“If you had asked me when I started Women in Trucking in 2007 that we would have 8000 members in ten countries and on the board of directors, names like Wal-Mart, Daimler, and Great Dane,” said Ellen Voie, founder of Women In Trucking (WIT), “I look at the board and I think, wow, these big companies are committed to gender diversity and they’re supporting the mission of women in trucking.”
According to new data from the WIT Index in July 2023, an average 12.1% of overall professional drivers who hold commercial driver’s licenses (CDLs) and drive heavy-duty trucks are female.
Additionally, an average of 43.5% of overall dispatchers are women. This is an important related statistic, as dispatchers are managers of professional truck drivers’ schedules and ensure timely pick-ups and deliveries.
While this is a great improvement, the American Transportation Research Institute (ATRI) recently launched a survey to identify what motor carriers are doing to recruit and retain women truck drivers.
This top research priority will identify challenges unique to women truck drivers as well as best practices that can be leveraged to overcome those challenges.
Motor carriers that want to participate are asked to complete the online survey by Friday, November 17, 2023.
To help us further understand gender diversity in trucking, we recently had Ellen Voie, founder of Women In Trucking, on our Caution: Wide Right podcast.
Each year Women in Trucking has their Accelerate Conference and have over 2,000 people expected to attend this year. It’s going to be November 5-8, 2023 in Dallas, Texas with 70+ educational sessions and lots of people in attendance. Check it out.
Below is some of what was discussed on the podcast.
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Luke Kibby (Host)
Hey everyone, and welcome to our podcast ‘Caution: Wide Right’! I’m Luke, your host, and with me today is the one and only founder of the Women In Trucking organization, Ellen Voie. Ellen is an internationally recognized speaker and authority on gender diversity and inclusion for women in transportation.
Women in Trucking basically represents women that design the trucks, build the trucks, buy the trucks, sell the trucks, own the trucks, fix the trucks, and drive the trucks! And I am sure you can include the brokers, insurance agents, safety and compliance industry, human resources, and more.
Ellen, Welcome to the podcast!
Ellen Voie
Well, thank you so much for the introduction, Luke. You did your homework very well.
Luke Kibby (Host)
Well, and we can go on and on about your background. And honestly, you could have been the whole hour of the time we have. But I do want to change things up a little bit. I also know that you recently retired from women in trucking specifically as the president and CEO, albeit still involved in different roles. This is alongside the retirement of Char, who helped you build the organization from the very beginning.
And with both of you backing away from the day to day. I’m just curious what stories you have of the two of you that sort of jump into memory from over the years?
Ellen Voie
You know, I was always the idea person. So, I’d come up with these ideas, like I’d see women in aviation and I’d see them have a gathering and they’d give them all the same color t-shirts. And so, I told Char, I’m going to do that in trucking. I want to have a salute to women behind the wheel.
And she said, okay, but we have to have chocolate because it is women in trucking. So, it was her idea to have a chocolate fountain.
So, I’d come up with these ideas and she would implement them and she would make the vision a reality. We made a great team.
Luke Kibby (Host)
And now stepping away, it is sort of the next chapter for women in trucking. I’m just curious, how does that future look?
Ellen Voie
Well, over the years, the last 16 years, every time we would bring on some new staff, people, I would shed some of the duties that I didn’t like to do. I just want to talk about how to get more women in transportation careers.
So, over the years I’ve delegated those things. And now, towards the end my job was going out and speaking. I speak at a lot of events. I have about six or seven events just in October where I’m speaking, and that’s what I love to do.
So, the retired part of it meant turning over the management of the organization and the new CEO has a background in association management, which means she knows how to run an association.
Luke Kibby (Host)
And I’m curious, there is a video of you online back in 2010 at the Great American Truck Show getting a tattoo. And you mentioned in the video that you, hey jokingly saying that if you hit 2,000 members, that maybe you’d add on to that. Now with 8,000, did you ever do any other additions to the tattoo?
Ellen Voie
You know, you’re right. I did make that comment that when we hit a thousand members, I’d get the tattoo. I still have the tattoo. And, you know, we always try to think, what could I do differently?
I’ve already done skydiving and things like that. So, we would brainstorm what we could do as a publicity stunt but didn’t really follow up on that other than the goal to have a conference.
And last year we had 1,800 people at our conference. So, I really should do something celebratory but I haven’t come up with some ideas, I guess.
Luke Kibby (Host)
Well, if you hit 10,000, maybe make the new the new president do it!
Ellen Voie
Exactly.
Luke Kibby (Host)
So, looking at our YouTube statistics, obviously the subscribers or the viewers are still 90% or 95% men. Since that’s the typical audience even today, what do you want to mention to the men in the trucking industry, in reference to women in trucking.
