That's All Folks!

I am no longer updating this blog.

I am still driving trucks and I have also started speaking at events on the reality of life on the road and about working as a woman in a male-dominated environment.

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Thanks for reading!

Mother truckers

It had to be done. A programme called MotherTruckers has been broadcast on Channel 4 following the lives of female truck drivers so I had to watch it and comment. Really.

It was actually surprisingly ok.

Let's just set the scene for my reaction to a programme like this.
1. I hate real life documentary shows. I think that the general public make extremely bad television. Gareth Malone is a friend of mine from school but I haven't watched any of his programmes I hate the genre so much. I don't care if I sound like a snob but that's the way it is.

2. I also hate seeing reflections of myself in any work of culture high or low brow. This is partly because I feel envious that I wasn't in it or I hadn't written it but also because I like to think of myself as unique and special and don't like to find out that I'm not.

3. I am used to being the only woman trucker around and I don't seek out the company of other women truckers. I try and avoid the "I'm the only gay in the village" type attitude and be friendly if I do meet another one but I don't generally seek them out. I like being an alien.

You may well be thinking, "Oh get over yourself woman", and you may well have some justification for thinking that but hey, that's the way it is.

So given all that, you would have thought that I wouldn't like MotherTruckers but in actual fact I did. The girls are an interesting cross-section. There are some extreme examples - the transsexual, the former ballet dancer, but they both came across as really nice people and not just put there for the sensationalism of it. There is a good cross-section of areas of HGV work too. Some of them are out all night and all week, some of them are day workers, some are in construction which I was really pleased to see and I hope we see more of that. It is the most difficult area of trucking I've worked in in terms of the actual driving so it's nice to see it on the telly.

The one thing I couldn't stand was the voiceover. The name MotherTruckers I have heard used to refer to female truckers before and I don't especially mind it as a joke on occasions. I found it really jarring that such a posh female voice would be used to say the name over and over again. Fair enough, call the programme by that title, it's a very Channel 4 thing to do, but MotherTruckers is not a word used in everyday parlance and it was used far too often and sounded ridiculous and sensationalist in that accent. I don't think it fitted with the tone of the programme which was actually quite kind and respectful of the women and their real lives.

I'll be interested to see where they go with it. I'm sure sooner or later something will wind me up about it but so far I have been pleasantly surprised.

Women drivers

A recent study carried out by researchers in Warwick, UK and Georgia, USA (reported here in the Telegraph) has found that in areas where men are perceived to have a natural advantage, such as in carrying out spatial tasks like parking and map-reading, lack of confidence will make women worse at those tasks. Basically, if you tell women they are rubbish at parking, they will be.

I would actually take this one stage further. I think that if you tell women that they are rubbish at parking, not only are you making it a self-fulfilling prophecy, but you are also inextricably linking incompetence in spatial tasks with femininity. This means that not only are you making it more likely that they won't be very good at parking their cars, but also you are saying that if they are good at parking their cars they are not proper women!

On several occasions when out driving lorries, women have said to me, "Oh, I couldn't drive that thing, I've got no spatial awareness". What they are really saying to me is, "I couldn't drive that thing, I'm a proper woman." The fact is, if I asked those women if they could organise their cupboards so that they can see and reach all the things they want to see they would say yes. If I observed them in a supermarket manoeuvring their shopping trolley round several stationary trolleys so that they could get to the deli counter in front of the woman with the 3 screaming children in tow without it looking like they were racing, I'm sure I would be impressed with those same spatial skills that they claim not to have. These examples may sound horribly stereotypical but it is in stereotypes that we are dealing when talking about women drivers. The fact is, women carry out complex spatial tasks all day every day. There is just something about driving that we are told is man's work.

Having said that, it is precisely because of the association of driving with men that makes it such a good area to work in when trying to challenge these stereotypes. Every time somebody of either sex sees me or any other woman successfully manoeuvre an articulated lorry into position it's just another little nail in the coffin of these outmoded ideas.

Women in construction and the construction of women

I have been working in the construction industry for the last 3 years but I have started doing other stuff so I thought I'd tell you a little story about what may be one of my last experiences in the industry.

Picture the scene: I was driving my truck down into Weymouth from the Wareham coast road side. In front of me I could see the colourful tower on the esplanade with the hill of Portland behind and the sea, flat calm and glittering in the sunshine to the left. The lane I wanted was blocked due to road works so I pulled out into the right hand lane and moved slowly past the roadworks along with all the other traffic. In the roadworks a tarmac tipper lorry was parked up with its back tipped and perched above a hole in the road but still closed. As I drove past at a snail's pace I noticed that the driver was a woman. I stopped my truck, she turned to me and we shared a smile. Then I drove off and we both continued with our day.

It may be that she thought that the quickest way to get rid of me was to smile at me. It may be that she smiles at everybody. However, I have always found that women working in the construction industry have made a conscious choice to go against the grain, to do something all day every day that it is not expected for them to do. I think that a recognition of that shared experience was in that smile.

I have discussed my own reasons for doing the job in a previous post and I didn't speak to this woman to ask her why she does it. However, a lot of people looking from the outside think that women working in construction and other masculine roles are themselves masculine which is why they feel more at home there but in some ways the opposite is true. If you, as a woman, are surrounded all day by men doing manly things like lifting and digging and building things, you actually feel more like a woman. Your gender identity is less challenged - it is obvious that you are a woman, because all the others are blokes.

On the relationship of trucker to truck

I'm not the kind of person who names vehicles. I have never assigned a gender to any car I have driven, let alone a name. But a truck is different.

I have driven the same truck pretty much every day since I started the job two and a half years ago. That is over 5000 hours I have spent in the same vehicle. There can't be many people in whose company I have spent 5000 hours - my family obviously, my best friend probably - but only people I have known a long time and love. I know all its foibles, I know when it doesn't feel quite right, I know how often it has developed certain faults and how to persuade it to get over them. My lorry also has a crane, so it even has a limb. So it has always felt like a living being.

She has always been a she. Her gender was established early on. She is extremely capable, large and perfectly formed, as am I. Added to that, when I first started the job I was extremely nervous but felt I had to hide it, to avoid any suggestion that I shouldn't be in the job if I couldn't handle it. For that reason I felt a solidarity with her, as if, together, we could take on the world, or the job in hand at least.

I never intended to name her, but she named herself.

After I had been in the job about 6 months, she had been in for MOT so I had had to drive another much smaller truck for a few days (truck MOTs take at least 3 days). Everything was in slightly the wrong place and it had a crane that could do little more than drag things off the bed of the lorry and drop them on the floor next to it. When I got mine back at the end of the week I was ridiculously pleased to see her. It was so comfortable to be back in that driving seat, with all the controls where I was used to them. I was aware I was very pleased to be reunited with her but I thought to myself that I still wasn't going to name her, but then a voice in my head said, 'unless she's called Diane'. So Diane she became.

She is not the kind of Diane who wears a twinset and emphasises the second syllable. No. She is the kind of DI-ane who runs a greasy spoon, has gold earrings up each ear and has forearms you would never want to challenge to an arm wrestle. But she's the kind of woman you would want on your side in any argument and who would look after you if you had had a row with your boyfriend, but who would also tell you if the argument was your fault.

I am no longer nervous in the job and have driven quite a few other vehicles recently. Many of these are much smaller and now that I feel I have proved myself, I sometimes wish I drove a more manoeuvrable one. But then I get back in mine and think, 'Nah. You'll do.'

What's a nice girl like you doing in a truck like this?

This is a question I often get asked. