As a child, Tonya Hicks was fascinated by car engines. She spent her summers in her grandparents’ garage with her uncle, an industrial mechanic, who taught her how to build a motor from scrap by the time she was 8. She constantly got in trouble with her mother and grandmother for her grease-stained sundresses and dirty hands, but that did not deter her.

Hicks grew up in public housing in Meridian, Mississippi with her mom, grandparents and five uncles who helped raise her. ​“You know how some people say they were raised by wolves? Well, I was raised by men. That made me tough,” she said. In high school, she realized that she loved math and was good at it, too. She knew she wanted to work in a field that allowed her to use her skills. ​“I wanted to be a mathematician cracking codes for the Pentagon or the FBI,” she says, aspirations that came, in part, from watching TV shows with her grandma.

She earned a full scholarship to study mathematics at Central State University in Wilberforce, Ohio and enrolled as a freshman in 1990.

There she ran into a barrier that she would encounter time and again throughout her career. When she told a professor that she planned to work in a math-related profession, he replied that ​“women don’t do those jobs,” and that she would be better off becoming a teacher. Hicks was discouraged, but at home, her grandmother had different advice: not only can women do everything, they already do everything — they always have.

The summer of her sophomore year, Hicks found a job at a construction site, mostly sweeping floors and cleaning up. She soon noticed that the electricians around her were constantly using math — calculating electrical loads, panels and voltages. It was a lightbulb moment for Hicks. She decided to drop out of college, forfeit her scholarship and become an electrician. She enrolled in a program through the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers union that allowed her to work 40 hours a week as an apprentice and attend school just one night per week. It was also, crucially, free.

But her path to a professional career was not a smooth one. From the moment she interviewed for the training program — in front of a panel made up of all white men — she was met with skepticism about her capabilities, and she felt the other trainees, who were overwhelmingly male and white, did not always respect her. ​“They’d put me in the office trailer and anywhere there was something to clean up,” she said. Hicks made the most of it: While stuck in the office, she started reading receipts and getting a sense of how the business was run, knowledge she would draw on when she started her own business years later.

Despite all the hardships, in 1998, Hicks completed the apprenticeship, becoming the first woman electrician in Local 917 of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers and the first Black woman journeyman in the state of Mississippi.

The gender disparity that Hicks experienced as an apprentice continues to be a huge problem across the trades. For example, men make up roughly 90 percent of all workers in the construction industry. When it comes to electricians, the gender gap is even more pronounced: In 2022, only 2.2 percent of electricians in the U.S. were women. Just 7.3 percent were Black.

This is especially problematic now, given the nationwide shortage of electricians, which is growing more acute just as the country is ramping up to meet ambitious decarbonization goals. Rewiring America estimates the U.S. will need at least 1 million more electricians over the next decade. Recruiting, training and retaining women in construction jobs and skilled trades will be essential to meeting that need.

The same year she joined the union, Hicks had her first son and moved to Atlanta, where she worked as an electrician for various employers. One day, a colleague at a job site somewhat jokingly suggested that she should start her own business. Hicks recalled, ​“He said to me, ​‘You know, if you’re going to run around telling everybody what to do, you might as well own your own company.’”

That was the nudge Hicks needed to gather her savings and launch her business, Power Solutions, from the sunroom of her Atlanta apartment in 2000. She was 28 years old and a single mom to a six-year-old. She took on any job that she could get, often small, one-off residential projects.