Ellen Voie
Be allies. I want the men to be allies. 50% of our members are men who joined because they support our mission.
But I need men to be supportive and don’t treat women any differently. Just think it could be your mom, your sister, your aunt, your grandma, and treat them with respect. Because the number one place where female drivers are harassed is truck stops by other drivers.
So, any driver out there please treat women with respect and we could get rid of a lot of the negative image of our industry if everyone treated each other with respect.
Luke Kibby (Host)
So, a little bit more about your background. Your master’s thesis in the 90’s was about the complex identities of women married to professional truck drivers. And in it you say that women married to truck drivers are very independent and when their husbands come home from on the road that they have to switch and adapt to become a couple again.
I’m just curious, among the eight women that you interviewed for your thesis, is there a story that specifically stands out to you today or even that one that maybe you relate to the most?
Ellen Voie
There is one very, very powerful story, a woman who had, I think, six or seven children. And I asked her, I said, what do you do when you’re missing your husband? And she said, I sit down and I hug my kids. And I said, is that why you had so many kids? And she goes, “My God.” It’s like a light bulb went on like she was filling a space with her by having more kids because she missed her husband.
And yeah, it hit us both. It’s like, wow, I mean, you fill the space with something. You know, for me, it was going to college. I mean, it took me 13 years to finish my bachelor’s and my master’s because I was raising two children and I was consulting, running a small company with my former husband.
But yeah, I think that was where I was filling my space.
But the biggest challenge is the returning spouse. And in my thesis, it was the man. But when they come back, knowing where they fit in was one of the struggles.
One of the truck drivers wives said her husband would come home after being gone and he would tell his teenage daughter to do something and she wouldn’t. He’d say, well, you’re grounded for two weeks. Then he’d go back on the road.
Guess what Mom did? Grounded her immediately. She had to drive the younger sister around. So, by him grounding her, it actually added an extra burden on Mom. So, I mean, knowing where they fit in was often a struggle because like I said in the thesis, they’re one person. She’s very independent and self-sufficient when he’s on the road.
And I’ll tell you one another story that I remember. So, it really hurt. It happened to be a rare Sunday when my former husband went to church with me because typically, he was on the road and there’s this couple came up to us and said, hey, why don’t you join our couple’s Bible study?
And he just goes, “Well, I can’t. I’m a truck driver.” And they turned and walked away and left me just standing there. And I thought, well, nobody asked. I didn’t fit in. I wasn’t a couple, yet I wasn’t single. So, when I go out with my single friends, no, I’m not single. I’m married, but I’m part of a couple.
But you guys are all single and, you know, you didn’t really fit in right in in that environment. So, my heart goes out to anyone who has a spouse that’s away from home for any length of time because it’s not easy.
Luke Kibby (Host)
Yeah. And I’m curious. After 16 years with women in trucking, obviously there’s more and more women involved, especially on the driving side and sort of maybe that role flips a bit, the women’s out on the road, maybe the spouse, you know, is at home. If you were to rewrite the thesis today or if you were to include the other side of the coin, the woman coming home, how would you see it? What would be similar? What would be different about it?
Ellen Voie
Well, the similar would be the spouse, the returning spouse, knowing where to fit in. But what would be different is what, you know, like stay at home. Dads have a tough job because they’re mingling with the stay-at-home moms, you know. And do they fit in at a Girl Scout camp? Do they fit in, you know, at toddler time?
So, they’re going to have a more different role. If it’s the dad at home with the family and the mom out on the road or the mom in the military or the mom, you know, commuting.
So, it’s going against those people stereotype and they have an added burden on them.
Luke Kibby (Host)
You mentioned the Girl Scouts. I know that you were a part of getting the transportation patch started. I’m just curious the story behind that and how that’s going.
Ellen Voie
It’s a great publicity and PR event.
I found out that the Boy Scouts had a transportation patch, and so I checked with the Girl Scouts and they said no. At the time, my board chair served on the Greater Chicago Northern Indiana region for Girl Scouts.
So, we created the curriculum. We had someone design the patch and over 1,400 girls now earned that patch.
We even have an activity book that’s called Scouting for Cookies, and it talks about how the grain goes from the field to the bakery in a truck bakery to packaging in a truck packaging to, you know, warehousing or whatever, and who’s the final mile, the Girl Scout.
And the goal of that book is, so Girl Scouts will look at a truck and say, that could be my milk in there. That could be the grain for my cookies. We want them to have a personal relationship with the trucks on the road because anyone in the trucking industry knows that most people don’t think about trucks.
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