Quote Originally Posted by shootingstar View Post
I worked on a major construction engineering project where my impressions with pics are here . I am not an engineer but had jobs working in engineering organizations. There is a real distinctly "male" ambiance at a construction site...even if most of the guys are nice/polite. We had very few female engineers (less than 10%) and none of them were in supervisory roles. In such work environments, one doesn't feel like wearing a dress or skirt often. I got tired of having a thin film of construction dust on my dress pants...

For a female engineer in such environments, better to look pragmatic rather than overly fragile looking, or too frou-frou looking if you want the guys to take you seriously. There similarities to cycling world: it's how you act, perform and speak, never mind the grey hair, lines...
We had to hang out with the more, um, rural of folk - we called it the "huntin' and fishin' crowd". I did have to overcome some of the female bias with some of the old timers, especially with one guy who supervised some of the operators and wanted to know why I didn't just go be a secretary for my dad.

But yeah, you had to prove you weren't a shrinking flower. Being on the fire team and a tower rat helped.