The following article by Jeff Yoders was published on September 2, 2025 at ENR.com.
ARX is reimagining PPE for women on the construction jobsite.
ARX Offers Personal Protective Equipment Sized for Women Only
Woman-owned Boston company, born out of frustration in lack of safety equipment that fits industry women, debuts a right-sized reflective PPE vest.
While many companies have released personal protective equipment they say is developed to fit women in construction, with contractor business groups and even regulators such as the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration supporting the efforts—major obstacles still exist for mass adoption of PPE specifically designed and manufactured to protect women.
ARX is one company trying to change that.
Founded by Kaitlin McCarthy—a civil engineer and Harvard MBA who is CEO of Ionic Development, one of the only woman-owned commercial real estate firms in greater Boston—and Dr. Hilary Gallin, a biomedical engineer and physician with a background in surgical care and anesthesiology, the firm was founded to close long-overlooked gaps in workplace safety gear with a focus on fit, comfort and function exclusively for women.
“What if you handed to men, women’s PPE and expected them to wear it? It’s funny, because that really drives it home for people—that it seems socially unacceptable to give that to men, but not the other way around,” said McCarthy, who has been provided on numerous jobsite visits reflective, high-visibility vests meant to fit men.
McCarthy and Gallin said that, in construction, most manufacturers’ minimum order requirement often leaves the minority of women on a jobsite in a situation where 50 or 100 vests or other protective equipment are not necessary. As a result, safety managers often leave it up to the few women onsite to purchase their own PPE. This creates a situation where vests and other products appear on a jobsite that were not purchased through the normal PPE procurement process but through Amazon and are not ANSI-rated. ARX sells PPE vests that are ANSI-cerfitied, with one as the minimum order number.
“We recognize you may not have 100 women on your job site, and so our minimum order quantity is one,” Gallin said. “We’re very happy to send you one vest and we really want to support as many people as possible.” ARX’s first product is a reflective PPE vest for construction, but the fledgling company plans to provide a full range of specialtty protective products geared to other fields such as forestry, agriculture and even health care.
Gallin noted a health-care experience in using safety goggles for a medical procedure that inspired her to seek a better PPE fit for all women on the job.
“They were laser safety goggles, so they have special lenses, and the goggles themselves were just very, very thick and very, very heavy,” she said. “They don’t need to be, but … engineers who mostly manufacture [them] are mostly men, so they get made heavy. She added: “Kaitlin and I are both engineers by training, and we’ve been the only [females] in every class we’ve been in since science club in third grade. There are a lot of opportunities to change the way goggles fit while we while maintaining the same level of safety.”
Gallin and McCarthy began initial designs of shapes for safety glasses and other eyewear that are narrower to fit more women’s faces so they fit properly and don’t constantly move because they’re too big.
The high-visibility ARX vest is already being used by contractors such as Tocci Building Co. and Build Health International.
“We’re now looking at designing a high-visibility long-sleeve shirt for [women] on the job site, but one that they could also use for running …or hunting … or for different activities not necessarily just [limited] to the workplace,” McCarthy said. “We’re really excited and thinking about safety as a much bigger issue than just for when you’re at work,”
Tocci Building, whose managers first met the ARX co-founders at a Construction Safety Week event in 2023, have since adopted the PPE developer’s high-visibility vest and are rolling it out for all women employees and making them available to trade contractors.
“We had already purchased vests that had female styles, but it was a situation where there was a minimum quantity.” said Matthew Chasse, Tocci corporate safety director and founder of Get Them Home Safely LLC, a workplace safety training and inspection consulting firm. “So we’re currently still using those vests, but we bought these [ARX vests] to have the craftwomen try them out. So far, we’ve gotten good feedback from it.”
ARX Plans to expand its line of personal protective equipment for women in 2026.
