Gina Stewart's Career in a Man's World
Gina Stewart is a month into her job as business development head at The Mullan Contracting Co, having joined from Merritt Construction. This is a woman who’s found success in the typically male-dominated construction industry, and she fits in pretty well, considering her love of golf, the Redskins, skeet shooting, and muscle cars. In fact, she and her 2010 Plum Crazy Purple and black-striped Dodge Challenger SRT 8 (“street and racing technology”—now you know) won top 20 at the Door to Virtue Masonic Lodge of Westminster Car Show in late April (above). Now that we’ve established that Gina’s a bro, we also should tell you that she’s a figure skater.
She took up the sport at age 5 (above, when she was 9) when an asthma attack prompted her doctor to suggest a sport to strengthen her lungs. She competed until she was 18 and coached until this past March, when foot surgery compelled her to hang up her skates. After Bowie High School, she went to an architectural drafting institute (she was the only girl in her drawing class) and landed a job at Washington Homes via the school’s job-placement program. She also was accepted into the University of Maryland but chose to jump right into the workforce. After racking up some experience, she moved on to design jobs with Kelly Clayton & Mojzisek and then Notari Associates.
Mullan just topped off a 5,800 SF addition to St. Mary's Antiochian Orthodox Church in Hunt Valley with this 40-foot, 10,000-pound gold dome. At Notari, Gina was working on a lot of bank locations, but the early ’90s downturn took a bite out of that biz, so she transitioned to business development at CW Jackson Construction. Gina carved out a career in the AEC industries, but for the past 12 years, she's worked solely in the construction biz. Earlier in her career, she says, her blonde hair may have tempted men in the industry to test her, but she knew how a building is put together, thanks to her architecture background. Now, she says, her “proving days” are past.
