Laura Suen, founder of Fire and Steel, which makes toy and real weaponry, says she still gets questions about who’s in charge, but she’s learned to brush off those slights.Jennifer Roberts/The Globe and Mail
When customers approach Fire and Steel, which designs, manufactures and sells toy and real weaponry such as swords and knives, perhaps at a Renaissance fair or comic con, they’ll usually talk to any guy at the booth first. Even if owner Laura Suen is standing right there.
“My colleagues will reply, ‘I’m not sure, but she will have a better answer for you because she’s my boss,’” says Ms. Suen, who launched the brand in 2012. She has advanced martial arts skills, knows her science fiction cold and has childhood memories of wanting nothing more than a flea market toy dagger.
At 36, Ms. Suen knows she looks younger; a landlord negotiating with her agent for a lease a few years ago balked at her picture on her business licence. “Who is this, Laura? How old is she?” they asked.
It’s difficult to work in traditionally male fields. And while it’s challenging to start a business in such industries, it might be a bit easier to brush off certain annoyances, knowing you’re the boss.
Ms. Suen, who has a background in science and worked as a physicist, found that microaggressions in her first career dragged her down. They still happen, but it’s now easier to dismiss them.
“It used to bother me more. But these days, if I were bothered each time that it happened, I’d be a very bothered person. I’d be high anxiety.”
It helps when your business is doing well. Mississauga-based Fire and Steel does brisk consumer and B2B sales – including to movie companies and martial arts studios – has 15 employees and will soon move to a larger facility. There, Ms. Suen will add to her team as she moves more manufacturing in-house, working around supply chain challenges.
It’s been different for serial entrepreneur Natasha Ferguson. She found sexism and racism in the construction industry drove her to double down on her own ventures.
Ms. Ferguson had worked a number of jobs, including in advertising, but got into roofing with her husband, starting a company in 2012. But by 2018, he’d taken a job, and the marriage was failing, while her mother was ill; she wanted security, so she sought a construction job.
“I don’t know how the guys on the job site will take to you,” one interviewer told her. Another actually got up and left the interview and sent in a human resources person. With other companies, she got the feeling that as a woman, and a woman of colour, she was not welcome.
“I decided if they were not going to give me a seat at the table, I would build my own.” She had already branched out into landscaping and general contracting – Ferguson is skilled in seven trades – but in 2020 rebranded as Ethelfox Construct, and put her roofing and landscaping services under that umbrella. She upped her marketing, plus her commitment to customer service. She also launched a non-profit called A Woman’s Work, a training school to help women get into the trades.
Natasha Ferguson says she wasn’t always welcomed on construction job sites. So, she started her own construction and landscaping business, Ethelfox Construct, and a non-profit, A Woman’s Work, to help train women in the field.SUPPLIED
There were tough moments. Some of the tradespeople she’d hired on jobs didn’t do their work. When she tried to dress more professionally in durable work clothing, she couldn’t find anything at major retailers. It bothered her that most roofing harnesses didn’t fit women, which means they can cause additional injuries during a fall.
But customers love what the company offers. Ms. Ferguson now has 28 employees, with a good percentage of them women in both the office and the field, and she expects to expand and hire grads from her non-profit arm. “There’s just such a big gap in the construction industry as it pertains to diversity,” she says, noting that lesbian couples in particular seek her out, as they’ve experienced poor treatment.
Norine Jones similarly has found her gender an asset. She’s the president and owner of Power Environmental/Power Vac Services in Burlington, Ont., which offers duct cleaning and asbestos removal. “At times, it has been to my benefit to be a woman. It’s a luxury being a woman in a man’s business.”
“What we do is really scary,” she says of asbestos removal. “We’re doing hazardous work in customers’ homes. A man in the industry once said to me, ‘You have a huge advantage over me. They just hand their keys over to you because you’re a woman.’”
Ms. Jones spent years running service departments at car dealerships before joining her father in the family business in 2004. She purchased the company in 2016, after his death. In both jobs, she worked hard to learn, and then shared openly and honestly with customers. “I like to be the most knowledgeable person in the room,” she says. She’s done considerable training and gets involved in the industry. For instance, she’s on the board of the Environmental Abatement Council of Canada.
She’s been called “intimidating” by colleagues, but Ms. Jones has kept the company going through difficult times – the pandemic was rough – by refocusing operations. While her dad used to do commercial and industrial bids, not all of which would come through, she’s found residential work better for cash flow. “We have set ourselves up as the best of the residential contractors and if my counterparts who do primarily commercial and industrial come across anybody doing residential, they send them to me.”
Ms. Jones, who has 10 employees, wants to keep growing, but to do so, she needs managerial help. She’d love to hire a woman who’s able to pick up the phone and answer in-depth questions, and not defer to someone else.
She thinks the ticket to gender diversity is supporting women so they can refuse the status quo of getting shut out of learning technical material. It worked for her. “I was never afraid to get my hands dirty.”