About 10 years ago, I heard the manager of a major lumberyard declare he would never hire a woman as an outside sales rep because he believed females weren’t up to the task. That opinion may well be one reason why he’s not there anymore.
Score one point for enlightened attitudes. But also note, as Marisa Mendez makes clear in her status report on women in LBM, that our industry as a whole has made disturbingly scant progress in hiring women and maximizing their potential contributions. Mao Zedong may have famously declared that women hold up half the sky, but within LBM’s horizon they are limited to just 30%.
In an age when dealers everywhere are struggling to find talent, it doesn’t make sense to overlook so many potentially great candidates. What’s the problem? You could name many, but let’s start with two.
The first is what I’ve found is a general belief that working in construction supply requires you to break a sweat. LBM’s iconic worker is the guy in the yard, bundled up to fend off the cold, tramping about in steel-toed shoes as his callused hands tote sacks and straighten lumber piles. Lots of dealer CEOs will recall fondly how they started their careers precisely this way. But as valuable as that path is, it shouldn’t be the only way to the top.
The second problem stems from a line I once was told years back: Your company president can come from anywhere, but you want your store manager to have played high school football in that town. This advice has some grains of truth: Manly men regularly go into construction trades, so a manly manager who scrimmaged with the guys at Central High enjoys a special, potentially profitable stature. But this philosophy assumes that: a) None of your tradespeople ever moves; b) all of your customers are male; and c) an ex-pitcher on the softball team couldn’t be just as good a managerial candidate. Times have changed.
A recent Wall Street Journal column cited research suggesting there’s no meaningful difference between a male and a female brain. According to Daphna Joel of Tel Aviv University, everyone’s brain is a mosaic, each one containing a mix of behaviors that could be regarded as being associated with women or men. But the comments on YouTube tied to Joel’s Ted Talk reveal rampant disagreements over her findings. The scientific debate will continue.
For our purposes, however, I believe the evidence is much clearer: In today’s LBM, a worker’s gender should play little—and usually no—role in what that person can do for your company.
