Meet “The Women in the Trailer” who are guiding construction of the Women’s Leadership Center at Williams Bay. Hard hats. DayGlo vests. Blue jeans. Steel-toe boots. In a video recently released by Pepper Construction company, the people surveying progress at the site of the Women’s Leadership Center look like construction workers everywhere. But they aren’t like construction workers anywhere.
“When we first started thinking about the project at the Women’s Leadership Center, we were very intentional that we wanted it to be created by women, designed by women, and built by women — for women,” says Michelle Dilley, CEO of AWESOME and head of operations for the Women’s Leadership Center at Williams Bay.
And it’s happening. The video produced by Pepper Construction—called “Women in Construction: Together We Rise”—honors the women-led team drawn from three different companies (Pepper Construction, Studio Gang, and Lincoln Road Enterprises) that’s guiding creation of the campus now rising on the shores of Geneva Lake in Wisconsin. Their success is a measure of how far women have come in an industry that traditionally has been predominantly male. It’s also an invitation for more women to enter the construction field.
Today, there are approximately 1.3 million women working in construction in the U.S.—a 45% increase in this sector over a decade ago. Despite the increase, though, only about one person in 10 working in construction is female. That’s one gender-based difference; another is the type of jobs women typically occupy. While men generally fill the more physical roles found in the field, women tend to fulfill management and office positions. That translates into just 2% of women working in production or in transporting and moving materials in the field.
Which is one reason why the Women’s Leadership Center project is significant. Pepper Construction’s video invites us to meet “the women in the trailer,” or the project leaders on site. In this case, it’s a collective of female engineers, project managers, and designers who are realizing a vision sparked by Ann Drake in 2021. That’s when she began dreaming of building a place where accomplished women could come together to address complex issues in a space designed and constructed just for them.
If all goes according to schedule, they will have that space by 2026, when the Women’s Leadership Center at Williams Bay is slated to open.
“I’m just proud to have this collective group of amazing women working together,” says Michelle Dilley. “We’re setting an example of powerful women doing amazing things. Future generations can say, ‘Oh my gosh—I want to do that. And I can do that!’ Just getting them excited because they can see it…and know they can be it someday, too.”
To watch Pepper Construction’s “Women in Construction: Together We Rise,” click here.