June 29, 1994

ARE MWBE GOALS WORKING FOR WOMEN?

BY CLAIR ENLOW

Journal A/E editor

Can women manage businesses?

Few would answer ``No.''

Do women belong in hard hats? Not everyone thinks so.

Have state and local goals for participation of Women and Minority Business Enterprises (WMBEs) worked to diversify the construction industry racially and ethnically?

There are complaints and statistics that indicate it has not.

Have the goals worked for women?

``Unequivocally. Yes,'' said Karyn Johnson, who runs a support program for WMBEs from South Seattle Community College that is sponsored by the Washington State Department of Transportation (WSDOT). She offers technical assistance to women and minority business enterprises who bid and work on WSDOT contracts from a satellite campus on East Marginal Way.

About 25 percent of her clients are women. But when it comes to success stories, a much larger percentage are women.

Johnson listed several personal traits that she believes have allowed some women to build successful businesses in an industry that has always been overwhelmingly dominated by men:

``They go about it very methodically. They aren't afraid to ask questions. They are willing to build a management team outside the company that they can employ on an as-needed basis.

`` They are dependable about paperwork. They are willing and able to negotiate. They are willing to take risks -- but conservative risks.''

One of her success stories is about Jackie Garner of Garner Construction. The company has provided crane services for three out of four large new buildings at the University of Washington, and is now on site at the Banner Building at Vine and Western.

Garner attributes her success to the fact that she has been a crane operator herself for 15 years. This experience in the trade has given her credibility and a close touch with work at the site that some new WBE's lack.

But Garner also credits the WMBE goals with giving her the foot-in-the-door opportunities she needed. Without them, ``We wouldn't even have been looked at,'' said Garner.

She is strongly in favor of WMBE participation goals, Garner deplores the fact that they have not worked as well for minority men. According to Garner, women have been more successful at breaking old barriers to participation simply because ``majority'' males are more comfortable working with women than with minorities.

Although some of the barriers to the job site have opened for women, there are other, more insidious barriers -- the limit of the WMBE participation goal, for instance. According to Garner, it is a common experience for women contractors like herself to approached in the middle of the task and told, in effect, `` you're finished, we'll take over,'' simply because that limit has been reached. The minority or woman contractor may be offered a monetary incentive to walk.

On her last job, Garner said ``No. I want to finish the job.'' She did.

``When you complete a project, you learn what you did right and wrong,'' said Garner, ``There's no substitute for that.''

The new presence of women in construction is changing the industry, off site and on. There is a recognition of needing adequate toilet facilities, and tools and equipment they can use.

Karen Johnson has an answer to contractors who believe that their industry is being diversified only by force of law.

She cited an article in the Washington Post which stated that white males had constituted 83 percent o the construction industry labor force in 1986, and that if the industry growth remained at that level until the year 2000, every white male coming into the labor force would have to go into construction to hold that 83 percent ratio.

Laws have created new markets within the industry. Safety standards in highway construction have become so stringent that meeting them has become a specialty area, and women are filling it.

Women owned businesses are showing dramatic increases in traffic control and safety, truck driving and excavating, electrical construction, -- and in financial management, bidding and estimating.

Women now work against some new prejudices and misconceptions that attend their success. Some complaints among their competitors within the industry are based on a perception that they are being backed financially by white men. This perception, according to Johnson, often indicates a misunderstanding of the role that technical expertise and past experience plays in getting commercial loans and contracts.

And when women hire men in key positions, they potentially face another misperception: that they are not running the business.

If WMBE goals have been a success for women, it is not unqualified.

Piper Doan of Tangent Electric, president of the Washington chapter of the Women Construction Owners and Executives (WCOE), has seen the down side.

Some large general contractors have entered into desperate searches for qualified women and minorities to fill subcontracting positions and meet WMBE participation goals. And some of those have settled for unqualified contractors, holding out promises of assistance or even cynical pass-through schemes.

As a result, a number of woman owned business, like their minority counterparts, have been drawn into bidding on projects that for which they were not qualified.

``I have 20 people in the field,'' said Doan. ``I've seen people half my size bid on bigger contracts than I would.''

``Then I've had to step over the dead bodies and get rid of the ghosts to get back to a level playing field.''

``They don't realize that 10 percent wrong on $2 million is a lot more than 10 percent on $20,000,'' said Doan. ``Then it take them a year to figure out that they're broke.''

Technical and professional excellence does not make you a competent business person, according to Doan, who says that she owes much to Johnson's program in learning the business side of contracting.

At the same time, Johnson has learned that it is part of her job to screen out marginal business before they start making those fatal bids.

In contracting, ``Nobody ever went broke without a job,'' said Doan.