W
e didn’t study woodwork at the convent in any of my eight years there. All the girls took cookery, sewing and needlework, but there was nothing involving angle grinders, power saws or portable sanders. My childhood was admittedly in the prehistoric era, but there’s a legacy to historic educational sexism when it’s coupled with other factors including a distinct lack of role models (there are no Babs the Builder books) — and one of the outcomes is that, even now, only 1 per cent of people working in skilled trades in the UK construction are women.
There are ten of us in the workshop at the Goodlife Centre near Borough Market in London for the “Basic Drill Skills” class, and we’re almost all women. The first question we’re asked as we stand around the workbench is, “Why did you sign up?” I take a deep breath, look at the floor and confess that I’m genuinely ashamed to be an adult who can’t hang a picture, fix a chair leg or replace a broken tile. I feel embarrassed by the gender stereotype and can’t believe it’s taken me 40 years to enrol in a class to address it. The next student simply says, “Same.” As does the next, and the next … it actually turns out to be everyone’s story. It transpires that girls do want to work with power tools.