Our thanks to Frank for this. An extract:
“Former farmer Charlie Lillington took part in the recent bootcamp, focused on women and held shortly after International Women’s Day. Lillington had experience with heavy machinery, and saw the programme as a way into a new profession, with better wages and hours than her previous career.
“I’d put the message out there to any woman, if you’re good at something, go for it. It is a male-dominated industry at the moment, but the more of us that join, the less it will be.””
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Justice for Men & Boys 
Lets be honest this “message” has been put out since at least the 1970s to my knowledge. I note “Charlie” was already familiar with machinery used on her family farm. So in fact she was retraining to access a more regular job. A classic female trajectory to avoid unsocial hours and get a better “work/life” balance.
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Indeed. And more money. An echo here of women getiing interested in truck driving in the UK when wages increased considerably for some reason.
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It reminded me of a Woman who was on a TV programme. Having a logistics company she decided to recruit females for fork lift driving in her warehouse. In a follow up a year later she’d given up the idea as she’d had not one female apply. I suspect it’s wasn’t the machinery so much as the unsocial hours and cold working environment that was the “problem”. The truth is while women have the choice to do indoor light work with convenient hours they’ll flock to those jobs. Hence it is in poorer less developed countries where you do see women in “glass cellar” jobs.
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Indeed, Nigel. I recall watching in utter disbelief as Hilary Devey https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilary_Devey the hard-headed logistics company boss – a dead ringer for Cruella de Vil in ‘The Hundred and One Dalmatians’ –https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cruella_de_Vil accepted an American woman’s assurance that her company would become more profitable if she hired more female fork lift truck drivers haha! Devey seemed generally to be sane, but she lost it there…
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Oh sure. Blah Blah Blah. Having worked as a tile mason for 15 years, and a damned good one if I do say so myself, I saw about maybe 5 females on the jobsites. They were all grunts i.e. workers hired to haul away trash, bring the professionals building material, coffee, hand them tools, etc. I found out later that at least three of the females were either sleeping with the pros they assisted or with various contractors. At any rate they didn’t last long. My grandmother like Queen Elizabeth the II was an auto mechanic during WWII and I greatly admire her service. She made a big effort to get along with the men she worked with and feminism or anything like that was the furthest thing from her mind. “We were a team” she said and ended up endearing herself, mainly because of her good attitude” to everyone in the shop and was friends with them for decades thereafter. She was offered a permanent position after the war ended but she turned it down because to quote her “the work was just too hard”, and she took job in a much more traditional female line of work for many years thereafter.
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