She's blazing trail for tradeswomen

DURHAM -- Lisa Pineiro bristles as she recites the low-life litany she's heard for years:

Construction workers have foul mouths and rocks for brains. Construction is a dead-end career. As a field for women, construction is the pits.

Pineiro, 32, is a hair stylist-turned-entrepreneur who has never taken a college course and knows the sting of that social stigma.

The prejudices are not only wrongheaded, they're downright harmful, says Pineiro, the founder and president of Technical Services Inc., a construction agency in Durham. College is not for everyone, she says, and vocational skills are highly undervalued in our society. Because of this mind-set, she says, women are often who are shut out of a viable career option.

Pineiro is her own evidence that women can succeed in construction. At her eight-year-old company, she's boss to her husband, Frank Pineiro, an electrical contractor, and to her father, Tony Armen, an accountant. She employs 105 men, ranging from laborers and skilled craftsmen to foremen, whom she assigns to job sites as clients need. In addition, she employs two women electricians.

Pineiro, a former high school cheerleader and homecoming queen, regularly takes her pep talk to students in Durham's public schools. She visits local classrooms to persuade middle-school students to embrace construction and other trades as a career. She's also recruiting the middle schoolers to the Construction and Architectural Design Academy, a program at Southern High School in Durham that's equivalent to a blue-collar magnet program.

"I talk to the girls and say, 'Do you want a man to screw in a light bulb for you? Do you want to depend on a man for everything?' " Pineiro explains. "The stereotype I would like to break is ... that women in construction are heavy-duty, hardy, redneck she-males."

Some middle schoolers stare blankly into space, she acknowledges; others twirl their hair around their fingers. But this year Pineiro felt great satisfaction when the first girl enrolled in the four-year program.

Vocational training, she preaches, is not just about hard hats, jackhammers and soldering irons. It could lead to a career in engineering, architecture or running a business.

"It's a talent, it's a career, it's an education," Pineiro says. "I just want to bring our industry back into the light."

As a volunteer, she not only recruits middle schoolers to the program; she also lines up guest speakers and visiting instructors for the students.

She's been mentoring, speaking and recruiting since 1999, when she was first asked to help develop construction programs in the school system. Pineiro helped create the one at Southern and sits on its advisory committee. Some say it couldn't run without her.

"We couldn't afford to pay her for what she's done," says Al Barnes, the work-base learning coordinator at the Durham Public Schools. "She coordinates, manages, arranges most of our speakers, taught students, helped recruit students."

Raleigh electrician Larry Saunders has worked for Technical Services Inc. from the outset. Last year, he spoke to seven classes about his work. He credits Pineiro with sticking with him through drug and alcohol addiction six years ago, a subject Saunders shares with the high schoolers during his presentations. He now oversees 20 men on a job for the company in Myrtle Beach, S.C. Through Technical Services, he has worked stints in Florida, New Jersey, Michigan and California -- chances he doubts he would have had without Pineiro's backing.

"A lot of the jobs I went to when I started I was the only black male," Saunders says. "And now I'm getting the opportunities."