Blazing Trails to the Top
Women leaders in Minnesota's manufacturing industry tell us how they got there, what it's like to be a woman at the top in a historically male-dominated industry, and why women today can thrive within it.
BY ANDREA LAHOUZE
Traci and Lori Tapani, co-presidents, Wyoming Machine
While millions of real-life Rosie the Riveters stepped into manufacturing plants to drive the nation’s manufacturing production during World War II, most stepped out of these positions as men returned from their wartime roles. Today, more than 60 years later, the industry still has a primarily male workforce. More than twice as many men as women are employed in Minnesota’s manufacturing industry. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, Minnesota’s manufacturing industry employed 82,254 females and 193,035 males in the first quarter of 2010, indicating that women make up about 30 percent of the industry.
The uneven split may be due in part to preferred college studies. Though women make up the majority of U.S. college grads, relatively few graduate with a degree in the STEM subjects of science, technology, engineering or mathematics. In 2007, an analysis by the American Association of University Women reported that colleges and universities awarded 138,874 STEM bachelor’s degrees to men and just 88,371 to women.
But slowly, more women are reconsidering careers in manufacturing. The growing number of women-owned manufacturing firms serves as proof. According to a recent report by National Association of Manufacturers, 19 percent of manufacturing firms in the U.S. are women-owned. That percentage nearly doubled between 2000 and 2010. And between 1997 and 2004, women owned manufacturing firms grew by 38 percent, while the manufacturing industry as a whole grew by 8 percent. Minnesota women have transcended the norm, too, rising through the ranks to become vice presidents, presidents, CFOs, CEOs and owners. Now they’re encouraging the next generation of working women to follow in their footsteps.
Industry Anomalies
Many of today’s female industry leaders have blazed unique, sometimes unlikely trails to the top. Now co-presidents of precision metal fabricator Wyoming Machine, the company their father Thomas Tapani started in 1974, Lori and Traci Tapani recall helping with the business since childhood. But after graduating from college with degrees in accounting and business, they went on to careers outside of the industry, Lori in public accounting and Traci in international trade and finance.
Not until the early 1990s did the sisters even give a thought to returning to work for their father’s business. Though he had never discussed it with them, word came out through a meeting between Thomas Tapani and his advisors that in his perfect vision, his daughters would one day run the company.
“We had never discussed that in our life,” Lori says. “But we were invited to a meeting at a law firm in Minneapolis and this was presented to us.” After a short deliberation period, Lori and Traci decided to enter into the business, and became co-presidents in 1993. At the time, a single customer constituted 60 percent of Wyoming Machine’s sales, leaving its own success to hinge upon its customer’s success. Now, thanks to the sisters’ diversification efforts, no customer makes up more than 20 percent of sales, allowing the company to thrive even when some of its customers do not.
Joan Thompson, CFO and executive vice president of Minnesota Wire and Cable Company, worked for her father’s business as well, lending an extra hand when he lost one of his seven employees. At the time, the business was a consulting company and served as a manufacturer’s representative and wiring distributor. After working at the company for several months, Thompson’s father asked her to stay on full-time and she accepted, leaving her previous position at Precision Associates.
“It was never intended to be a family business. We just happened to work really well together,” Thompson explains. “I didn’t seek out manufacturing [either]; Minnesota Wire turned into a manufacturing company, so it evolved over time. But for me personally that was the beauty of the experience: the variety of positions I held, and also the fact that I experienced growing a manufacturing company from scratch.”
Over the next 15 years, Thompson wore many hats at Minnesota Wire, including accounting, managing labor, inventory and tooling, and was key in transforming Minnesota Wire from a consulting company and wiring distributor into the precision electrical equipment manufacturer that it is today. Over the past 10 years alone, she has been the driving force behind growth that has tripled the value of the company.
Thompson’s manufacturing expertise has also led her to serve on many boards, including the St. Paul Chamber, the Minnesota Chamber, the Minnesota Hospital Foundation, and Allina Hospitals and Clinics. In 2004, when President George W. Bush needed insights on R&D tax credits, he invited 10 handpicked business executives to the White House for a roundtable discussion. Thompson was one of them.
Jean Bye’s journey to the presidency at Dotson Iron Castings began when she was in high school. “I was clerical in the office, typing seven-part carbon copy price lists. It was as routine and mundane as you could possibly get,” Bye says. She continued to work for the company each summer through college. Upon graduation, Bye was offered a position as personnel manager for the company and worked her way through positions in almost every area of the company until landing her current role as president.
Mary Moldenhauer’s dexterity led her to a variety of electronic assembly positions right out of high school, including building aircraft cables for Lockheed Martin. Instead of moving with the company when it relocated in 1999, she chose to stay in northern Minnesota and start her own manufacturing company. Today, Moldenhauer’s GreyStar Electronics is a thriving electronic and cable assemblies manufacturer whose precision is trusted by a variety of customers in the defense and aerospace industries, including the U.S. Army, U.S. Navy, and U.S. Coast Guard. In 2006, the U.S. Small Business Association honored Moldenhauer, who is an Ojibwe woman, as Minority Small Business Person of the Year.
