OLD ORCHARD BEACH (AP) – Rumford native Mary Ann Conroy is venturing down a road that few women have traveled.

Of Maine’s 502 local public works departments, only four are headed by women. And in three of those – the Penobscot County towns of Bradford and Bradley, and on Monhegan Island – the woman in charge is the only employee.

On Tuesday, Conroy was named by the Old Orchard Town Council as public works director, responsible for the town’s public infrastructure and a crew of nine men and one woman.

Over the years, it’s been rare to find women in the top jobs at public works departments in the state, said Pete Coughlan, director of the Maine Local Road Center with the state Department of Transportation.

“It’s just a male-dominated position,” he said, adding that he was at a loss to explain the disparity. “I don’t know, it’s one of those guy things.”

In Old Orchard, Town Manager Jim Thomas said Conroy stood out among the 30 applicants, all but two of them women.

“She was hands down the best qualified candidate,” he said.

A former traffic engineer for the city of Portland who recently has been teaching math at Southern Maine Community College and doing consulting work from home, Conroy is no crusader.

The 44-year-old mother of three from South Portland apparently found her way to her new job by doing what she likes to do, even if it means being without much female company.

In addition to maintaining the municipal sewer and water systems, sidewalks, roads, and dump, her job will entail being a caretaker of the town’s most valuable piece of physical infrastructure – its seven miles of sandy beach.

As a teenager, she worked in the paper mill in Rumford, where she said it struck her that the engineers had the most interesting jobs. When she studied civil engineering in college, she was the only woman in many of her classes.

Conroy said she finds the lack of women in public works more frustrating than intimidating, and she intends to do what she can to encourage more girls to go into her field by speaking at schools. She said she hopes to dispel the idea that many girls have that they can’t do engineering.

In fact, women may take a different approach to the work, she said, and this can be an advantage.

“A lot of times, and I don’t say this as a stereotype, a male will just keep wanting to move forward,” she said. “Sometimes you have to know when to stop, sometimes when to back up.”