General Motors started Affinity Group for Women as a catalyst and research group to attract, engage, develop and retain great female employees to positively affect GM's business results.

Kate Williams, production manager of General Motors (GM) Powertrain in Baltimore, remembers the small number of women in manufacturing when she entered the industry full-time in 1994. But things are certainly changing 12 years later, and GM has helped nurture the growing number of women with careers in the manufacturing field through numerous endeavors; specifically, its Affinity Group for Women (AGW). “It is still a very male-dominated industry, but it's changing,” Williams says.

“You do see more women in key roles than when I started in 1994. That will continue to change as more women see manufacturing and manufacturing-type fields as a career type for them.”

According to GM, the company started AGW in 1999 as a catalyst and research group to “attract, engage, develop and retain great women employees to positively impact GM's business results.”

AGW focuses on empowering women in such fields as engineering, finance, legal, research and development, and manufacturing to help gain a larger share of the more than $3.7 trillion spent annually by U. S women, according to GM. Williams - who has been involved with AGW for five years and is now the chair for the women in manufacturing group for the Baltimore facility - says AGW promotes utilizing women internally for their feedback on vehicle features and product lines, as well as to attract and retain good manufacturing employees. This could help GM buck the national trend for the number of women in manufacturing.

According to Women in Labor: A Databook, which was compiled by the U.S Department of Labor (DOL) the number of women employed in manufacturing dropped 0.3 percent in 2004, which has women at 30 percent of the total number of manufacturing employees in the United States. The DOL also showed there is still a large gap in the wage disparity between men and women in manufacturing. As of 2004, women earned only 71.1 percent of the men's median weekly earnings. Williams says GM is unfamiliar with this trend, but she encourages any woman in that position to do what she can to end that imbalance.

“If this is the case, I definitely encourage women to try to understand why this exists in their position,” she adds. Through AGW GM establishes mission statements and goals at the corporate and individual plant levels to meet retention and attraction of numbers for women in manufacturing and its other initiatives, Williams says.

Through formal mentoring programs, the embracing of flexible work schedules and the work force becoming more global, Williams predicts there will be large increases in the number of women in the manufacturing work force in the near future.

“The quantity of women continues to grow in manufacturing, and I think it will continue to grow,” Williams says. “The future is really wide open,” she continues, ” not so much for what women in manufacturing can do, but what manufacturing holds for women.”