'I thought being in trades would be all men, but it's not like that'

Jane Potter manages the Leeds branch of Bagnalls and is passing on her skills to apprentices Faith and Antonia

At one Yorkshire painting and decorating firm, almost a third of its apprentices are women in an industry where just 4% of staff are female.

Faith Loynes, 20, is in the second year of her apprenticeship. Her colleague Antonia Fieldhouse is in her first year.

They work at the Leeds branch of Bagnalls, a Bradford-based industrial painting and decorating business.

The office currently has 10 female apprentices out of a total of 21.

Faith says she chose the course because it allows her to gain a qualification while also getting paid.

"I'm not getting student debt. But I always knew I wanted to do something more in manual labour instead of just sat at a desk," she says.

"I tried doing a normal college course and got bored of it."

Antonia says she knew she wanted to do something practical but wasn't sure what. She enrolled on a multi-skills course at college, teaching a variety of trades.

She was one of three girls to 15 boys.

"I loved painting and then this opportunity came up," she says.

"When you see the change of the job - when it goes from being worn down to leaving it all new, it's just nice. We clean up the sparkies' and joiners' mess."

Bagnalls now has more female staff than ever before despite operating in a male-dominated field

Faith and Antonia say they both look up to branch manager Jane Potter.

Jane has been with the firm for 34 years and was recently named as one of the most influential women in construction by the Construction Industry Training Board (CITB).

When she started as an apprentice she was the only woman in her cohort.

"I had a lot of the guys saying: 'because you're a girl you're winning competitions and you can't do this, you can't do that'," she says.

"So I said 'right, let's shut the doors, take the name tags off so nobody knows' and I still won.

"Because I'm small, when I first started out I used to be shoved up a ladder or put on to roofs - nowadays it's not the case.

"The industry has changed a lot. And the guys you're working with, they're more eager to train and bring in women, so it's certainly been a mind shift and a mind change really within the industry."

Jane says there are many reasons why the sector needs women - not just to tick the equality box.

"For changing rooms or toilets, when we do a lot of gym work, we'll have a female and a male painter decorator down there so you can go into the right areas.

"It's beneficial because we don't have to shut the toilets or that part of the gym off.

"We'll also put a female team together to go into a nursing home and places like that because there's a perceived idea that you can talk to people more."

Women also have finer painting skills, she says.

"Women probably have a better eye for detail and I know when we've employed females, and we've employed both females and males, it seems to be that the females seem to strive in the painting side of things," she says.

In fact, that kind of work is better paid and more interesting, agree Faith and Antonia.

"If you're going to a town hall or a civic hall and you've got columns that look like marble, that's what we've painted. Or the detail and cherubs that's on the ceiling, we can do stuff like that," says Jane.

"There were some tiles down at Leeds Town Hall that's been there since year dot, and they couldn't find any more. I think they're 200 years old, something like that, and we've painted them all in."

Jane Potter was named one of the Top 100 Influential Women in Construction this year

Despite changes in the industry, there are still challenges with getting young women into the sector, says Jane. They are still the minority.

"We've gone from just me being here to having 17 women, and that's the plan to keep on increasing that and attracting more females into the industry. We're going out to schools now and trying to get in there early doors to get people in," she says.

"But I think a lot of times females don't know that you can come into this industry so it's getting that out there and into the spotlight."

Antonia agrees. She says some of the girls on her college course chose different sectors for better pay prospects.

"Painting and decorating is fun and you do get a good wage but there are sectors in the building and construction industry that pay more, so sometimes they go more for the money than anything else," she says.

"It does look quite daunting from the outside, like going into the trades and thinking it's all going to be men, but once I actually started I realised it's not actually like that."

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