The Not-So-Hidden Price of Being a "Blue Collar Babe"

Get the Full StoryChaya Milchtein tried her best to stay away from blue-collar TikTok, and for a little while it actually worked. In early 2021, her many thousands of followers on social media were largely industry outsiders, the majority women and queer people like herself, who looked to Milchtein for guidance on how to navigate the mundane but adrenaline-racked experiences of buying a car or getting an oil change in spaces frequently unwelcoming to customers who aren't white men.

As an automotive educator, journalist, trained mechanic, and author of "Mechanic Shop Femme's Guide to Car Ownership," Milchtein, 30, was able to build a trusted platform that offered support to a chronically overlooked demographic. And while there would always be the occasional hater - it's the internet after all - the community she reached was generally supportive. Until Pride Month of that year.

Milchtein posted a sponsored video about brake pads to her TikTok, mechanicshopfemme. She didn't think much of it, until she saw that it had been stitched by a woman in Canada who identified herself as a "straight, heavy-duty mechanic." Milchtein says the woman "trashed" her - "not the content I was teaching, but the fact that I said I was queer." The stitch received over a million views, and for Milchtein, social media hasn't been the same since.

"It kind of opened the floodgates to just the worst men on the internet that had gotten permission from this woman to harass me," she tells PS.

Milchtein's content still reaches thousands of followers, but the comment sections on some of her more popular videos read like a slurry of insults. Bullies flock to her profile to try and shame her for being fat, queer, a woman, and, of course, for having the audacity to be all of these things and still call herself an automotive expert. She's received multiple death threats from strangers.

It's a story we once heard all the time about women on the internet: harassment is brutal and near-constant. As algorithms have become more sophisticated, however, those in certain bubbles might have thought this level of abuse was a thing of the past. But in online spaces dedicated to blue-collar trades work, which have exploded in popularity in recent years and are now reaching more young women than ever, it's very much alive and normalized.

Just one example is the hashtag #BlueCollarBabe, which has over 135,000 posts on TikTok. It's a lineup of mostly beautiful, thin, young women cracking jokes about sexist stereotypes and what they wear to work. The comments range from creepy catcalling to callous and condescending "If you're up there, who is operating the 'slow' 'stop' sign" , and frequently question everything from a woman's makeup and nails to the dirtiness of her equipment anything remotely clean-looking is considered suspect .

Gen Z Women Want to Work in Trades, Despite It All

The truth is that the trades need bodies, and debt-averse Gen Zers - over half of them, according to one report from September - are eager to step up and reverse a nationwide skilled labor shortage. Yet there are still so many ways in which women are discouraged from entering blue-collar fields. Not only is there a baseline skepticism about their ability to perform the duties of tradeswork, which vary widely by industry, but there's also a constant threat of harassment, discrimination, and intimidation on and offline.

Gender politics outlet The 19th recently referenced a 2023 study from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission that found "discrimination was still rampant in the construction industry, citing several instances of employers not hiring people because of their gender or race." But the study has since been scrubbed from federal government websites.

With or without studies, women laborers already know there's a crisis, especially those like Amanda, a 29-year-old Canada-based grader operator and construction worker. She frequently posts about her experiences as a "grader girl" on TikTok, where she goes by amanda.dyxe. For this article she asked to keep her real last name and hometown private to protect from stalkers.

Amanda is no stranger to degrading comments, both on job sites and all over her social media. She started her channel with the hope of connecting with other women in similar fields, because even though she's worked in construction for over 10 years, she's rarely had the chance to work with other women. When she started posting about her career, Amanda says it was "eye-opening" to see so many "negative men coming onto the comments and just chirping really hard."

"It's really unfortunate because you're going on social media trying to help break the stereotype, break the stigma around it and encourage other women to pursue this career as well," she tells PS. "Some people assume a woman is just doing this job for attention or people in the comments just say, 'Oh, she got the job because of her dad,' or, 'She got the job because she did the nasty.' They say disheartening things that discredit a woman to be able to be here."

Some want to connect with other likeminded folks, sure, but a big reason so many women post about their blue-collar jobs is to prove that they're just as capable as any man in their field, Amanda says. "But unfortunately it comes with being sexualized or you're treated like an anomaly."

Old Gender Roles Still Rule

As the price of a four-year degree climbs and the practicality plummets, it's no surprise that a growing proportion of school-age youth no longer consider traditional college an option. But the pathways to financial independence without college have historically looked very different for women and men.

Labor jobs considered suitable for women childcare, unskilled nursing, housecleaning, motherhood are some of the lowest paying and come with the fewest benefits. Meanwhile, the trades, long considered men's work, promise steady paychecks, renowned benefits, and opportunity to rise quickly in the ranks. Vox reporter Constance Grady argues that this divide is intentional, meant to tether financially weaker women to men with the good jobs.

