By Monica Potts

Copyright newrepublic

“They gave me so much insight from a woman’s perspective,” Moser, who is now a first-year apprentice with a local electrician’s union, said. She wanted to know everything from how to manage future relationships to whether and how she could get promoted in the field; she was also given tools for how to handle workplace harassment, whether she experiences it herself or sees someone else targeted. “I’ve heard horror stories … from women that I’ve met, and they would cry about their experience,” Moser said.

Construction trades can provide excellent careers. They are well paid, especially for jobs that don’t require a college degree, and are highly unionized. They can also lead to opportunities for self-employment or small-business ownership once workers become licensed. Traditionally, though, they’ve been dominated by white men. Moser became an apprentice at a time when women were specifically recruited to join early-career apprenticeship training programs, and when the federal government stepped up to ensure that these training programs took measures to prevent and deal with harassment against women and minorities on job sites.

President Donald Trump has put a stop to this. From the beginning of his second term, he’s attacked diversity, equity, and inclusion, which had helped bring more workers into the construction labor force, and this summer his Department of Labor announced a new rule that eliminates a nearly 10-year-old sexual harassment training requirement that had barely gotten off the ground. “It almost breaks my heart because I feel like it took so long to get where we’re at, and it’s taken a second to go backwards,” Moser said.