Camry Simon didn't know anything about manufacturing when she signed up for a free 10-week program learning to make metal parts. To her surprise, she loved it.

"You're creating artwork in a sense. You're taking a piece of metal and turning it into something," said the 24-year-old mother, who is now earning an associate's degree and a journeyman's licence in hopes of working in the manufacturing industry. "To me, that means there's a wide range of ways I could go."

Some companies in need of welders, machinists and other skilled workers are now targeting women, who account for nearly half of the U.S. workforce but hold less than a third of the nation's 12.2 million manufacturing jobs, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Harley-Davidson is among them. The Milwaukee-based company is recruiting women through job fairs, professional organizations and schools as part of its effort to hire more women, minorities and young adults, said Tonit Calaway, Harley's vice-president of human resources. "We know we want to sell to those customers, so we should look like the people we want to sell to," Calaway said. She noted that 21 per cent of the company's global manufacturing workers are female.

Women's share of manufacturing jobs peaked in the early 1990s, and remained mostly unchanged until the recession. Since the recession ended in June 2009, men regained more than 500,000 jobs, while women lost another 52,000, according to a report from the National Women's Law Center in Washington.

The reasoning for the discrepancy is unclear, but analyst Katherine Gallagher Robbins, who wrote the report, said she believes companies "are not doing the outreach to get to the women out there."

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