We’ve all been there, right? Oh how precious, a little lady is here to fix her car. Let’s jack up the rates we quote and add some unnecessary services because we know she doesn’t know anything at all about cars.

At some point, every woman has faced the results of this sort of stereotyping. If you’re lucky, you eventually found a mechanic who treats you with respect.

Mine once came out after hours to do some emergency roadside assistance that he didn’t even charge me for because he wanted to make sure I was safe and taken care of.

While I seriously appreciated that gesture, it, too, likely only happened because he saw me as a female, and therefore more weak and vulnerable when stranded.

It gets much worse when you try to apply for jobs in the automotive industry.

In any male dominated industry, stereotyping and harassment occurs. I experienced a lot of it myself when I was a young cook, working my way through college with a job that paid better than average rates.

Another friend of mine couldn’t get a job in construction at all, despite their numbers being low and their firms constantly hiring.

She was told, “This is no industry for women. You couldn’t handle the physical labor, and the culture isn’t much better”.

So what do we do? How bad has it gotten, and how can we fix it? The good news is that some companies are making some real headway in their attempts to break stereotypes and make the automotive industry more friendly to females – both as customers and employees. Let’s take a look at some of the ways we can break those stereotypes.

Before you can fix a problem, you need to understand why it needs to be changed. Let’s take a look at some of the numbers.

Women are underrepresented everywhere. Across Europe, the highest percentage of women employed in a sector of the automotive industry is still less than 25%, and Canada is even lower.

In the United States, women represent just under 27% of the automotive workforce, and when it comes to repair and mechanics, that number drops to below 10% of the workforce.

Women of color comprise barely more than 10% of those already staggeringly low numbers. Globally, less than 8% of the top executives in the automotive industry are women.

Pair that with some even more staggering blows. Of the women in this industry, 25% of them feel unsafe at work, and 65% of them report both experiencing sexual harassment and being given assignments that are lower in level than their male counterparts, regardless of their experience or skill…
 
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