Celebrating Women in Construction

A look back at our first Women in Construction event.

Women are critical to the development of the construction industry, and the demand for more skilled workers continues to grow. Though more women are joining the construction industry than ever before , they still make up a small portion of the workforce. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics , only about 14% of construction workers in 2022 were female.?

To continue fostering growth, we recognize the need to create opportunities for female operators to network with each other, share their experiences, and showcase their operating skills. Enter: our inaugural Celebrating Women in Construction event.?

Caterpillar was proud to host 18 women at our Edward J. Rapp Customer Training Center in Clayton, North Carolina for this special event. These operators were sponsored by different dealers around North and South America—making it an excellent learning opportunity for everyone involved.?

Celebrating Women in Construction was the perfect mix of learning, networking and friendly competition. To inspire our attendees, we invited Tammy Barlette , a retired Air Force pilot and motivational speaker, who spoke about her experiences in breaking barriers. Later in the week, attendees rolled up their sleeves to put their operator skills to the test—three tests to be exact . In the end, we celebrated our top operators from the challenges.?

We caught up with a few of the competitors between challenges to chat about their careers and experiences in the construction industry beginning, of course, with what brought them to construction in the first place.?

Chelsey Holdosi has been an operator for about two years now, but she got her start in the industry as a project manager. “Originally, I was a statistician for the Navy. And then I was working part time for a small company called Jay Brown Excavating, where my husband is a foreman,” she told us. “I was optimizing some of their processes and creating applications ... but as I was learning more about the excavation world...I was like, ‘well, if my husband can do it, I can do it.’”?

Family tradition is a common way in which operators come into the field.? Operator Kenzi Tackett’s interest in the industry started as a little girl riding around on her grandpa’s tractor. “He was the person who had me out in the dirt as a kid. I remember falling asleep many days, riding around with him on his tractor.”??

Sadly, he passed away a few years ago, but she keeps him close by wearing his flannel. “I just take him with me to work whenever I get to do something cool...As soon as I heard I was coming to the Women in Construction event, I said, ‘Pappy, you're going with me.’”?

Kenzi went on to win the Compact Track Loader Skills Test, and we have no doubt she made her Pappy proud!

As a result of making up only a small percentage of operators, women in construction often face some unique barriers and challenges. Rondalee Wilke described being a female operator as teaching old dogs new tricks, saying, “It’s just expected that you don’t know what you’re doing, or a girl can’t lift that, or that we’re not as strong as men.”?

“It was definitely harder going into a field and having people assume I was with the health department or I'm an inspector, or I'm just here to take notes.”? — Chelsey Holdosi??

Whitney Poulin recalled a time she was made fun of for being new to operating the machines. “I’d just started learning. I had practice running [a machine] a certain way, and then when I got on this other piece of equipment, [the controls] were backward to me. And instead of showing me how to change it, I was just made fun of the whole time,” she said.??

But she didn’t let that stop her. Instead, that experience only fueled Whitney’s desire to learn. “I took that, and I was like, ‘I want to be better at doing this. This is cool. And I know there’s not a lot of girls doing this.’”?

Rondalee never let other people’s ideas about what she could or couldn’t do get in her way either. “The reality is we really are strong as men. We run homes. We take care of our children. We go to work, and we come home, and we do it all over again.”??

When asked about the main event—the skills tests—our competitors all agreed it would be great to win, but that getting to meet so many other women in construction was its own prize.??

“Everybody's been so friendly and inspiring,” said Whitney.?

Azaria Biven , winner of the Small Hydraulic Excavator Skills Test, may have said it best: “It's a competition, but I mean, we're all women. We need to still give each other advice…If someone's struggling, we’ve got to lift them up... We're just all here having a good time and having fun.”?

We look forward to upcoming opportunities for female operators to come together to connect, learn, and get our hands a little dirty along the way! To learn more about this event visit our Women in Construction site . Don’t forget to follow Caterpillar on LinkedIn , and keep up with the conversation using #WomenInConstruction and #CatConstruction.?

Thank you to all the Cat dealerships who helped make this event possible: Carter Machinery , Empire Cat , Gregory Poole Equipment Company , MacAllister Machinery Co., Inc. , Milton CAT , Ohio Cat , Ring Power Cat , Sotreq S/A , Stowers Machinery Corporation , Thompson Machinery , Wagner Equipment , Warren CAT , and Ziegler Caterpillar .?