From a 2012 NYT piece.
quote:
Monique Catus stood at the entrance of an elegant Art Deco apartment building on East 51st Street one day this spring, with a smile on her face and pristine white gloves on her hands. A little girl trotted by, she later recounted, looked up at her, and then looked at her mother. She was confused.
“He’s a girl!” she said, turning to her mother.
“No, she’s a girl,” her mother corrected.
“But!” the little girl said, “That’s the doorman!”
Doorwoman, actually. Doorperson, or door attendant, would be fine, too. None of these terms, however, are widely in use, because even though there are thousands of people in New York City who do the job, only a few hundred of them are women. And the pace of change has been glacial.
According to 32BJ, the largest building employee union in the city, about 12,800 of its members in the five boroughs are employed as doormen, porters and the like in residential buildings. How many are women? Only 302. Of the nearly 3,000 residential superintendents in the union, the number of women is 45.
“We all say ‘doormen’ for a reason: you really don’t see many women doing it,” said Amy Peterson, the president of Nontraditional Employment for Women, a nonprofit organization that trains women for jobs in male-dominated fields like construction and building maintenance. “But that’s not because employers don’t want to hire women, and it’s not because women aren’t ready.”
One reason, a spokeswoman for 32BJ suggested, is that the turnover in those jobs is quite low. Doorman, superintendent and porter positions are good union jobs (the minimum wage for a doorman in a typical apartment building is $20.77 an hour, before tips) with benefit plans and regular raises, and are not in danger of being shipped overseas. Often, such jobs are held by the same person for a few decades, or even passed down to the next generation.
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