"It doesn't matter how far you get up the ladder, I have DEI stamped on my forehead."

This inequity isn't new, of course. Discrimination against tradeswomen is a dusty old practice that labor unions and advocacy groups have tried to address since World War II, with mild success. The National Association of Women in Construction NAWIC was founded in the 1950s and has been a steady voice for change since. Now with over 100 chapters, NAWIC provides its roughly 6,000 members with support around legislative changes, minority women business enterprises, OSHA compliance and safety, and professional development.

Jillian Penkin is the owner of Penkin Consulting and is NAWIC's northeast region director, based in Buffalo, NY. She discovered NAWIC as a construction newbie in 2009, the same year her mom died. As Penkin puts it, she was in dire need of some "adult supervision" at the time.

"I needed women to help me navigate life, I needed mentorship, and NAWIC stood in that painful gap," she tells PS. "NAWIC is a sisterhood in an area that's anything but. It's an industry that's desperately in need of sisterhood."

NAWIC also partners with unions, trying to push them to "do their part" in eradicating gender- and identity-based harassment from trades jobs, Penkin says. But that's been a long, uphill battle. While some, like the North American Building Trades Union - one of the biggest and most influential, with three million members - boast of diversity initiatives, they have largely failed to take this issue seriously.

The Building Trades Union sponsors an annual conference and award, and a small mentorship program specifically for women in construction. On its website, the union's "diversity fact-sheet" also emphasizes the role of its joint apprenticeship and joint construction programs, which employ and train the majority of women in the trades, as well as its sponsorship of 175 apprenticeship readiness programs geared toward women and minorities.

Yet women still only make up about nine percent of construction workers nationwide, according to the US Department of Commerce.

"Unions have been crying for a very long time that they need bodies, but there's only so many white men. Eventually you're gonna run out," Penkin says with a laugh. The North American Building Trades Union did not respond to a request for comment.

Beyond DEI

Complicating efforts to curb work-related harassment is the Trump administration's attack on DEI, leaving women and minorities with even less oversight and institutional support than before. Whatever minor progress has been made over the last 70 years now hangs in the balance, as nonprofits geared toward leveling the scales lose their government funding, according to The 19th. Milchtein says she's already lost significant sponsorship revenue, which she relies on to fund her educational platforms.

"Right now it feels a lot less hopeful than it did a few months ago," Milchtein adds. "In the past, brands would entertain the idea of trying to reach marginalized communities. Now it's clear they never saw me as more than just DEI. It doesn't matter how far you get up the ladder, I have DEI stamped on my forehead."

Jake Finney, a 35-year-old construction foreman from Massachusetts, was recently finishing up a job near Harvard Square, laying the foundation for what will soon be an electric vehicle charging station. He says that while he doesn't know of too many women who work out in the field like he does, he has no problem working with them as long as they earn their place.

"If they can do the job, fine. If they can't do the job and they're only here because she's a woman, that's where it's like . . ." When he rubbed his hands together pensively they sounded like sandpaper. "They are equal and they should be equal and I got no problem with that. But if they come on, they got to be able to do the same job as the guy next to 'em."

Construction wasn't Finney's first career choice. He graduated from Plymouth State with an environmental planning degree, and worked in a related field for about two years after school. The money wasn't very good, plus he says he "got into some trouble" when he was younger he wouldn't specify what , so construction felt like his next best option. He's married now, with a 2-year-old daughter, and making much better money. His union, the Local 151 in Cambridge, ensures that he has good health insurance for him and his whole family, and a good pension. "I got a good thing here," he says.

Still, he says he wouldn't want his daughter to work in construction when she grows up, because it's too tough: "I'm not sexist or anything, but it's more of a man's thing."

To hear Amanda talk about her work, though, Finney's assessment falls flat. As a grader operator, Amanda's construction specialty falls into the heavy equipment category. She geeks out about the ditches she gets to dig, the drainage she carves out, the snow stacks that she piles high. She's responsible for keeping roads clear. Winter is her favorite, because that's when she really gets to shine: While everyone else is hunkered down at home, she looks forward to the night shifts during the snowstorms, sometimes working 12 or 14 hours at a time. For all the harassment she's faced in her decade in construction, there's deep love in her voice.

"I just try to find the joys and the little things to bring me satisfaction about my job, being like, damn, that ditch looked good, or that slope is perfect," she says. "Little things. You got to take 'em."

Related:

Gen Z Can Fix That: Why Young People Want Blue-Collar Jobs

Emma Glassman-Hughes she her is the associate editor at PS Balance. In her seven years as a reporter, her beats have spanned the lifestyle spectrum; she's covered arts and culture for The Boston Globe, sex and relationships for Cosmopolitan, and food, climate, and farming for Ambrook Research.

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