The Use of Mentoring to Promote Well-being for Female SMART Members

Women are highly underrepresented in the construction skilled trades. In addition to facing the industry's well-known physical risks, women are subjected to discrimination, harassment, and skills under-utilization. As a result, tradeswomen have increased risk for injury, stress-related health effects, and high attrition rates from apprenticeship programs, thus perpetuating their minority status. Mentoring is a well-established technique for learning technical and personal navigation skills in new or challenging social environments. The investigators propose development and dissemination of a mentorship program through local unions of the International Association of Sheet Metal, Air, Rail and Transportation Workers (SMART), and evaluating its success in reducing women's injury and work stress, while improving retention.

Journey-level workers will be trained on effective mentoring techniques, and matched to approximately 100 women apprentices within participating local unions. Mentees will be followed for two years within the mentorship program, with another 100 women apprentices in locals not receiving the mentorship training similarly followed as controls. The impact of participation in mentoring programs will be measured through apprentices' experience of stress, coping mechanisms, safety climate, and retention in the apprenticeship programs. Specifically, the investigators propose to: Aim 1: Develop a mentorship training program for journey-level sheet metal workers to assist women apprentices in navigating the challenges faced by women in trades Aim 2: Disseminate the training and assist locals in developing effective mentorship programs Aim 3: Evaluate the effectiveness of the mentoring programs specified in Aims 1 and 2 Aim 4: Disseminate the best practices for supporting women apprentices in the skilled trades.