Mortar, she wrote: But it's no mystery why few women belong

Women find it hard to remain in the bricklayers union.
PITTSBURGH (AP) -- Katrina Shaffer's short brown ponytail sticks out just a smidgen beneath her white plastic hard hat as she sponges down a freshly grouted section of shower tile.
"You have to work fast because showers dry really fast," she said. "I'm wiping the wall down and making the grout lines small and straight."
Wearing safety goggles, orange rubber gloves, a black Massaro Industries golf shirt, baggy blue jeans, construction boots and blue knee pads, Shaffer is just one of the crew.
"I get along with the people real well, even people not in my trade," she said, her squinty little eyes temporarily disappearing when she smiles or laughs.
At 19, Shaffer's a proud new member of the International Union of Bricklayers and Allied Craftworkers, Local 9, Pennsylvania, as an apprentice tile finisher.
Apprentices start out earning 50 percent of union scale, a little more than $9 an hour plus benefits, and make more as they gain work experience. After 6,000 hours (three to four years) of work, she'll be a journeyman tile finisher earning full union scale -- upward of $18 an hour.
Rare breed
She's a rare breed. Only seven of the local union's 1,800 active members are women, and only 1 percent to 2 percent of the international union's 100,000 members are women.
However, before the 1970s, there were virtually no women in the international union, which also represents tile setters, stonemasons, marble masons, terrazzo workers, terrazzo finishers, marble finishers, pointer-caulker-cleaners (who do restoration), cement masons and plasterers.
The ranks of women in the international have remained at about 2 percent for the past two decades, said Colleen Muldoon, education programs coordinator for the International Masonry Institute, the international union's training arm, in Maryland.
"It doesn't mean that we're not getting any more in; it's that they're not staying," said Muldoon, who left bricklaying after more than a decade because of burnout. "There are lots of reasons. Women obviously have different issues, from child care and starting a family to the fact that it's still not the most receptive atmosphere."
On that last point, most everyone agrees.
"It's tough to talk a contractor into taking a female because right away they get scared," said Ed Frieze, safety and apprentice coordinator for Local 9. "They're scared of their own people, the discrimination stuff and sexual harassment."
For Muldoon, who believes she's effecting more change in the industry in her current post as education coordinator, it wasn't harassment that made her leave day-to-day bricklaying.
Proving yourself
"It was just the feeling of being not completely accepted and the way you just constantly had to prove yourself on a different level more than anybody else every day," she said. "Not only do you have your [bricklaying] job, but you have another job of keeping your sanity."
Shaffer isn't the first woman to work on a Massaro Industries tiling crew, which has made things just a little easier for her.
"I don't think it's any different for me than for a guy," she said matter-of-factly.
Shaffer has no feminist agenda. She doesn't even know who Gloria Steinem is. She just likes working with tile and is laying claim to her version of the American Dream.
"She's just a happy, happy person; she's always laughing," Frieze said.
On the job, however, she's about business, and by all accounts, she's a good, hard worker.
"She wouldn't be there if she wasn't," Frieze said. "The trade is the trade, and you gotta produce."