The #MeToo movement for blue-collar workers helps explain why women don’t work on their cars...and what you can do about it
There may be no place in American life where sexism is baked in more thoroughly than car culture. A recent New York Times article profiling generations of abuse at Ford Motor Company—a problem they’ve been getting sued for since 1995 and which goes back more than 100 years—has brought Dearborn some of the same attention as Hollywood and Washington, but it’s more than just the factories.
From vocational programs, to academia, to management, the dealership and the local instant oil change, cars have not just been a man’s world, but a world where women were actively discouraged.
I can’t tell you when or where this started. Maybe the horse and buggy era was a boy’s club. I can tell you that I’ve worked in a lot of industries, and nowhere else has the level of institutional misogyny of the automotive world.
Nowhere else is one of the most sought-after promotional items a nude calendar like Pirelli’s; nowhere else are barely (or often un-) clad women used as literal machinery to begin races; and nowhere else are women excluded from even trying to participate. Maybe professional sports or rock and roll music can compare, but neither of those affect a fraction of the lives that the car does.
Much as almost every woman has a #metoo story from the workplace, so to do most women whose lives have touched cars in any way. I learned that from my own mother, a woman whose first car was a ‘65 Mustang, when dealers tried to “little lady” her and show her the trunk space.
I learned it from my friend Julie, who worked for one of the world’s best known car restorers but was never taken seriously. I learned it from my editor Kate, an automotive scholar who was treated like she didn’t exist at international conferences.
It’s impossible for me as a man to say I know anything about women’s experience in America, any more than as a white man I can know anything about the experience of being black in America, other than to acknowledge it sucks. But what I can do is try to help, and so can you, and here’s what we’re going to do:
• Seek out woman-owned automotive businesses and spend your money there. Whether it’s a garage, dealership or tow truck; when presented with a choice make the one that evens the scales just that tiny bit.
• Start young and start often. Cars are fun and do not have to be intimidating, especially to a young coder or hacker. It doesn’t have to be greasy, if someone is turned off by that. An OBDII (Onboard Diagnostic) scanner—a which reads fault codes, like a check engine light—is less than $50. Ten minutes with one of those and Google will tell you everything going on with your car.
If you’re even more ambitious, 40 bucks will get you a USB interface you can use with a laptop and free software not only to read those codes, but clear them, too. For $80, you can get a bluetooth version and do it from your phone or tablet. Hand that to your kid and they can have a reprogrammable virtual dashboard of their own while you drive.
• Stay woke. Are you a man with a woman doing something car related? And are you the one automatically being addressed? Say, “It’s hers” and walk away, every time, at the car wash, at the Valvoline oil change place, at the garage, anywhere. Hammer it home, over and over again and challenge assumptions.
• Call it out where you see it. That goes for all evils and it can be a fine line between neckbeard mansplaining and speaking up, so take a minute to make sure you’re not trying to rescue a damsel who is in fact just about to kick someone’s balls in.
• And most of all, don’t be a dick. Do you need me to tell you this? I mean, I assume Pulse readers are an enlightened crowd but the thing about discrimination is, it’s sneaky. It doesn’t get taught; instead, it sneaks in around the corners in things you overhear as a kid, in the body language of people you trust, on the TV.
Fighting it isn’t a war but a process of slow everyday repair, making little things better wherever you can.
David Traver Adolphus is a freelance automotive researcher who recently quit his full time job writing about old cars to pursue his lifelong dream of writing about old AND new cars. Follow him on Twitter as @proscriptus.