This footage was filmed and produced 10 July 2021.

Since women are "automatically" relegated to cleaning tasks, a group of women in Argentina started doing masonry to break down gender roles. According to Argentina's construction workers union, the number of women in the industry increased by 131 percent from 2003 to 2010 and they now make up five percent of the workforce.

The video shows Argentine women building houses to break down gender stereotypes as well as some interviews with these powerful women.

Interview:

I started working at the Community Center. The first project was with one of our colleagues that told us she did not have money to pay for bricklayers.
Then I spoke with my reference in the MTE (Movimiento de Trabajadores Excluidos) and I commented that we liked the idea of ​​learning masonry to which they invited us to join and from there we started with our colleagues to train and build houses. This started about one and a half years ago.
The MTE has always supported us, I like to belong to it because it always gives us space and they listen to us in our needs. We were included not only for the fact of being women, most people think that masonry is a man's thing, but because we proved otherwise, that we can work together and that makes us feel very good.
We started here for a project called "Promoting Work" in addition to our situation of gender violence.
From there the MTE women builders started. We started with the house of a colleague who had absolutely nothing, she didn't have money either. She needed to move because the money was not enough to pay the rent.
First we rebuilt a little wooden house so that she could live with her children while we were building what would finally be her house. The Town Hall (municipality) also helped a lot in this first project. The mayor Juan Ignacio Ustarroz supported us in the 1,000 Days Plan.
We feel that both the municipality and our colleagues from the MTE offer us their help to move forward.
We are co-workers but also partners, if they need to be heard when they have problems at home, we’ll be there. This is like a second home for us.
We started being nine people and as more women entered due to gender violence, now we are fifteen.
There are emergency crews in case some women cannot come in the morning. These emergency crews would cover them during one shift and women can do the other shift.
This crew is growing every day and more fellows are being added.
We women have clearly demonstrated that we can work alongside men and some have even shown to work better than men.
We would like other women to be able to do different jobs, telling them that they can also achieve them, that women can come out of gender-based violence, and be self-sufficient without depending on someone who mistreats them.

I was very afraid at first, when I started working, but my male colleagues understood what I had suffered and they were kind and helped me to get ahead.
They are real men because they have always supported us.

This totally changed me, I feel like a better person being able to help others with my experiences, something that I didn't do before for fear of being told ‘You can't do it’. They had told me you can't do this, you have to stay at home taking care of the children. It was all no, no, no. Until the psychologists made me understand that that was not the way to live. They helped us to understand that we did not have to continue suffering this abuse and that we were capable of doing much more than we thought. Now we are also building sidewalks, working with another partners, that is why I say that the Town Hall has helped us a lot by including women in these projects. It is very good that more and more women are included in these kind of projects because we can work as well as men do.
We, men and women, need to share chores. Women should be able to do men's work and men should be able to do women's work, help each other. Not only women have to be a slave to housework. That is already in the past.
We broke the gender stereotype by being bricklayers, by building houses. Men should also put themselves in the place of women taking care of children, cooking, cleaning and doing other chores that were previously considered only for women.
Our work draws a lot of attention, but we do not stay in that, we are not aware of that, we continue working every day. We are simple people, a family, and we want it to continue to grow. We want more women to join us.
Finally, I want to say that I hope that gender violence can gradually disappear, not only from men to women but from both sides because they suffer the same but today women suffer more from these types of problems. For that I say to all women ‘You can do it, you can live without violence.