Canadian auto dealer columnist Wolfgang Koehler shares what female techs tell him about what it’s like working in our industry. We can do better.
It is sad to think that gender bias is still going on as we enter 2025.
This has been a difficult article for me to write because I am a man and couldn’t possibly understand what women go through in our industry.
As a manager, I have had the odd time when a customer will refuse to deal with a female service advisor and was shocked and appalled by this request in this day and age.
Why are we still dealing with gender bias in our dealerships?
I have run into too many stories of women that have left the industry because of how they were treated in the shop. What is shocking to me is that we are already in a crisis in the car business with a lack of technicians.
There’s no easy fix, but I believe we need to keep the conversation going.
To that end, I reached out to two former female colleagues and I wanted to share their stories with you. The first story appears in this issue and the second will appear in the next issue.
The first person I want to talk about was someone I hired long ago. She was a young woman who wanted to work in the car business. I remember that during the interview I found this person was well spoken and friendly.
She told me years later that she wanted to get into fixing cars when she first saw the Dodge Viper concept car. She was smitten with the design and wanted to become an engineer and her high school guidance counselor suggested she become a technician first.
I decided to give her a chance. I believe people either have that “gift” of being able to diagnose and repair cars or they don’t. I, for one, do not have that gift. I can take something apart but have no chance of putting it back together properly.
It didn’t take long for my new hire to show she had the gift. Not long after, I signed her up as an apprentice. Time went on, and she was an exemplary employee, extremely intelligent and became very knowledgeable about the product. Her hard work paid off and she became a licensed technician. In my eyes everything was fine…or was it?
When you are looked at through the lens of a woman doing a man’s job, it skews all perception of your work. You are not measured on your ability to do the job but rather on how you are able to put up with an environment made for men.
I asked her 25 years later: “What was it like being a female technician back then?” She told me that she was the only female tech in the shop and was always asked to prove she was a mechanic. She told me, “I would often get quizzed by random people in and out of the industry once they were told I was a mechanic or apprentice. I would almost always get asked to show my hands, and get blown off if they weren’t ’dirty enough to be a real mechanic.’” Wow, would we ask a man to do this?
She went on to say: “There were often two types of techs, ones who were very curious about having a woman in the shop, and the others who doubted or hated it. Often they expected me to ‘prove myself’ — this would include going out of their way to set me up for failure to see what I’d do.”
When I heard this I was extremely disappointed and sad. How could the team I put together behave this way, and why didn’t I notice? She also mentioned that back then uniform companies didn’t have proper coveralls for female techs.
The ones the uniform company supplied didn’t have pockets (as if they weren’t going to carry anything) and they didn’t fit right. She then got the men’s uniforms that were too big on her waist or too tight on her hips.
Then there was a huge issue with being hit on, or expected to date people she worked with. Some techs even made it into a game she explained. Which one could get a date with her first. She said, “I was often hated, or mistrusted by the other tech’s girlfriends or wives, it wasn’t uncommon for women to suggest I went into the trade to ‘find a man.’”
“There were often two types of techs, ones who were very curious about having a woman in the shop, and the others who doubted or hated it, often they expected me to ‘prove myself’ — this would include going out of their way to set me up for failure to see what I’d do.”
She said it was hard to know who was genuinely helping me, and who was only nice to me because they were hoping for more. There is a lot to unpack here. Think about going to work having to feel like you need to prove yourself every day to your colleagues just because you are a woman.
The second part of that is to imagine those same colleagues setting you up for failure to see how you react. What’s more, is what do you do when you are not sure of who to trust and who just wants to date you?
The positives were that she started working on cars and she loved it. She loved fixing cars and loved the physical aspect of the job. She loved working in the dealership and was given the opportunity to work on cars with technical advancement which led her to learn and improve her skills. She even loved the eventual camaraderie in the shop. I asked her what made her leave the automotive industry?
“I saw a real lack of opportunity, it didn’t matter how good I was I still felt like most doubted me. I was eager to keep learning and advancing my career, but there were little advancement opportunities for mechanics. I didn’t like who I had to pretend to be day in and day out just to do the job. I wanted to be taken seriously in this industry, so I opted for higher education to give me credibility and a voice.”
One person’s story from about 25 years ago. Have things changed?
Next issue we will hear another story from a female tech struggling with many of the same issues.
