Why the Trades Have a Memory Problem

Most conversations about diversity in the trades focus on today's job site: who's hired, who's promoted, who's made to feel welcome. New research from the University of Portsmouth points to a barrier that sits a generation earlier — and it's one most apprenticeship strategies aren't built to address.

A career you can't picture is a career you don't choose

Dr George Ackers, a sociologist at Portsmouth, studied the work histories of thirteen women who trained as apprentices in Britain's Royal Dockyards from the 1960s onward. His findings, published in the journal Capital & Class, describe decades of restricted training, exclusion from skilled tasks, and harassment that pushed many of these women out of the trade entirely, or out of the workforce in that trade by the time they might have mentored someone else.

The consequence goes beyond those individual careers. Trade skills have historically passed down through families — a father teaching a daughter to rewire a socket, an aunt showing a nephew how to read a blueprint. When women were systematically excluded from staying and progressing in the trades, that chain of informal teaching broke. Fewer women stayed in the trades long enough, or were respected enough within them, to pass that knowledge — and that sense of "this could be your job too" — on to the next generation.

Many of these women were "prevented from passing on their knowledge, skills and pride" in their work to the next generation — Dr George Ackers, University of Portsmouth

That's the mechanism at the heart of what Ackers calls the craft paradox: trades are often celebrated as offering rare, meaningful, hands-on work — but that meaning has historically depended on excluding the people who might have complicated the picture.

Why this matters for today's apprenticeship push

The UK government has been investing in growing apprenticeship numbers, and that's a genuinely good thing — the trades need more people, and more routes in. But Ackers' research points to a limit on what volume alone can fix. If a young woman has never seen a woman working a trade up close, in her own family or community, she's less likely to consider it a realistic path in the first place, no matter how many apprenticeship places exist.

In other words, access isn't only about how many doors are open. It's about whether people can see themselves walking through them.

What this means for how we're building Renzo

This research lines up with something we've built Renzo around from the start: the trades shouldn't require an inside connection to get started. Historically, the easiest way in has been knowing someone — a relative, a family friend, a neighbour — already on the tools. That's exactly the route this research shows has been closed off to women for generations.

Renzo is built to work without that connection already in place.

None of this replaces the deeper, harder work Ackers' research points to — changing workplace cultures, and making sure the trades are somewhere people want to stay once they're in. That's work employers and industry have to lead. But if part of the problem is that too many people have never had a way in without knowing the right person, that's a gap we can help close, for women and for anyone else the trades have historically been hard to picture themselves in.

Access to a trade shouldn't depend on who you already know.