There is a popular theme of tweet that does the rounds every month or so, when someone decides to post it like it’s never been posted before. It goes: ‘STOP TRYING TO BE CONTENT CREATORS! WE NEED MORE PLUMBERS!’
As someone who writes content for a living, I can’t really throw stones at aspiring young TikTokers posting little dances and recounting everything they ate in a day. But the plumbing bit is true. We do need more plumbers. And electricians, and builders, and tradespeople in general. In 2021, The New Zealand Infrastructure Commission estimated we’d need another 57,000 people in the infrastructure workforce over the next 30 years to help solve our multi-billion dollar infrastructure crisis.
And hey, beggars can’t be choosers, but it would also be pretty cool if a few more of those were women. Recent statistics show that only 3-4% of tradies in Aotearoa aren’t men. If you’ve ever walked past a construction site, or been waylaid by roadworks (whomst in New Zealand has not), this won’t be a surprise. But what is a career laying pipes and fixing drains actually like for a young woman in Aotearoa?
Harmony Pearce is a 25-year-old plumber from Invercargill, now based in Dunedin. And she’s good at it. Pearce is one of 10 finalists – and the only woman finalist – competing at Plumbing World’s Young Plumber of the Year Awards in Hamilton later this month. To get here, Harmony survived both a local and a regional knockout competition, which involved a series of practical challenges that sound particularly impressive to someone whose primary skill is making little marks on paper. Said challenges included things like: “pipe work,” “copper bending,” “copper crimping” and “putting valves in a hot water cylinder.”
Not only are competitors assessed on skill level, they’re also marked on personability. “If you're going into people's houses, you don't want to be rude, you want to be well mannered,” says Harmony. “And to be able to actually communicate properly.” See again: more women in trades!
Harmony decided to get into plumbing at age 19, after four years working as a cook. “I just felt like I could do more and learn more,” she says. It was her brother who encouraged her to pick up a trade, “Because no matter what I've always got that qualification behind me, whether it's something I stick to or not,” she explains. Deciding what trade to do was simply a process of elimination. “I did plumbing because [my brother] is a sparky, and I figured we didn't need two of those in the family.”
Despite regular articles about New Zealand’s need for more tradies (ones like, admittedly, the start of this one), it wasn’t easy for Harmony to get a foothold in the industry. She started looking for an apprenticeship at 19, but only secured one at 21. “It wasn't so much that there wasn't work going on. I think it was more because I was a 19 year old female that had absolutely no experience in the trade. It was like I was more of a liability, that's what it seemed like to me,” Harmony says. “Not that the companies replied to my emails.”
While the number of men and women in trade-related trainee roles (on-the-job learning gigs) is close to equal – with 45% of 2023 trainees being women – when it comes to the number of women in apprenticeships (more formal, paid training programmes), this number drops to 17%. It’s impossible to state exactly why there’s such a drop based on just these numbers – some women, for instance, may have just decided copper crimping is not for them. But it’s also not unreasonable to deduce that part of that sharp drop is that women, like Harmony, find it difficult to get apprenticeships at all – even if they wanted them.
In an interview from earlier this year, Stacey Mendoca – co-founder and past president of the National Association of Women in Construction – said, “I had an old dude phone me recently, for example, who said they didn’t want to take on a female chippy apprentice previously. But he had called me to say he wished he’d done it sooner, as they are the best worker they have ever had.” That there was any hesitancy in the first place shows there’s still people out there with a complex about women wielding a power drill.
In better news, things got easier once Harmony secured her apprenticeship. “I don't really think about [being one of the only women] at all anymore,” she says of the three companies she worked for during this. “I didn't feel like I was discriminated against because I was a female. I did everything the boys did. We got treated the same as the boys did. If not, we probably got better treatment.”
Four years into the job, Harmony has no regrets. “I just love it,” she says. She doesn’t even have to deal with much shit, metaphorically and physically speaking. One of the biggest misconceptions about plumbing is that you’re surrounded by fecal matter on a regular basis. “You might get the odd blocked drain,” she says, “ but you're not always doing that.”
Not that it isn’t an occupational hazard – the worst job Harmony’s ever had involved a house full of women putting sanitary products down the toilet. “The drain had been blocked for quite some time, and it was just overflowing out the back of their house,” she says, recounting a delightful day trudging ankle deep through everything you can think of that goes down a toilet. (For the sake of Pearce, the planet and those unfortunate people who have to deal with fatbergs – please, stop flushing your tampons.)
As she wasn't busy enough with the day job and national plumbing competitions, Harmony recently spent the past twelve weeks training for an MMA fight. For two to three hours, six days a week, Harmony would head to the gym and prepare to throttle someone in a cage. Unfortunately she lost on a technicality, but, “Luckily I only came out of it with a bleeding nose and a bruise on my chin,” she says. Despite the loss, she’s adamant a plumber would win in a three way fight with a sparky and a builder. “The sparky would whinge his way out,” she says. And the builder? “They’re just ready for smoko.”
