Women at the bottom of the ladder

An article titled the same as above was published in “THE HINDU” which left me very disturbed after reading it. It gave out statistics about even though women play an equally important role in the civil engineering field in the mason level they are terribly underpaid and usually not treated properly in the site. According to studies, women though preferred for the job by site engineers since they come regularly and do not cause any problems in the site are paid almost half of what men masons earn the exact pay being around Rs.165 for women and Rs.306 for men per day. Moreover this doesn’t mean they do any less work in the site. Right from carrying heavy materials to the top of the buildings from the ground and to passing the bricks from top to bottom in the scorching sun... You name it and they do it! Usually girls and boys are enrolled at the same age to work as labours but unlike boys who graduate to being masons girls do not carry their jobs into the future as they get married. When they return to work they have to start again as labours taking them a step back. Even when some girls were gathered and provided an internship of onsite training following the post tsunami period , at the end of their training almost all of them preferred to take up designing or other desk jobs since they knew they had no future in the field work. So, I now would like appeal to my fellow civil engineers especially women to stop this trend. Atleast we should provide equal opportunity to those women who are talented and competent enough to work as masons and earn their equal pay just as men earn it. Having women as masons have numerous advantages and they should not be discriminated just because they are women. The way we carve a niche for us in this patriarch field its time for us to let the other women also to be given the place we know they deserve.