Instead of starting her own business as Moldenhauer did, Darlene Miller was working in sales at Permac Industries when the precision machined products manufacturer started to fail. She received an opportunity to buy into the business and become a partial owner, and took it. “My ride into it was kind of one where I had to take lemons and make lemonade. I felt that the opportunities were there,” she says. In 1994, Miller purchased the remaining portion of the company and assumed her current position of president and CEO. Since taking the helm, Miller has helped sales at Permac Industries to skyrocket—from an annual $700,000 to more than $5 million.
In the 1980s, Linda Hull had already established her own business helping companies to automate their accounting systems. Hull’s introduction to the manufacturing industry came when she was asked to automate accounting for Residual Materials, a scrap metal recycling plant in Grand Forks, North Dakota. When Residual Materials owners Dusty and Mitch Gibbs purchased Re- Alliance, another metal recycling company, they asked Hull to create an automated system for tracking inventory. The Gibbs’ 2006 purchase of Kirschbaum & Krupp LLC also benefited from Hull’s automated accounting and inventory tracking systems, and she was asked to stay on as CFO of the company.
“Typically up until that time, scrap balance sheets were done once a year, just what came in and what you were left with in inventory. But [with the inventory tracking system] we were able to do monthly financials,” Hull says.
As rarities within the industry, success for many of these women has not come without occasional gender-related hurdles. When Miller took ownership of Permac Industries, she remembers one employee who quit because he was sure the company would falter under female ownership. Years later, the employee returned to tell Miller he had been wrong.
In the foundry industry, where the large male-to-female ratio is even more pronounced than Minnesota manufacturing’s 70/30 split, Bye struggles with frequent assumption that she is president of Dotson Iron Castings because she has familial ties to the business.
“They always assume I must be a daughter or a relative, but I’ve earned this position completely on my own,” she says. “But it’s so unusual to see a woman that that conclusion gets jumped to.”
Being the only woman (or one of the only women) in most meetings or groups has its trials as well. On one occasion early in her entrepreneurial career, Moldenhauer was walking to meet with other manufacturing owners whom she had never met. When she got to the door, the meeting facilitator did not greet her but simply waited for her to continue walking down the hall, assuming she must be lost.
“He didn’t think I belonged in the meeting and I had to tell him, ‘No excuse me, I need to sit down. I’m part of the meeting,’” Moldenhauer recalls.
The attention Moldenhauer and others draw simply from being women can be intimidating. Bye admits it’s difficult to remember names when everyone already knows hers. She sits on the boards of directors of both the American Foundry Society and Ductile Iron Society. On one, she is one of three women out of 25 members. On the other, she is the only woman on the 15-member board. “I’ll get together with a group of 25 people and they all know who I am instantly because I’m the only woman, so they can call me by name while I still have to learn all of their names,” she says.
But extra attention can also be used to one’s advantage. As Miller puts it, “The more free publicity, the better.” She believes being a woman was especially helpful at the beginning of her manufacturing sales career. “When I first made sales calls, because it’s not the norm, I probably got in the doors a little easier. I was an exception and people probably wondered, ‘Who is this woman selling machining?’”
Few people in the industry today would wonder. Early this year, Miller was appointed by President Barack Obama to the President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness. As part of the council’s mission to strengthen the American economy through jobs, Miller and other councilmembers are working with public and private schools to create a pilot program to introduce school age children to careers in technology and manufacturing. A particular goal of the pilot program is to encourage more girls to consider these career options.
Lori Tapani says being a woman in manufacturing also grants instant access to—and support from—a network of those in the same position.
“We have met the greatest women through manufacturing,” she says. “When there are not a lot of you, you can go someplace and someone will say, ‘Hey, have you met so and so?’ We help each other, and we’re open. We’re not behind the scenes and aggressive. We reach out and try to find ways that we can help each other and promote each other’s businesses. It’s great.”
Miller agrees. “You can pick up the phone at any time and ask any question [of other women in manufacturing] and we’re not afraid to do so,” she says. “I think that’s a really good female trait, that we’re not afraid to ask.”
The XX Factor
Not being afraid to ask is one of many female traits that lend themselves well to manufacturing careers. Moldenhauer and Denise Johnson, who is president and CEO of metal fabrication and machining company RiteWay Manufacturing, believe that women are more structured and more detail-oriented, both of which are critical attributes in manufacturing’s highly organized environment.
Miller agrees, adding that women’s attention to detail also makes them good listeners, which in turn fosters good working relationships. “I think we’re able to really concentrate on what others share with us,” she says. “We as women are more open. We bare our souls a little bit more, whether it’s to our employees or our customers or our suppliers, and it forms really good relationships. Because in the end everything is about relationships, and I think we’re good at it. Plus, we’re good networkers.”
