When Stacy Richardson launched her heavy truck towing and service business nearly a decade ago, she found plenty of receptive customers.
But the feedback wasn’t all glowing. When they found out a woman was calling the shots, some people reacted poorly. Richardson recalls one man who came in to talk business and wouldn’t look her in the eye.
“It was very hard for a female to get into a man’s world,” Richardson said. “You got looked at as: females don’t need to be doing this, and what could you offer that we’re not already doing. Or laughing, or giving snide looks.”
While the service truck industry is modernizing and adapting to changing trends, it’s still an industry that’s overwhelmingly dominated by men.
According to a 2009 U.S. Department of Labor report on women’s employment, just 1.6 percent of the country’s approximately 223,000 heavy vehicle equipment and mobile equipment service technicians were women.
Only a handful of jobs — crane operators, cement masons and pipe layers, among them — had smaller numbers of women among their ranks.
There are more women working in the industry, running companies, managing sales and marketing and taking on other roles, but they too are in far fewer numbers than their male counterparts. And the people they’re serving are predominately men; fewer than seven percent of industrial truck and operators in the U.S. are women.
Confused looks often greet them
Women who work in various aspects of mobile maintenance say they love the pace and the challenge of the work. But they are well aware that they’re also trailblazers in an industry that often welcomes them with a confused look.
Alyssa Donegan, sales coordinator at Star Equipment in Des Moines, Iowa, followed her grandfather, father and uncles in the business. Her family’s fingerprints are all over the business — which offers mechanic’s trucks, lube trucks and cranes, among other equipment — but she’s the only female family member who has joined the company.
Donegan handles inventory control, does all of the major stock orders for all of the company’s locations and makes sure everything is properly priced and distributed for sale.
It’s a natural fit for a woman who grew up driving skid loaders and excavators. Still, that’s not always apparent to customers who call or drop in. More than a few have seen Donegan or heard her voice on the phone and immediately assumed they need to talk to someone else.
“I get a lot of people who don’t want to talk to me because I’m a woman,” she said. “They think I don’t know what I’m speaking about, think I don’t know the product.”
For a while, Donegan said, the reactions from customers were “extremely frustrating.” But with more experience under her belt, she’s gotten used to watching customers hesitate — and then change their tune as soon as she starts rattling off information about the equipment they’re looking to buy.
“Usually all you have to do is start talking about it, and they understand that you’re not dumb,” she said.
Apoligies due, and received
Bonne Karim, a retired fleet trainer for the U.S. Postal Service and chairwoman of the American Trucking Associations’ Technology and Maintenance Council, earned an engineering degree and began her Postal Service career in plant maintenance. When a manager’s job opened on the truck side of the business, she jumped at the chance — and then got more and more involved in automotive training.
She was the only woman training others at her location for more than a decade, surprising some students who didn’t expect her to know much about mechanics.
“I once had two older gentlemen who came up and apologized after class; they had done their best to try and trip me up, and they didn’t and were ashamed,” she said.
Richardson spent seven years running daycare businesses before opening Wrecker 1, her Atlanta-based towing and recovery business. It was a big shift, but it came out of a longtime interest; Richardson’s father had been a trucker, and she remembered him coming home with “horror stories” of being broken down on the side of the road for hours, waiting for service help to arrive.
“My thought behind it was to have a company that would be able to get the dad — or the mom, in today’s world — back to the family as fast and safely as we could,” she said.
In the early days in particular, Richardson worked hard to meet with people face to face, and doing any and all work of the business herself.
Her staff of eight does everything from service calls to cleaning up hazardous materials spills and wrecks, and Richardson makes sure has the skills to back up ever part of the business.
“I go shoulder to shoulder with my guys out on the road,” Richardson said. “To me, that’s equally important. I’m not going to ask them to do something I wouldn’t.”
All they want is an equal shot
While they pride themselves on being able to perform just as well – or better – as the men who hold similar roles, women in the industry said they’d be happy to see more of their gender represented.
Donegan said she thinks schools and parents can do more to encourage girls who might show an aptitude for or interest in trucking or mechanics. Donegan’s father told her she could do anything her brothers did, but she knows many girls don’t get the same message.
“I think a lot of it has to do with when you’re going through middle school, high school, college and a lot of those sciences and hands-on type activities are not marketed or geared toward girls,” she said.
Janis Orr, another former Postal Service maintenance supervisor who once earned a “Supervisor of the Year” award from the ATA’s Technology and Maintenance Council, remembers telling a high school teacher about how she was fascinated with auto mechanics — and watching him scoff when she said she’d like to be a mechanic someday.
Years later, when a job came up with the Postal Service, Orr thought: “I’m just going to see if I would still want to do that.” Turns out, she still did.
“Going into a garage, the smell, the sounds, I thought: Man, that’s where I need to be,” Orr said.
Embrace the work and become expert
Other women learned to embrace the industry much later, but said it’s proof that anyone can get involved.
Nina Frischherz, director of marketing at QT Equipment, a service truck dealer in Akron, Ohio, worked at a company that sold ballet shoes before she traded the dancing business in for heavy equipment.
In short order, she had to become an expert on service trucks, cranes and chassis. Now, she’s the woman surprising people with her knowledge of the vehicles cruising by on the road.
“I’ll be driving on the highway and I’ll say: ‘Oh my gosh, look at that crane — I bet that can lift so much,’” she said. “Or I’ll be talking to my guy friends about Peterbilt chassis.”
Richardson, with Wrecker 1, said the key for any woman looking to break into the industry is persistence and a real interest in doing the work.
“You’ve got to want to do it, first and foremost,” she said. “You can be the difference that you want to make. That’s what I’ve been: the difference I wanted to make in this industry.”
Erin Golden is a journalist in Minnesota.