In this episode I talked to locally famous home inspector James Brock from Boston Home Inspectors. Jim has been a home inspector for 25 years, and lately he has become a little bit internet famous. He claims he’s not, but his Instagram account @bostonhomeinspectors currently has 15.2k followers (it’s been growing fast), and I actually heard of him through an article The Boston Globe wrote about him back in January. Jim is very knowledgeable in his field, notably about older buildings in the Boston area (though he also inspects newer homes, of course). Having knowledge of historical construction practices is especially important when inspecting the old buildings around here: they tend to have quirks that could easily fool you if you’re not used to them. Jim and I had a good conversation about what to expect from your home inspector, the inspection process in general, and more.
You should definitely check out his Instagram, even if you feel like you don’t know much about houses you can still appreciate the content (probably why it’s so popular). Every day Jim posts a funny picture of something he’s seen during a home inspection, along with a caption. With Jim’s permission, here are some of my favorites:
I cut this from the episode, but while we were talking I asked Jim if there were many female home inspectors. He told me that in Massachusetts there are 500 home inspectors, but by his estimate only 5 of them are women. When I asked why, he said it might be that women just don’t want to be inspectors because of the dirty nature of the job. As a home inspector, you can expect frequent insect and rodent sightings, cobwebs and crawlspaces. He also mentioned that unfortunately some people (I’m assuming more… let’s say traditional men) don’t trust a woman to be able to assess a building for them.
I posted about it on TikTok, asking viewers why they thought only 1% of home inspectors were female. TikTok being what it is, several people told me to calm down, that men and women had different interests and not everything needs to be balanced. One told me the anecdote was just plain wrong, that there were more like 20 female home inspectors in Massachusetts (Oh, there’s 20! Never mind then).
I decided to do some research, and I found some actual sourced statistics. I couldn’t find anything for Massachusetts, but I did stumble across a very useful survey from the Bureau of Labor Statistics for the whole US. According to that data, out of 116,000 construction and building inspectors, 11.9% are women1. This comes out to ~13,804 female construction and building inspectors across the country.
However, it’s important to note that home inspectors make up only a small fraction of this industry. According to another source (Zippia.com), among 9,914 total home inspectors, 15.6% are women2, with ~1,547 women working as home inspectors (and again, these are national statistics). These numbers are a lot better than I was expecting, but still extremely disproportionate.
The architecture industry suffers from a similar (if a bit less extreme) lack of women. According to that same BLS survey, as of 2020 there are 190,000 practicing architects, 28.2% of whom are women1, for a grand total of ~53,580 female practicing architects.
In my research I was glad to find that these numbers have been steadily growing over the years, but it’s still concerning to me. When I was in architecture school, the ratio of women to men was more or less balanced, yet the number of female architects even today is so off-kilter. And I went to school in the 90s, meaning the statistics would have been even more lopsided when they were entering the workforce. Where did they all go? Just something to think about.
As for home inspectors, I think there’s really no reason for the profession to be so male-dominated apart from gender stereotypes. At least for now I can find hope in the fact that the numbers will eventually balance themselves out- whether the random commenters on TikTok want them to or not.
Sources
- https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat11.htm
- https://www.zippia.com/home-inspector-jobs/demographics/