WILTON – It’s around 11 on a cool Wednesday morning, and inside the mammoth Nichols Development warehouse, the din of welders isn’t quite blocking out laughter down the hall.

In the office, which is adorned with a rather large trophy buck, four women sit, pads and pens in hand, chatting and laughing.

A few minutes later, and there are still playful barbs, but now they’re working, too – discussing the four disparate areas of business each is responsible for under the Nichols umbrella.

Sarah Docsinski manages Nichols Development, finding tenants for the former Bass Shoe factory and planning the company’s expansion. Terry Handrahan runs the Nichols Expo car auction and everything else that happens in the Expo center. Kelly Gordon, a welder, manages Nichols Custom Welding, which is currently making trailers to be sent to Iraq. Joan Reed is controller, and manages the books for all three.

Together, the three enterprises are helping Wilton toward an economic renaissance, nearly a decade after the Bass Shoe factory closed, taking hundreds of jobs and hundreds of thousands of dollars with it.

For the four managers, and their boss, Nichols’ owner Gil Reed, the fact women occupy the top positions at Nichols, working in what have traditionally been known as men’s jobs, is only surprising or impressive from a distance.

“I woke up one morning and went, ‘Holy cow!,'” Handrahan says, explaining she never exactly set out to become the manager of a car-sales and auction outfit.

Reed, too, says he did not plan that all four of his managers would be women. It just happened, he said. But it works.

Compared to the U.S economy at large, the Nichols arrangement is unusual.

Women are a regular fixture in the workplace these days, both on factory floors, in the boardroom, and running the gamut in between. Since the advent of the women’s movement in the 1960s, women have come to nearly match men in numbers, with 60 percent of women in the work force, compared to 74 percent of men, according a U.S. Census Bureau report.

Even so, according to the report, 91 percent of people working in precision manufacturing jobs in 1998 were men. And a www.womenof.com article says women make up only 3.1 percent of manufacturing and production managers in the United States.

“There are still a few Neanderthals out there, who believe women should be in the kitchen,” Gil Reed said.

But Gordon, Joan Reed, Handrahan and Doscinski say they’ve had no such problems since starting their jobs, even though they work mostly with men.

“In this business, the people I work with are all predominantly male,” Handrahan says. “Ninety-nine percent are men.”

Working for Nichols Development, Doscinski says aside from a few proposals she’s written to child care operators and gym owners, she’s yet to provide a proposal to a woman.

Most of their employees are men, too.

Working for a woman is a little different than working for a man, Nichols Custom Welding Foreman Dwayne Pratt says. Not to generalize, he says, but Kelly Gordon has a different attitude toward communication than some of his male bosses have.

“If you ask a question, (women) are going to tell you straight out, not beat around the bush or say ‘oh, that’s a stupid question,'” Pratt says. “It’s nice in a way, because they don’t take no crap, and they’ll pretty much tell you how it is.”

Foreman and fabricator Brandon Boivin agrees. “They’re great to me,” he said. Having never worked for women in the manufacturing business before, he said at first he wondered what it would be like. “When I have something to say, they listen,” he said. “They don’t just take in one ear and out the other. (Men) do that more than a woman would.”

So, how does being women doing jobs traditionally considered “men’s” impact their work, in their own opinions?

The four laugh when asked the question, and then the truth comes out. It’s all in the relationships.

“As a team, we’re able to be serious, but take things lighter,” Handrahan says.

“We’re usually just a pain in the rear end,” Reed says, explaining she and the others rib each other, laugh and tease one another a lot.

“We give each other support,” Doscinski says. “We have the same goal.”