“I remember having a conversation over a beer with another female electrician and saying Christ, this situation of women in trades is just appalling, and so increasing the amount of women in trade has been my little mantra.”
Kaye Napper, 57, who worked as an electrician for around 17 years across London and settling in Islington, knows the trade inside out. Starting out as an electrician around the early 2000s, Kaye was trained and mentored by a female electrician named Jean. Jean suffered sexist discrimination “absolutely non-stop” as an electrician, Kaye says.
“There was a particular team who she worked with, and this guy would pull the toilet out of the floor the minute she arrived, almost like he was waiting for her. He would throw it into a skip, and go ‘there you are Jean’. It was almost like ‘now you’re not able to work here because there is no working toilet for you to work with’”, she says.
Though Kaye sees her experience as being distinctly better than Jean’s, she recieved her fair share of sexist discrimination too. “One of the first times I was on a site with a certain bloke he cut all the ends of my cables, and as an electrician, that’s just a nightmare because you’ve written on what every cable does. You’ve got to track every single cable from the beginning again,” she says.
Other times,she’d come into work to find urine on the floor where she was going to be working, “but honestly, is that really the best they can do?”, she says with a laugh.
But Jean helped Kaye look past all that. “She was an amazing support and I wouldn’t be where I am today without her,” Kaye says about Jean, who inspired her to start training female electricians herself. “She passed it forward and I’ve tried to pass it forward with all the people I’ve trained up.”
For Kaye, she sees working in a trade as being part of a community. She says men aren’t always as “generous” in the industry, but Kaye believes in supporting the women around her. “There’s enough work for all of us”, she says.
So when Kaye was ready to move on from her electrics business, she decided to hand it down to her employee and former trainee Amy. Kaye says she made a promise to Amy’s mother before she died to look after Amy, so that she could go on and train people too. “I thought if I’m very generous with her, I’m thinking she’ll be generous with someone else and she’ll change someone else’s life. Jean changed my life. I think I changed Amy’s life.”
Amy Nicholson, 37, became an electrician ten years ago and talks about Kaye the way Kaye talks about Jean.
“Kaye paved the way for people like me to be able to work in a comfortable environment and an accepted environment. I think the people of the past have done a lot of the groundwork for us to allow us to operate happily, safely and comfortably,” she says.
Needless to say there are still situations where Amy experiences sexism, for instance when certain men “give looks when the girls rock up on site”. Though after “an initial eyebrow raise, they quickly realise that we know exactly what we’re doing”.
Instead of negative discrimination, Amy says, “what we do have is very surprised happy faces, when they see the van saying Amy’s Electrics, they say ‘oh a female electrician, oh can I get your card? Oh you’re a female. Oh wow, yeah! Girls doing it!’ You get a lot of positives more than negative which is brilliant.”
Testament to Amy’s words is nineteen-year-old Charlotte Lazarus, who is becoming an electrician even further down the pathway carved out by the likes of Jean, Kaye and Amy. Charlotte, who is completing an apprenticeship to become an electrician, says that “initially [she] was worried about being the only female but everyone was very welcoming” and that “there was no sexism or anything from my experiences”.
She says the main task is college. “There’s a lot of maths and science but I’m getting there slowly and surely!” For Charlotte, her experience has been wholly positive so far and she’s positive about the future: “I’ve seen so many more women begin trades. I think the future is definitely female.”
Working behind the scenes to continue the structural progress for tradeswomen is Hattie Hasan, a plumber and CEO of the Stopcocks Women Plumbers company. Awarded an MBE in the 2020 New Year’s Honours List for her work, Hattie, who has been in the industry for over 30 years, is helping to progress the entire industry, from the next generation of tradeswomen to the vulnerable customers they serve.
Hattie, who grew up with a violent father herself, is aware of the difficulties domestic abuse victims face when they are forced to employ a tradesman. After seeing the rise of domestic abuse cases last year, Hattie made it her mission to take action.
Hattie found that domestic abuse charities, such as Women’s Aid, appreciated that her company offered women plumbers, but were asking: “Can you find us an electrician or can you find us a decorator, or plasterer, or a builder because every time we need to do work in refuges, either it’s very, very stressful for the residents, or we have to evacuate them.”
Since then, Hattie has been setting up the UK’s first national register for tradeswomen to make all types of tradeswomen “visible and available for householders and vulnerable people”, which came to its launch on 1 March this year. Hattie says between 500 and 600 tradeswomen are already involved, from plumbers, electricians, gas engineers, mechanics, decorators, and gardeners.
“The role of the register is not to be a directory. It’s got a far, far greater goal.” Hattie wants it to create “a community” which connects inexperienced and experienced tradeswomen across the country and where women can access finance in order to help them train in a trade.
By connecting the pathways carved by women traders across the country, Hattie is enacting structural change from above: “The industry has been like it’s been forever and it’s not attracting women. So you can’t keep doing the same thing and saying ‘why aren’t women coming?’ You have to change it.”
