I remember, like, a guy
slapped my ass on-site
in Invercargill
and I went
and told like someone straight away.
His response was to, like,
make a joke of it.
And then, like
10 minutes later,
he recreated the ass slap on me
and was like, ‘Oh, look I’m that guy’.
Just the ignorance of people
to understand
like the shit we go through
is the worst part for sure.
Hi, I'm Brooke Thompson.
I work and live
in the beautiful Queenstown
and I am one of 2% of female qualified
electricians in New Zealand.
The golden question
like people always ask me.
They're always like, ‘why
did you want to be a tradie?’.
It was like an economic situation.
I had just come back from
living in South America.
I couldn't afford to go to
university in all honesty.
I remember looking at my guy
friends who were earning heaps of money
and in amazing careers,
and I was like, ‘Well,
why can't I fucking do that?’.
Like, what?
What is the difference?
I could go work in a cafe
for minimum wage for the rest of my life,
or I could go into the trades and
own my own business.
I could be empowered.
I just couldn't believe that
just because I was a woman
that this thing wasn't
recommended to me,
like at school or in society at all.
It just had, like, never crossed my mind.
And then when I decided to do it,
it was like, game over.
Like,
you couldn't have talked me out of it,
if you wanted to.
So this house is pretty cool
because it is actually the first house
I've done start to finish
since being qualified.
So it's a big deal for me.
Hopefully when we turn on
and we go for testing everything...
Perfect.
Perfect first time.
I'm just going to wire up the hot water
cylinder, Keri.
The first year of my apprenticeship
was just like a nightmare.
I don't know why I stayed in it, but
like I just felt so, like,
rejected by everyone.
That, like, active disrespect.
The making me feel small.
The making me feel like
I was nothing more than, like,
tradie Tinder.
Like you could swipe
right on me when I came on site,
you know, like.
But I just knew that, like,
what was happening wasn't right.
I had something to prove.
I think if I gave up,
then all those people would have won.
And I, like, couldn't.
I couldn't
let them have that, like, never.
So I just kind of kept going.
So for a lot of
the men that I've worked with,
I am the first woman
they've ever worked with.
So I'm sort of like a guinea pig
at times.
Testing where the boundaries lie.
I think that the culture is like
pretty bad.
And I hate when people say like,
‘it's one or two bad eggs’ because
I think of all the times
I've been harassed on site,
there's been other men around
and those other men didn't say anything
or they laughed.
And that's what hurt most.
It's a hard balance
I find of, like, being honest
with what I've been through
and not like
sugarcoating it
or glossing over the hard stuff,
but also at the same time,
like still encouraging women.
Like,
it's an amazing career
and a really cool industry.
When I started my apprenticeship,
I didn't know any qualified
tradeswomen of any kind, and
it was really hard to picture myself
having a life in this industry because
I couldn't see anyone who had done it.
At all.
So I felt, like, quite lonely.
And then my sister told me
to get on Instagram.
Yeah, I made friends
with all these incredible women
who were so supportive
and had been through
similar things that I had been through
and we would joke about,
like the smell of the Portaloos
and what to do
when you got your period on-site.
And it was just like this
wealth of knowledge
that I never had access to
and I was just over the moon
like it just completely changed my life.
Something really interesting
is I've seen statistics
where, like, the rates of women
in construction have risen
and then dropped, and risen and dropped.
We're encouraging
all these women to get into construction,
but we're not actually protecting them.
I'd love to own a company.
I'd love to call it like Girl Power Electrical
or something like that.
That would be awesome.
And just make opportunities
for women, employ women, train women.
It's not about giving them
just the opportunity, it's
about making sure
that they feel supported
when they have that opportunity as well.
Yeah go on, have a look at that.
Oh looks pretty good!
Sometimes I'm not completely useless,
you know?