On the first day of her first job at Perini Corp.—now Tutor Perini—in the 1970s, a male worker approached Karen Arpino-Shaffer's boss and asked, "What the hell is she doing here?"
"In those days, people said what they felt," Arpino-Shaffer, 54, says. Workers now are "trained not to say it, but as a woman, you can still feel" when you are not wanted, she adds. It took a few false starts for things to change, but she and the man eventually became good friends.