Promoting Road Freight Industry to Women: Motivations and Challenges of Female Truck Drivers in the UK

Introduction

Within the UK there is a deficit of around 59,000 Truck drivers (FTA, 2019), and this is an aging workforce. This means that the majority of drivers are of an older age with few younger people joining the industry. This is a concern as truck drivers are essential workers in the movement of goods, which is the key in distribution of value (Kotler & Armstrong, 2012). Truck drivers are necessary in the movement of all things ranging from animal feeds and raw materials to road maintenance and delivering to supermarkets and so are vital to ensuring that the country remains operative. There is a very small number of females within this profession, the Road Haulage Association (RHA) claims that only between 1 and 2% of drivers are female. By encouraging more females to consider or become truck drivers, this deficit could be reduced. Therefore, knowing what motivates and challenges female truck drivers plays a vital role.

Encouraging more females joining the industry is also a large step for equality in workforces, the more normalised female truck drivers become the more it will be seen as an option for women to join this industry as currently it is saturated with males. There is also a great gap of literature focusing on female truck drivers. The lack of information surrounding this aspect highlights that there is a need to study what motivates and challenges female truck drivers. Furthermore, the literature surrounding truck drivers generally is lacking surrounding their motivations and challenges also. There is some information in previous literature but it is limited. For instance, Reed & Cronin (2003) investigated the health issues faced by female truck drivers. Naysmith & Rubincam (2012) studied the perceptions and experiences of female truck drivers and their employees in South Africa. The existing literature covers the health of truck drivers and therefore does not have the detail surrounding what encourages them within their profession. This is again important as with the current deficit of drivers more information needs to be collected in order to see what policies and motivators can be put in place to make truck driving a more desirable career.

The literature is also lacking a focus directly on female truck drivers particularly within the UK. This gap in knowledge shows a need to focus on females working in the industry in order to better understand what motivates and challenges them. This leads to the purpose of this study in taking a direct approach in finding the challenges and motivations. Accordingly, the aim of this book chapter is to discover the main motivations and challenges of being a female truck driver in the UK. Main objectives of this book chapter are to discover if females feel they are treated equally to males within this industry; if females feel accepted and included within their roles; how females find working in such a male dominated industry and also; how female truck drivers decided to be a truck driver. It will also be important to discover how female truck drivers manage with other issues such as keeping safe and managing their personal lives.

The second part of the study continue with literature review, which will focus on female truck drivers and then which will consider females working in other male dominated industries as some of the issues they face will be similar. The literature review will look at previous research and publications about these things in order to later determine whether the results from interviewees selected for this project relate to previous studies. It is also important to discover whether the results link to females in other male dominated industries to see if there is a broader gender issue with these industries or whether the results link directly to female truck drivers. The third part explains the methodology section in which the procedure of semi-structured interviews is described. The fourth part in this chapter presents the findings of our qualitative interviews with a critical discussion. The chapter is ended with the discussion and conclusion part.