News

A woman in the trades
By Carol C. Bradley

It’s a challenge for women working in the trades, says Valerie RiChard, Notre Dame’s new director of facilities operations.

“The women who went before me blazed the trail, so I could come along and have an easier time,” she says. “And I blazed a trail for those who come after me. But yeah, there’s a challenge,” she says. “You understand that you’re a woman, or a minority. But you have to present yourself as the individual with the specific types of skills to get the job done. You can only build relationships as an individual.”

RiChard, whose parents both worked as supervisors for Ford Motor Co., graduated from high school in Detroit, and then completed a degree in advertising design. But she couldn’t find a job.

It’s a story she still likes to tell—how one day she saw an ad in the paper for an apprenticeship program for stationary engineers.

Stationary engineers operate and maintain heating and cooling equipment, “from a home furnace to a power plant to powering an entire city,” RiChard says. The term “stationary” came from the days when a lot of steam equipment moved around on locomotives. Stationary equipment was equipment that stayed in place.

The job description, she recalls, was awful. “It said you had to be able to lift 50 pounds, shovel coal and work high off the ground. But when I got to the point where they talked about the pay … I decided to take the test. Because the pay was good, even in the apprenticeship program.”

RiChard was accepted into the four-year program and started learning about boilers and pumps, electricity and blueprint reading. First she obtained her high-pressure boiler operator’s license, then a third-class refrigeration license, and finally, her first-class stationary engineer’s license.

She was hired by Wayne State University in Detroit as a stationary engineer and became the first woman at the university ever to be promoted into a supervising engineer position. A few years later, she became the first woman at Wayne State ever to be taken out of a trades position and put into a directorship.

As director of facility operations, she was in charge of the physical plant, operations and engineering for the medical school campus during the day, and the entire campus at night.

“Which meant I got calls 24 hours a day,” she says. “A fire, a leak, a smell of smoke .… I’d get my coffee, get my little book and start calling to see who I could get to come in.”

That proved to be one of the times it was tricky to be a woman in a man’s field, she says—when she had to call a man’s house at two in the morning. “Their wives would say, ‘Who are you, and what do you want with my husband?’” RiChard says. “I learned, even before I said hello, to say ‘This is Wayne State University calling.’”

RiChard left Wayne State after 17 years for a short stint at the University of Iowa. At Notre Dame she oversees nearly 300 employees in landscape services, building services, locksmith services, the sign shop and the work control center.

As a leader, she sees her job as team building.

“The people who come to work every day make Notre Dame a better place by the work they do,” she says. “My work is not more important than their work. If I can’t provide them with the resources to get the job done—if I can’t provide them with an environment where they feel comfortable coming to work and meeting the mission of the University—then I’m not doing my job.”