Lisa Campbell is a hard-working Republican from Chino Hills, a self-described “good little Catholic girl” and the mother of two high-achieving teenage daughters. She grew up on a farm, where her life revolved around athletics and 4H Club and chores like hauling hay and vaccinating cattle. “I’ve always been an all-American girl,” she says. But Lisa Campbell’s traditional upbringing and solid, farm-fresh values did nothing to prepare her for the barriers she encountered as a woman entering the even more traditional construction industry in Southern California. For nine years, Lisa Campbell, now 38, has had her own business, as an environmental cleanup contractor. When she’s not in the office, she can often be found clambering over pipes, through tunnels, up in water towers and attics, and in schools and refineries checking on asbestos, lead and other environmental hazards. Campbell is hard to miss: She’s the 5-foot-4 dynamo in the stylish jeans, plaid shirt, turtleneck and work boots-and her trademark pink hard hat. Campbell is president and CEO of Diversified Associated, her second environmental cleanup company, which she founded in 1995. More recently, she and her husband divorced. Yet, as she says, “The divorce hurt, but I tell you, Proposition 209 killed me. I’ve been through the wringer.”
	Lisa Campbell says she gets by on the “hard work ethic” that her father, a firefighter, drummed into all four of his daughters on their farm near Tulsa. She is also proud of her achievements as a woman in the “man’s world” of contracting. She says she owes a debt to her gracious, Venezuelan-born mother, who taught her four farm girls how to be proper ladies—“to step out at night as if we were stepping out of a hatbox.” Campbell grew up an ardent environmentalist, giving 4H Club and Chamber of Commerce speeches on water conservation and recycling. After years of technical courses as a young adult, she got her certification and entered the field as a contractor, doing first asbestos cleanup and later lead abatement, soil remediation, low-level nuclear waste cleanup and related jobs. Although she was president of the firm, she sometimes went out in the field herself, in a respirator suit, scraping asbestos off a wall. And it’s work she’s proud of: “I help people breathe easier.” The hardest part was not gaining the expertise but getting a foothold in the industry of large, male-dominated corporations. Big companies looking for subcontractors want someone with a proven background. But some of the public agencies, like the gas and electric companies and the city and county of Los Angeles, gave the young woman her first opportunities. Campbell explains: “They said, ’You know what? Since we have this affirmative action program, we’re going to ask you to give us a bid on a small project.’ And the project might have been $900 to $1000. At that time, I didn’t care. I was just ecstatic that I was given the opportunity to finally get my foot in the door.…I was able to build my reputation”-which she did, not as a woman but as a contractor.
	The political debate these past few years over affirmative action and Proposition 209 is a very personal matter for Campbell. Once she had a staff that peaked at 150, with crews working at up to 16 or 17 jobs at a time. The jobs occasionally surpassed the million-dollar mark. Until November of last year, she had a 10,000-square-foot combination office and warehouse in Pomona, with 3800 square feet devoted to the office staff. These days her staff is down to just nine. The four office employees work out of the spacious garage at her home. Her own office is in the dining room. Heavy equipment and supplies are kept in a small warehouse in a Chino strip mall. Campbell says the business’ decline began when Governor Wilson started abolishing affirmative action programs. It got still worse after passage of Proposition 209. “I’m just being lean and mean and downsizing,” she says, “because it’s really hurt. After 209, there’s so much less out there. As a woman in an all-male industry, I have to work harder and smarter. We’re just not getting the requests for bids like we once used to, because they just kinda want to deal with their good old boy thing.” Campbell has watched the decline of opportunity for women contractors both on an individual and a statewide basis. For two years she was the state vice president of Women Construction Owners and Executives (WCOE). With contractors required by the government to make good-faith efforts to seek out women subcontractors to bid on state jobs, WCOE’s fax machine was always humming with requests for bids-up to 40 or 50 faxes a week seeking everything from electrical and plumbing contractors to earthmoving, asbestos abatement and landscaping. The whole tone changed with the governor’s 1995 executive order curtailing affirmative action. WCOE’s faxes went down to perhaps 20 or 25 a week, a cut of almost half, “and then after the 209 election,” says Campbell, “I’m lucky to get two. Maybe, on a good week, five, and that’s it. And there are weeks that go by when we get nothing. And it’s not that the work’s not out there. There’s plenty of work.” Most women- and minority-owned construction contractors, she says, are small businesses. They can’t afford to send workers out daily to check all the government bulletin boards. Nor can they afford the thousands of dollars it costs to get a year’s subscription to trade publications carrying advertisements for jobs. Without good-faith requirements, she says, the work goes by default to the large companies that government agencies have traditionally dealt with. Those companies, in turn, have their traditional networks of large all-male subcontractors.
	Campbell’s experiences are echoed by other women contractors. One, Carolyn Garrety, president of Continental Building Specialty Co. in San Francisco, says she used to use a ream of fax paper daily to handle the average of 50 bid requests she received each day. Now, with affirmative action programs in abeyance, she receives two or three bid requests a day. She, too, says she can’t bid on projects because the general contractors no longer notify her of the jobs. Garrety is surviving by working on strictly private jobs where she has pre-existing relationships with contractors. Campbell praises some of the state’s major corporations for their commitment to diversity-among the best are Bechtel, Disney and OHM Remediation, she says-but they can’t provide enough work to keep those fax machines humming or her employees on jobsites. Campbell emphasizes that affirmative action-mandated faxes never guaranteed anyone a job. “If I’m qualified, if I have the insurance and I have the bonding and I have all this other stuff, I should be able to have the opportunity to submit a bid. And with affirmative action, it forced people to give other people the opportunity to bid. That’s all they want. They don’t want, ’I’m a woman or I’m an African American or I’m a Hispanic-you have to give me a job.’ I have never, ever, ever won a contract because I’m a woman and I’m a Hispanic. Never. I’ve always been low bid. And I can tell you, more times than not, I didn’t win the project, because my price was too high, or whatever, but I always come back and say, thank you for giving me the opportunity.” Now, however, with no affirmative action enforcement on many state and local jobs, “it’s like, ’You know what, you need not apply-women need not apply, minorities need not apply.’ Because of the stereotype that a woman and a minority isn’t smart enough to run a company and their workmanship is shoddy.” Those attitudes are rooted in the male history of her industry, and she can reel off anecdote after anecdote about the crude behavior and demeaning remarks that she’s had to endure from male colleagues who refuse to acknowledge that women can play a legitimate role in construction. “We’re in a man’s world out there.” Some salesmen tell her they want to speak to the man in charge. One inspector, when assured that she was in charge, demanded, “What kind of experience do you have?” The same inspector later looked at her $9.99 Guess shirt and asked, “Do you wear a designer bra and panties too?” “And that was with affirmative action,” Campbell says. “Now it’s even worse. The animosity is terrible out there.” Emboldened by the decline of affirmative action, she says, many men see no reason to be civil to a woman, much less to offer them an opportunity to bid on projects.
	On a number of occasions, she has been advised that she’d have greater success in getting bids if she put a man out front. Some of the project managers and estimators “don’t want to deal with women, period. And there are times that I’ve had Tim or Eric or Marco or one of the other guys go out on job walks.” But Campbell, as the president, still has to put the deal together-often with information she wasn’t able to gather herself. But most hurtful of all is the line she hears again and again when she inquires about bidding on a government contract. It’s become a refrain for this post-Prop. 209 era: “We don’t have to take your bid. There’s no more good-faith effort.” Will it get better for the next generation of women? Campbell’s own daughters have no desire to follow her into the family business, she says. “They’ve seen the hell that I’ve gone through.”