After pandemic job upheaval some women are forging their own path — with power tools
Global News
Women were hit disproportionately hard by pandemic-linked job losses. Now some of them are flocking the skilled trades, a sector traditionally dominated by men.
When Daina Cobb’s job running the office of a chartered boat on the Toronto Harbour stopped paying sales commissions amid the COVID-19 pandemic, it felt like an opportunity to realize a long-held dream.
Her old job wasn’t enough to pay the bills anymore, Cobb says. So the mother of two took the plunge. In February 2021, she founded Screw It Contracting — a tongue-in-cheek name suggested by her 90-year-old grandmother — and set out on her own as a general contractor.
“My passion has always been building,” she says.
She discovered that vocation more than two decades ago, when she stumbled on a woodworking workshop in the garage of the condo building she was living in at the time. She was immediately hooked, she says.
“I started buying lumber from Home Depot,” she says. “I’d be down there for hours at a time.”
The next thing she knew, she was building TV stands, bookcases, spice racks and armoires for family and friends. She’d been toying with the idea of starting her own business for years, she says. But it wasn’t until the pandemic that she finally did.
“My kids were old enough at that point for me to be able to go off and kind of start up this passion of mine,” she says. “And so that’s what I did.”
As many women rethink their careers amid the labour market upheaval wrought by the pandemic, some are flocking to a traditionally male-dominated sector: the skilled trades.