Jul 8, 2024 By Brad Hundt 5 min read

One of those moments in life when you are at your most vulnerable is when you are stranded alongside the road.

As other cars and trucks go roaring by, you are stuck. Going nowhere. A tire is flat or the gas tank is empty, or the battery has given up the ghost.

Most of us would feel a rush of gratitude when the tow truck pulls up, the driver gets out and starts working to get us back on the road. But once when Charlene Taylor arrived to assist a driver, he refused her help.

The reason? Taylor is a woman.

There are people who will think a woman is going to work on their car is “the greatest thing,” the Trinity High School graduate explained, but then there are those who are taken aback that a woman is working in what has long been considered the province of grease-covered, blunt-spoken guys.

“I’ve gotten used to it,” said Taylor, a Washington resident. “It’s one of those things.”

Becky Tom, the co-owner of EQ Muffler in Uniontown, encountered the same resistance recently. An older man walked into the shop to ask about his daughter’s car. Tom told him she could answer his questions – she is certified to work on vehicles – but he insisted on speaking to one of the men in the shop.

“People can be like that,” Tom said. “There was no trust. He wanted to hear nothing that I had to say.”

The old joke has it that if men see a car with its hood up, they will automatically gravitate to it, furrow their brows and look over the engine, radiator, battery and belts even if they don’t have a clue how a car works and aren’t even remotely handy with a wrench or pliers. But even though the world of cars has long been considered a men’s club as tough to get into as a treehouse guarded by 8-year-old boys, the world of auto maintenance, repair and towing is seeing a slowly growing number of women breaking into it.

According to 2022 figures from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, about 12% of those employed in the automotive repair sector are women. It’s a considerable leap compared to 1999, when women made up only 1.4% of employees in the field. This could be the result of schools placing added emphasis on technology and engineering in recent years, but it also likely is a reflection of how notions of what constitutes “women’s work” and “men’s work” are being blurred or disappearing altogether. The percentage of women in automotive repair is comparable to the percentage of male nurses – 13% of registered nurses in America are men, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Rebecca Ames, the general manager of Kilkeary’s Auto Body, which employs a couple of women on it repair floor, said she was hesitant as recently as 10 years ago to put a female in the mix, citing “the guy talk” and a general boys-will-be-boys attitude that could be found in auto shops. Now, however, she believes women are accepted as valued co-workers.

“The women who are in this industry are highly capable,” Ames said, noting that many of them have to work harder than their male counterparts in order to prove themselves.

“We just want somebody to work on cars,” Ames added.

Probably the most high-profile showcase for women at work on cars is the Girls Auto Clinic in the Philadelphia suburb of Upper Darby. Founded by entrepreneur Patrice Banks, she got the idea for the Girls Auto Clinic – which is staffed entirely by women – because of how intimidated she felt taking her own car to the shop for repairs. She decided to ditch her career as an engineer at DuPont and learn the ins-and-outs of fixing her own car.

“I was afraid I was going to be taken advantage of,” Banks told the NPR program “Fresh Air” in 2018. “I was tired of feeling helpless and having to go talk to a guy.”

The website for the Girls Auto Clinic trumpets the rise of the “shecanic,” and points visitors to workshops and educational resources on car care. Visitors to the Girls Auto Clinic can also stop at an adjoining salon for pedicures, manicures, facials and waxing while they wait for their vehicle to be fixed.

Avalon Mathias doesn’t have a beauty bar at Top Notch Automotive, the business she has operated in Finleyville for the last eight years, but it’s “a small shop with big goals.” Mathias has been working on cars since she was 16 and growing up on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls. She “grew up poor,” Mathias explained, and being able to repair what they had was a money-saving necessity.

“I always just kind of liked tinkering with things and figuring out how they worked,” Mathias explained.

As she was learning the ropes, Mathias said she sometimes took some flak because of her gender, but she is guided by the idea that you should “do no harm and take no s**t.”

“You can’t be easily offended,” Mathias said. “You have to work hard to prove yourself.”

Kate Dunlap agrees. A painter at Kilkeary’s Auto Body, she says women in the field “have to work twice as hard” to prove themselves.

“It takes a lot of hard work and dedication,” she said. “I can do everything pretty much from start to finish.”

Taryn Russell is an apprentice at Kilkeary’s Auto Body, and learned about repairing vehicles from her grandfather.

“When I was little, I helped my pop,” she said. “He showed me that I could do it.”

Would she recommend that other women make the jump into auto repair and maintenance?

“I do,” Russell said. “I think it’s something we will benefit from.”