Laura Lynch learned a lot about practicing her craft safely as a carpenter through colleagues in the National Association of Women in Construction, but those lessons were ingrained by a monthly safety program conducted by the custom home builder she worked for in North Carolina. “They were smart. Whether you're a young man or a young woman, they don't want you throwing your back out, because their insurance is going to pay for it either way,” she says. “It's proactive thinking and management.”
Many of the experts studying women's work-place safety are quick to point out that while women's bodies are shaped and sized differently from those of their male colleagues, many men also fall outside the “normal” sizes of protective equipment. The best employers, they say, consider a wide range of sizes found in an increasingly diverse workforce and plan for them accordingly.
A recent study of fall protection harnesses found that the traditional design, made for average-sized men as measured by the military in the 1950s, was not working for many of the men on jobsites, says Deborah Gold, a senior industrial hygienist for California's OSHA program. “The bottom line about most of these women's issues on construction sites is that men are impacted as well,” she says.
Safety standards and practices on Habitat for Humanity's Women Build sites, where the construction is led by teams of women, mirror those on traditional Habitat work sites, says Fiona Eastwood, director of Women Build. “The only difference is in the way safety is handled by the different genders,” she says. “We find women are more safety conscious [than men], anyway. They tend to adhere to the letter, if not to the extreme.”
Several companies have introduced tool lines designed for women, but aside from an occasional lighter hammer, Eastwood says most women on her crews use traditional construction tools. “They want the real tools, not the tools labeled ‘for women,' ” she says. “They can use them safely as long as they know the safety precautions.”