Women in The Automotive Industry: Then and Now
The automotive industry has always been dominated by men, from the aftermarket to the executive positions. As time has gone on and attitudes have shifted, more and more women are working in higher-level positions in various industries. However, while women make up around half of the US and Canadian workforce, they only account for around a quarter of the automotive industry even to this day.
For companies to stay with the times, we need to see more women in automotive roles, but before that happens, we have to assess people’s attitudes.
In this article:
Women in The Automotive Industry: Prejudices and Attitudes
To understand why the gender divide in the automotive industry is so wide, we need to investigate the historic attitudes that still permeate through to this very day.
In the case of men’s own attitudes, there are ideas about women and cars that have been around for years. Some examples include the hurtful stereotypes that women are bad drivers and are less suited to engineering roles. However, if Danica Patrick’s historic win at the IndyCar Series 2008 showed us anything, it’s that women can drive just as well if not better than men, and female automotive engineers like Helene Rother have also proven that very successful careers can be carved out by mothers and sisters.
Women in the Automotive Industry Today
While the attitudes of the public are clearly starting to shift, there’s still some way to go before female representation is more closely representative of the overall workforce. We’re not just talking about women working on cars either, with the need for more women in executive roles demonstrated by no major car manufacturers having more than 23% of executive roles filled by females (as of June 2019).
The Canadian Situation
As stated earlier, women still only make up a quarter of the Canadian automotive industry, and it doesn’t seem as if a major shift is on the horizon. However, with reports such as the Women at the wheel study by Deloitte and Automotive News Europe getting lots of exposure, and attitudes towards diversity changing almost everywhere you look, we can only hope to see more women in the automotive industry moving forward.
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