Women are slowly increasing their presence, writes Gill South.
There are some professions and occupations men and women naturally gravitate towards - women towards health and education, men toward IT and engineering.
But in this age of diversity and gender equality, increasing numbers of women are taking on several former male bastions - with some success.
In the case of architecture, a formerly male dominated profession, women have made real progress in evening the balance.
In 2008, 330 males completed a bachelors degree in architecture or building, against 300 females. Broken down into the two subcategories - architecture and urban environment, and building - in the architecture and urban environment group there were 260 males against 280 females.
There are still plenty of scare factors. While the women may think themselves capable of achieving in a male-dominated area, they may be put off by how society will treat them, says Ministry of Women's Affairs chief executive Shenagh Gleisner.
She notes in a recent MWA study, "The young women who were interviewed said there are challenges to seeking a job in occupations such as engineering or building."
They can be influenced by how the trades are portrayed in the media, what their friends say and the careers advice at school.
Banu Tashutanizadeh, a young Indian-educated engineering student at Massey University, says she is the only girl on her mechatronics course, which she started in July 2008.
Unlike her male friends on the course, who have been very accepting of her, she has her life course mapped out well beyond her undergraduate degree. She has wanted to study engineering since she was 9 - at school, maths was her favourite subject.
The 19-year-old says: "I always knew that I wanted to do something with planes, working with planes."
From New Zealand, the plan is to study for a masters in aeronautical engineering, preferably at an ivy league university in the United States with a scholarship. Then: "I'm dying to work for Boeing in Seattle."
Her final aim is to be a project manager, a leader, if not the chief executive of Boeing. Tashutanizadeh's Persian father was an aeronautical engineer and is "absolutely stoked" she wants to study it, she says.
The Massey student says seven of her girlfriends back in India are also studying engineering. There are more women in their classes there, she says, although they are still a minority.
The teen does wonder if some companies will think twice before hiring a "girl engineer" but she believes if she works hard and finds a good internship, she is "bound to get a good job".
She is not 100 per cent confident all the time. Tashutanizadeh remembers walking into her mechatronics class late on her first day and "50 boy heads turned around and looked at me. I thought: 'Am I doing the right thing?' But I think about the end result."
Meanwhile, a move is on among the tertiary institutes such as the Manukau Institute of Technology and Unitec Institute of Technology to make trades-related occupations more attractive to women.
MIT communications account manager Donna Davies says the traditionally male-dominated courses such as building and construction are starting to draw some female interest.
Wendy Fulton, a graduate of the Level 3 carpentry course at MIT, was involved in the Barb the Builder marketing campaign last year, designed to bring more women into the trades.
Subsequently, several women expressed an interest in starting building and construction courses.
Fulton is one of the success stories. The former dairy farmer has found a job and will continue studying to get her National Certificate of Carpentry this year. She obviously excelled because her tutors recommended her to a building company, Metro Homes.
Fulton was the only woman on her course.
"I remember the first day, I was so scared. There were about 25 guys, a lot of them teenagers and Pacific Islanders. They were really lovely, they just fitted me in ... All the way through, I thought: 'I love this."'
The group started off by getting to know about tools and ended up building a house together at the end of the six-month course, she says.
Fulton had her fears about people's response to a woman builder. How would she handle the heavy work, for instance?
"There's a certain amount of lifting, but most of the time you can get someone to help you. I don't think that should put people off if they are interested in it."
Fulton's confidence rose when she was hired. She had thought: "Who's going to hire a middle-aged woman?"
Her boss, Mark Harris, one of the partners of Metro Homes, agreed to take her on. "Mark is such a great teacher, he shows you how to do it."
She realises she has to work her way up. "I'm really super keen to learn, I don't mind."
Fulton has plans for a few years' time - she would like to fill a gap in the market. "I would like to have my own building business targeting the female who would rather have a woman builder than a male one."
Quite a few women live alone and would feel uncomfortable having a man in the house, says Fulton. A woman builder in the US has done well with this approach, she says. "Maybe I could use that angle."
The profession of engineering, meanwhile, remains a male domain which does not call for strength but real intellectual acumen and a fascination for how things work.
In the Equal Employment Opportunities (EEO) Trust's report last year, Workplace Age and Gender: Trends and Implications, the numbers of women working in engineering is still tiny.
In New Zealand they make up a mere 2 per cent of industrial and mechanical engineers, 8 per cent of civil engineers, 15 per cent of electronic and telecommunications engineers and 36 per cent of chemical engineers.
The proportion of women engineers is rising in the younger age brackets.
Architecture is at the stage where engineering may be one day - there is a very even gender mix . It is one of those formerly male-dominated professions which has evened up its numbers of women.
When Hilary Scully and Carolyn Smith graduated from the University of Auckland architecture school in the mid 1980s, they were among seven women out of 76 total graduates.
They believe women are ideally suited to architecture because most of the job is about communication, through drawings and words, and women are good at this.
In their field of residential, they "get" what the client wants.
"Being women has been an advantage," says Smith.
"We understand how the house runs and works efficiently, how it might evolve," says Scully. "We deal totally in the grey," adds Smith.
Fourteen years ago the women, both bringing up families, decided having their own practice would give them the flexibility they needed.
When they were starting their families, part-time architectural work did not exist. In their practice, they have specialised in residential new build and alterations.
Scully works three to four days a week, and Smith four to five days.
About the time they started up their business they both designed their own new houses, which they then promoted, won awards for and used to help sell themselves and their skills.
Having made a success of their practice, they feel it their responsibility to take on new women architects and give them the training they need to become registered architects.
They see it as their duty to help nurture young women coming forward, says Smith.
Almost three years ago they employed Unitec Bachelor of Architecture graduate Kristan Deed. Deed is bringing the change with her.
The young woman says her classes in the first year were pretty evenly split between young men and women - but interestingly, a lot more women graduated than men in the end.
A "techie", Deed has brought her computer model-making strengths to the consulting firm which are a real asset, say her bosses.
So far the business partners have put three young women through their registration and Deed is their fourth.
Smith says she has met women who did not challenge themselves enough in their career choice and she is glad that she did.
"As an architect you can just never get bored."
