Women’s Work

By Kat Roberts

I’m interested in doing a series of original photos and short interviews tentatively entitled “Women’s Work”. This project would focus on women who work, or are involved in activities, that presently are or were once thought in the past to be solely the domain of men. I strongly suspect from my initial research that many of these fields have never historically been men only, though the women’s participation may have been the minority. I believe the stories collected from the women participating in this series will provide valuable insights as to some of the reasons why in this day and age many jobs still have an assumed gender attached to them. Some of the questions I hope to address with the participants include whether they feel that any particular challenges, rewards, unexpected camaraderie, etc. have come along with their working in a male dominated field. It would also be one of the goals of this series to provide some additional visibility to women in these roles. I am still finalizing the range of activities I plan to focus on, but so far they include the following: truck drivers, racers, motorcyclists, daredevils, fire fighters, construction workers, athletes, lumberjacks, and politicians.

As I am highly active on the social media platform Pinterest, I thought that it made a lot of sense to start a “Women’s Work” board there where I could begin collecting images and articles about women in such fields. By saving these items to the board it has given me a place to store and organize my initial research while the project is still in these early stages of development. It has also given me a platform to share these images with other users and to begin connecting with people who have similar interests.