Lenore Janis, a force of nature in New York’s construction industry who left thousands of cracks in the concrete ceiling of a male-dominated company, died on January 31 at an assisted living facility in Brookfield, Connecticut. She was 86 years old.
The cause was complications from Covid-19, said her son John.
Ms. Janis was the founder and longtime president of Professional Women in Construction, which started as a small nonprofit and, under her leadership, became a networking powerhouse for tens of thousands of women trying to pursue a career path that seemed purpose built to exclude them .
Ms. Janis, a smart, creative organizer with a cigarette-plagued voice, offered more than mentoring opportunities and meet-and-greet sessions – though she did a lot of them, too.
Knowing that the golf course had a lot of business for her industry, she ran clinics to teach women to play. She sent executives into high school to recruit girls who otherwise might never have thought of a life under construction. And she passed stories to young members of her trading group, lessons from a life in which she broke barriers.
“She would take you under her wing and give advice you wouldn’t hear from anyone else in New York,” said Barbara Armand Kushner, executive director of Armand Corporation, a project management company in Manhattan.
Lenore Janis was born on March 4, 1934 in Manhattan. She grew up in White Plains, NY, where her father Harry owned the White Plains Iron Works. Her mother, Gussie (Weinstein) Janis, was a housewife.
She studied theater at Bennington College but left after her sophomore year to marry engineer Herbert Fishman. The couple moved to Indiana, where she enrolled in a local Methodist college. She was unhappy.
“After a semester in long-sleeved, modest clothes,” she wrote in a 2005 Bennington alumni newsletter, “she tried to decipher Edmund Spenser’s ‘Fairie Queen’ (all the naughty lines obscured by school censors) and the good ones to avoid religious people. ” Those who wanted to “save” me went back east. “
After a divorce verdict, she graduated from the University of Connecticut in 1956 and moved to Manhattan looking for work. She got a job with a public relations firm, but was shocked by what she found: A woman in the office told her that the only way to get up is by accepting less wages than men doing the same job.
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Mrs. Janis was married and divorced twice more. In addition to her son John, she survived two grandchildren. Another son, Peter, died in 2011.
After leaving public relations, Ms. Janis worked in the off-Broadway theater. In the late 1960s she founded and directed the Jewish Heritage Theater for Children on Y 92nd Street in Manhattan.
She was divorced and raised her sons alone. In 1972 she moved back to White Plains. Her father died shortly after they arrived, and she and her brothers George and David took over the family’s ironworks (George died in 2016 and David died in 2020). Suddenly she was working 60-hour weeks, much of that time driving around the New York area to visit construction sites.
“I’ve been Janey in this industry lately and I’ve been studying on the job,” she said in a 2004 interview. “I’ve been the only woman in various industry roles for years and was often mistaken for someone in the interior decorating business have to be.”
In 1979 she founded Era Steel, named after the Equal Rights Amendment, which was awaiting ratification by two-thirds of states and was inspired by the achievements of women in the 1970s.
Ratification never took place, and as the new decade began, Ms. Janis found that running a construction company as a woman was more difficult than she expected. Banks wouldn’t give her loans, and despite years of experience, she couldn’t get access to the back rooms where developers, bankers, and site managers – almost all men – did their business.
She and eleven other women founded Professional Women in Construction in 1980 with the aim of getting city and state governments to open up the contract process to women-owned businesses – something the federal government had already done under President Jimmy Carter.
Their efforts paid off: in 1983, Mario M. Cuomo, who had recently arrived at the governor’s mansion, set up an office to ensure more construction contracts went to companies in New York state owned by women.
In 1986, New York City Mayor Edward I. Koch appointed Ms. Janis director of the city’s Bureau of Building Management, the first woman to hold the job. Her accomplishments included installing changing rooms for women in Department of Sanitation facilities. She later led special projects under Mayor David N. Dinkins in the city’s construction office.
Ms. Janis left the city government in 1994 and was named president of Professional Women in Construction the next year. She retired in 2015, not long after her 81st birthday.
Today more women work in the industry than ever before, both in the boardroom and on the construction site. However, progress has been slow and the number of women in the workforce has fallen sharply since the pandemic.
Even so, Ms. Janis remained optimistic about the place of her gender in an industry that had reluctantly made way for her over time.
“In 1980, a woman couldn’t hope for a well-paid executive position in the construction industry,” she said in 2014. “Women trying to run construction companies were shunned by banks and suppliers. Attitudes have changed: when a woman walks into the room, she may even be pleasantly surprised that she is not the only woman at the table. “
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