As CFO of a metal recycling facility, Hull observes that more women have been driving recycling efforts in their homes and local schools. She believes women will help lead the way in efforts to make manufacturing more environmentally friendly.
“In general, I see women, especially 20-40-year-old women, a lot more interested in keeping the planet green and recycling. I think that having women involved in manufacturing will really benefit that whole concept of trying to green manufacturing,” Hull says.
Perhaps the most important quality women bring to the table is simply a different perspective.
“I just think that having a mix of both men and women is a really good idea,” Lori Tapani says. “Women just have an ingenuity and a creativity sometimes, that’s different. Because of that, you sometimes get some really unique solutions to things that you might not normally have gotten. Women are more open to just throwing something out on the table that might be really odd and completely outside the realm of what you would think of in manufacturing, then it creates a cool synergy because even if that’s not ultimately the idea you use, it’s something that got out on the table that causes a whole different process to go on the way of coming up with a unique solution.”
Bye says having male and female employees brings balance to a company. “The bigger your pool of employees and variation across employees that you bring to the table, the more perspectives you are going to consider, and considering more perspectives gives you a broader view of things. If you’re excluding 50 percent of the population, you’re limiting your view of the world,” she says.
Manufacturing and Tomorrow’s Working Woman
Though their ability to excel in manufacturing careers is unquestionable, the fact remains that relatively few women choose to walk down that path. For many women, an adverse reaction to the industry starts in grade school, and is fueled by misperceptions that manufacturing is dirty, dangerous, and manual labor-intensive.
Manufacturing “is a clean environment and it’s very technical,” Miller says. “It’s very math skills-driven. It has excellent career paths. As women in this industry, we really need to get out and educate our young people as to what we all do.”
Anna Wald, a quality manager at Wyoming Machine who began as a welder, believes a lack of confidence or a fear of disapproval is can deter female students from considering careers in manufacturing as well. Particularly, Wald believes girls might worry that others will seem them as less then feminine.
“It always surprises me when I ask young girls what they want to be when they grow up,” Wald says. “There is always one girl in the group that is will speak up and say something about liking math. And when this happens I notice the other girls in the group show subtle signs of disapproval or quietly pull away from the girl that is willing to speak up. That is a barrier that we as women impose on ourselves.”
Traci Tapani has witnessed similar concerns among young women in her public speaking experiences. At a recent machine tool show in Chicago, she answered questions from 100 eleventh and twelfth grade girls.
“One of the questions they asked was what kind of clothes do you wear to work if you work in a manufacturing company? … It makes sense to me as the mother of two daughters that a young woman is going to care about what she wears to work,” Traci Tapani says.
To help students cast off industry misperceptions at a young age, Lori and Traci Tapani speak frequently to student groups around the country and were recent keynote speakers at “Women in Technology,” an annual event at Pine City Technical College. The daylong event brings 6th grade girls and women established in engineering and manufacturing careers together to introduce female students to similar career opportunities in ways they can appreciate. Aveda, for example, sent one of its chemists to talk about the chemical composition of lip gloss. The chemist made a batch of lip gloss, then gave one to each girl to take home.
“It’s a way of connecting with girls in a really fun way that they can understand and enjoy,” Lori Tapani says. She reminds students today to consider that manufacturing career opportunities exist for them both inside and outside the production area.
“For virtually any type of profession, there is a job for you in manufacturing,” she says. “If you like to work with people, there are opportunities ranging from customer service-type positions to HR kind of positions at a manufacturing company. If you’re very technical, there are all kinds of manufacturing engineering jobs. There are positions in quality if you are a process-oriented person…I just feel that there are so many misperceptions that women don’t even consider manufacturing.”
And as the search for skilled talent challenges more and more manufacturers, they will be needed. Simultaneous increases in baby boomer retirements and global competition make for a one-two punch that will require manufacturers to attract a fresh generation of skilled talent to stay competitive.
Miller encourages young women to look at manufacturing as they would any other business.
“Look at what your passion is, and it doesn’t have to be the end product. It can be the sales of it or it can be the marketing of it or it can be ownership of a business,” Miller suggests. “I couldn’t run a machine if my life depended on it. We need to get rid of that fear that we need to know what is running in the factory because if we don’t have that fear, it doesn’t really matter. It’s no different than running a spa. You don’t know how the inner workings of spa equipment work, so does it really matter if you don’t know how the inner workings of a CNC machine work?”
Bye stresses that manufacturing careers today are fast-paced, high-tech and highly rewarding. “Until you experience it, I don’t think you can realize how exciting and revitalizing it can be to be a part of something where you’re creating something. It’s high intensity. [Women should know that] it’s not old and stodgy. It’s exciting to be a part of it.”
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