She Wears Work Boots

Elyse Chiu's road to drywall finishing started with a rental property. She had been working as a paramedic in Toronto for 14 years when she and her wife bought a house and started renovating, and something in there sparked a fascination with mudding and taping. She continued in her EMS career while renovating on the side, but everything changed in 2019 when they moved out East to Moncton, New Brun...

Marina Ramos has been working in construction for a decade. She has been on all types of projects from commercial and retail, pharmaceutical and industrial all the way to residential high-rise. Her extensive knowledge in BIM Management and Scheduling has been core to her career. Marina uses her knowledge and skill to liaise with consultants and trades and achieve a unified goal of building smarter...

Veronica Da Luca has been working as a structural designer and Engineer for about 11 years. Her work has a significant focus on cold formed steel framing (otherwise known as steel studs) which is a very niche market within the Engineering world. Today, she is Division Manager of the Toronto office for Building Structures with MTE, while still managing the CFS team and performing regular site visit...

Patricia Robinson is a testament to the importance of those women in trades who are sharing their stories. Her journey towards a carpentry apprenticeship was literally inspired by all the women she saw posting about their awesome careers on social media. Feeling drawn toward carpentry and trades for so many reasons, she started with a wood-working night-class, and discovered that the college offer...

Emily Lynch is a Labour Apprentice with LiUNA local 183 working on Highrise construction projects in downtown Toronto. Just over 2 years ago she stared sharing small parts of her work and career journey on Instagram in hopes to inspire other girls and women to look at construction as a serious career path. In her feed she shares about everything from transfer-slabs and concrete pumps to winterizin...

Christina Murray has demolition in her blood. After graduating from high-school, she started working on sites as a labourer and eventually took on heavy equipment operation and dump-truck driving. Her choice made her the 4th generation of her family to work in Demolition.  In 2009 Christina joined Budget Environmental as the Demolition Estimator. Then in early 2022, the entire Budget Group, includ...

Paige Heron has been a carpenter since she was 19 years old. It all started with a week off in her first year of fire-fighting college and encouragement from her dad to go work for a millwork company. Carpentry was just a summer gig, until college was done, but she loved it so much that she jumped into a pre-apprenticeship and hasn't looked back. As @carpenterpaigey, she has an active social media...

Jennifer Green started her skilled trades career in high school as an Industrial Mechanic Millwright. Today, she is the Director of Competitions at Skills Ontario.   Jennifer has been labelled a fearless trailblazer and glass-ceiling breaker for women in non-traditional careers, and continues to advocate and be a leader in the skilled trades community. She has a rich history of breaking new ground...

Leanne Stephenson has been working in project management for general contractors for 15-plus years. She grew up in a small town, raised in a working class family daughter and granddaughter of carpenters and found her own path to construction through the co-operative education program at Fanshawe College. Most of her career has primarily focused on large commercial construction management retrofit...

Terry Petrie is an experienced Construction Project Manager with nearly 20 years in the industry. Her well-rounded career has included Institutional, Commercial, Renovation, Facility Management, and complex Design-Build Finance Maintain projects. In short - she has been exposed to everything. Throughout her career she has engaged in stakeholder management, contract negotiation, and mentorship of t...

Mahtab Pezhman graduated from the University of Toronto with a civil engineering bachelor's degree and a business minor in 2018, but instead of working for an Engineering firm, she found a career in construction coordination and project management. She quickly realized that what she enjoys the most is the broader perspective of the construction industry as a whole and as a business and today she i...

Kristi Slade has been taping and finishing drywall since she was 16 years old. A woman of many talents, she worked to pursue a few different careers and hobbies including taping, cooking, and restoration. Kristi pursued all these equally until a friend introduced her to the taper's union and a career in commercial drywall finishing. It has been almost 8 years since she joined the International Uni...

Tamika Tulloch is a Millennial Mother to a three-year old son and has recently started her apprenticeship as a Labourer with LiUNA. Before construction she was an educational assistant for ten years where she spent her days molding the young minds of the future but her teams were understaffed, underpaid, and overworked and she always had this feeling that she needed to do something more to make he...

