We are often asked about what advice we would have for other women in manufacturing. At first, it was a difficult question for us to answer because we did not particularly focus on being women – we just were people working hard at doing the jobs we were engaged in. 

Today, there are approximately 1.2 million women employed in the US construction industry, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). Women still account for only 11 percent of the construction industry overall, however.

Women have made amazing strides in many fields and industries throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. Unfortunately, there are many others in which it remains a big challenge for a woman to rise to the top — or even, in some cases, to enter the industry at all.

Female smokers have a much greater risk of death from lung cancer and chronic obstructive lung disease (COLD) in recent years than did female smokers 20 or 40 years ago, reflecting changes in smoking behavior according to a Special Article published in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM).

Not counting some kinds of skin cancer, breast cancer is the most common cancer in women in the United States, according the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which is using the month of October to urge women to get mammograms on a regular basis.

Researchers from the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) and the Injury Control Research Center at West Virginia University (WVU-ICRC) have found that intimate partner violence resulted in 142 homicides among women at work in the U.S. from 2003 to 2008, a figure which represents 22% of the 648 workplace homicides among women during the period.