Why more women should become auto mechanics, repair cars

So where have all the mechanics gone? There is no single reason for the shortfall. One of the industry’s biggest drawbacks is how grueling it is. Auto techs spend hours on their feet, lifting tires, wrenching bolts, and when that’s done, scrubbing motor oil off their hands and clothes. Perhaps because of how physically demanding and grimy the work can be, people tend to wrongly assume it’s low-skilled and not well paid.

A few months ago, I asked Ashlee why she never considered becoming an auto technician. She didn’t seem to mind getting grimy or working hard — she once flew to Arizona over a weekend so she could replace the valve cover gaskets on her 86-year-old grandmother’s 1998 Toyota Camry. She shrugged. “I’ve been told you shouldn’t do what you love.” And Ashlee really does love car repair. She taught herself by practicing repairs on cars in junkyards before attempting them on her own car.

That sort of self-taught experience isn’t historically a bad thing in the industry. Becoming a car mechanic is a highly skilled, technical vocation that does not require a license or formal education to enter. Many previous generations of mechanics learned on the job. But as modern cars get more computerized, it’s becoming harder for self-taught mechanics to keep up. In dealerships and garages, it’s almost a given that continuous education is required for auto techs to stay up to date and avoid obsolescence. And repairing electric vehicles requires its own set of specialized skills.

That means the schools that feed into dealerships and garages have become more and more important to the industry. David Dibarri, superintendent of Northeast Metropolitan Regional Vocational High School in Wakefield, says there’s been such a dramatic increase in enrollment in recent years that the school now has a waitlist. Graduating auto tech students are highly recruited. “When I first started working here and I went to school here, we had to fight hard to place our students in different occupations,” Dibarri says. “And very often they were the most entry-level positions. They might be working in the front desk. They might be changing oil. It was very hard for us to get return phone calls. Now, we can’t keep up with the demand from the local businesses.”

Auto repair is a very hot job market, but one big demographic of the potential workforce has been absent, even as salaries in the industry climb. According to statistics from the US Department of Labor, the automotive industry is the occupation with the lowest percentage of women, a paltry 1.6 percent, even though women make up a significant proportion of car buyers and automotive repair clients.

It’s unsurprising that the industry has suffered from a bad reputation when it comes to women. Over the years, various studies and personal accounts have shown women expect to be patronized or taken advantage of at auto repair shops. Many women dread dealing with mechanics. But there are plenty of male-dominated fields, with similar reputations for misogyny, that women have successfully infiltrated. What makes car repair an outlier? Do female mechanics have uniquely bad experiences? Or does car repair’s bad reputation drive women away — perpetuating the problem?

In reporting this story, I was surprised — and heartened — to learn that most of the female mechanics I spoke with were happy in their careers.

Sally Dawson is also a self-taught mechanic. She prefers the term “mechanic” over “auto technician” because she never had formal training other than working in her father’s shop growing up. She opened her own garage, Foxy Auto & Truck Repair, in North Reading in 2006 with her sister Sheila. Dawson went into the profession because it was one of the few where her lack of formal education wasn’t a problem.

Dawson says she doesn’t remember ever experiencing unequal treatment in her career, but she is careful to point out that her experience may not mirror that of women who work in dealerships or larger garages. As an independent owner, she’s had much more control over her environment than is typical for an average mechanic. But she has heard complaints from other female mechanics about hostile work environments.

At the same time, she wonders if assumptions about the culture being bad end up keeping women from pursuing careers they’d genuinely enjoy. “If you tell them ahead of time that it’s a potentially hostile environment, or we make these assumptions that the reason girls aren’t involved is because it’s a hostile environment, then you might be scaring them out of it before they even get a chance to find out for themselves.”

Kim Stevenson, an automotive instructor at Lakes Region Community College in New Hampshire and coordinator for the Toyota Technician Training and Education Network, started her career 21 years ago at General Motors. Stevenson has amassed a robust automotive background — she’s worked as an auto technician, a dispatcher, a service adviser, instructor, and department manager. When Stevenson reflects on her career, she has no fondness for the hazing she experienced, but she doesn’t think it was overwhelmingly difficult, either. “Guys generally will pick on you to kind of see what they can get away with,” she says. “So just be prepared to give them a little trouble back. But overall, I worked in really good shops.”

Jai Santora, of Santora Automotives in Oxford, doesn’t think that kind of hazing is limited to the auto industry. “In general, that’s how women are treated no matter what the occupation is,” she says. “Women are born knowing it’s instilled in them, almost: ‘Be quiet. Be respectful. Don’t speak up or it’s going to be harder for you.’ And I think that that’s true in everything a woman does in life. And so when asking a woman to go into a male-dominated industry, it becomes magnified.”

But Santora believes more work detangling misogyny from the industry is needed. “The big male ego,” she sighs, “it’s definitely prevalent in the auto industry.” And it’s part of the reason she opened her own garage. “People dread going to a mechanic or an auto technician. They are afraid of being taken advantage of, especially women, minorities. A lot of queer folks, for sure, just have a real hard time when they go into a garage not knowing what to expect, feeling like they’re going to be talked down to.”

Santora is a trans woman who began her career before transitioning. “I definitely did become weaker [physically] after transitioning. It was challenging in that way, that I needed to adjust how I do things. But it’s really no different fundamentally now than it was before.” Santora thinks women and female-presenting people are just as capable as men in the industry, and the environment can be challenging for anyone. “Whether you’re a woman or you’re a male that is more sensitive to that type of treatment, then you become targeted and you become attacked. And I’ve been through that.”

Dawson, Stevenson, and Santora all shared similar impressions. The industry is tough, and to survive in it, you have to be tough too. That’s true for everyone. But as the auto tech shortage continues to deplete the strength of industry, I can only hope that more women consider learning about car repair, even if only for the satisfaction of showing up the guys at the garage.

The rare times Ashlee does take our car to the shop, she says, “I kind of play dumb and see what they tell me so I can compare it to what I know. I just ask questions. And sometimes I catch them guessing. It’s a good feeling when you can call them out.”

Jazmin Aguilera can be reached at [email protected]. Follow her @jazminaguilerax.