Sherry Calkins was paired with a woman driver for a ride along during a recent visit to one of Geotab’s fleet customers. Calkins, Geotab’s senior vice president of global strategic accounts, said the driver shared with her that one of her biggest concerns as a woman behind the wheel of a big rig is safety – not while rolling down the road, but when she’s stopped for the required rest break.
Seventy-two percent of women truckers have turned down routes, contracts, or jobs due to safety concerns; only 31% said they feel safe sleeping in their truck; nearly half said they want safer rest stops; and 30% reported facing harassment, according to a recent report from Lance Surety Bonds’s national survey on female truckers' safety, satisfaction, and career conditions.
Despite those safety concerns, 85% said they would still recommend trucking to other women or younger generations.
Calkins said she is seeing more and more women coming into the fleet industry as light- or heavy-duty truckers or even in ancillary roles like back-office staff, diesel technicians, and those in roles like hers at technology companies that serve the transportation sector. In the midst of Women’s History Month, Calkins pointed out that the trucking industry needs this influx of women to diversify thought and innovation, and technology has made that easier.
“When you think of the evolution of the truck itself, it used to be very manual. Even just shifting those gears, it was a struggle,” she said. “Today, everything is by buttons. That technology has just changed the game … and we are seeing more women interested in getting into trucking.
“Technology … is also opening up a lot more opportunities for women within this automotive trucking space as well, whether it be a data analyst, maybe a safety compliance officer within a company – just so many different ways they can get into this trucking space and not actually have to be driving the truck,” she added.
According to Women in Trucking’s (WIT) 2024-2025 gender diversity data index, 9.5% of professional drivers are women. Beyond driving, women make up 38.5% of safety roles in the transportation industry, 38.5% of dispatcher roles, and 4% of technician roles.
Tawni Marrs, a lead data scientist and engineer at Trimble, said she is seeing more women enter the transportation tech industry from broader software and engineering backgrounds, “bringing fresh perspectives to an industry that has historically been quite insular.”
“I believe that this influx of diversity is exactly what leads to better solutions. When our engineering teams reflect a broader spectrum of experiences, we build for a broader user audience. We stop designing for a 'default' user and start building more resilient, inclusive products that solve for a wider range of safety, usability, and operational needs,” Marrs said. “As an example, if we want to fix the 'leaky bucket' of driver retention, we need those diverse engineering minds at the table to build the tools that make the career viable and enjoyable for everyone.”
Rig On Wheels Broker & Recruitment Services posted a newsletter during last year’s Women’s History Month that stated fleets with diverse leadership teams experience higher retention and driver satisfaction, and Lance Surety Bonds’ survey reported that 41% of women truckers said the biggest change they want is more women in leadership roles. Meanwhile, both the WIT index showed that only 28% of C-suite executives in transportation are women, and 34.5% are company leaders.
“The fact that 41% of female truckers specifically pointed to more women in leadership as their top desired change highlights a major gap in how the industry is currently managed,” Marrs said. “… Increasing the presence of women in leadership builds and fosters a foundation of trust that is currently missing for many. It creates a culture of psychological safety that makes it much easier for other women to speak up and contribute. When representation is visible at the top, it signals that every perspective is valued, encouraging a more open exchange of ideas…”
Women in leadership roles will also inspire other women and younger generations to work in the trucking industry, Calkins said.
She pointed to Knight-Swift’s women’s mentorship program and the Hourglass Foundation. Calkins serves on the board of the foundation, which is the philanthropic arm of Hourglass Management Corporation. She said the foundation works with young women in high school to help them discover and fund careers in trades like trucking.
“Before, people weren't really tapping on women for these types of positions,” Calkins said. “In the last 10 years, and especially in the last five, as we start to see autonomous trucking and just everything come on around the product side and the technology, even more women are going to be leading in those spaces.”
She said she thinks women are very open to change and are always seeking ways to be more efficient, so having women in leadership will encourage the adoption of the new technology that will bring more women into the trucking industry.
Marrs said the logistics and technology sectors have historically been male-dominated industries, which doesn’t change overnight.
“Many of the current leaders are in those positions because they bring deep, niche experience,” Marrs said. “It takes time for a new generation of leaders to build that same level of domain expertise, but we are in the middle of that transition right now.”