Lia Lamela spent over a decade in medial esthetics, but recently went from Botox to bolts, faces to fixtures, esthetics to electronics, and has now traded in beauty treatments for an electrifying life! Today she is an electrical apprentice specializing in building automation and the host of The Sparky Life Podcast. In this episode we talk about the (seemingly) insurmountable obstacles that block o...

Mira Polski has wanted to be a carpenter since she was just 5 years old. In high school she took all the woodworking courses including a dual credit program and graduated with college credits in welding, masonry, plumbing, electrical, and (of course) carpentry! A summer co-op on a framing crew set her up with a company she continued to work for while completing her Renovation Technician Diploma at...

Sarah Osterlee has been landscaping since she was 13, by 18 she earned her Red Seal and at 20 years old she received an associates diploma from the University of Guelph Ridgetown. Today, she is a Red Seal Horticulturalist who owns an operates her own landscaping and gardening company, called Empress Gardens. Sarah struggled with ADD her whole life and finds the outdoors and the extreme physical de...

Rylie Swanson started working for Rubaroc straight out of university, after graduating with a degree in business. She was initially hired as as a communications assistant with the role of managing the socials, website and other marketing activities. Her past experience in cinematography, web design and digital design, made this a great fit. As part of her role she spent time on site to capture med...

Elizabeth Juarez currently works as a Journey Level Instrument Mechanic for the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. She boldly left college at 22 to pursue this career with no background in the utility industry and has been learning it all on the job. Now, with nearly 10 years under her belt, her femininity has become her superpower, and she is starting to see clearly that honesty, courage,...

Alicia Woods started working in the mining and supply service sector over 20 years ago as part her family's business. She started in administration and sales and over 15 years, worked her way to General Manager. Motivated by her own experiences on site, she set out to improve the underground mining experience for women and designed the covergall (female coverall). In 2014, she successfully pitched...

Shawna Peddle has been working on the tools as an HVAC service technician since 2018, she started in residential and recently made a switch to commercial. Shawna now works at TRI-AIR Systems as a third year 313A/G1 HVACR Apprentice. She's also a member of UA Local 787, Ontario's Commercial Refrigeration Union.  Shawna loves diagnostic troubleshooting, she's a strong advocate for education, and bel...

Sydney Schultz is a Red Seal Power-line Technician Journeyman for SaskPower in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada. She was born in Weyburn, Saskatchewan and grew up on a farm with two younger brothers. Out of high school she was encouraged to pursue university but realized it just wasn't for her. Instead she found her way to drilling and worked in the oilfield for five years. Concerned about the inco...

Shannon Tymosko started her electrical apprenticeship at the age of 31 after her first career as a Child and Youth Worker just couldn't pay the bills. Her journey to the trades was supported by the YWCA Hamilton's pre-apprenticeship programs. Today, she is a third year apprentice with the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers local 105, in Hamilton Ontario. Shannon is passionate about pe...

Laura Hutt went to Algonquin College for Civil Engineering Technology. She started her career in coordination and assistant project management roles for restoration and civil construction companies. While working for PCL Construction in Ottawa she had the opportunity to work an out of town project and move into site supervision. Shortly after starting in a fully on-site role, Laura founded Women I...

Tessa Ferzli has been a 402A Red Seal Brick and Stone Mason since 2020. She was just 21 at the time making her Canada's youngest female red seal mason. Unlike most of our interviews to date, Tessa actually came to masonry through a Home-Building course in high school, after trying her hand at everything from pouring foundations to shingling roofs, she found a resonance with masonry. Today she is M...

Lorraine Kearsey-Carter is a Certified Psychological Health and Safety Advisor and the President of Rubicon Safety, a company that she founded in 2012 to focus on fall-protection, confined space and rescue solutions. She has over 20 years of Sales & Project Management experience in the Construction & Building Industry, and holds many certificates in Occupational Health & Safety. Everywhere she goe...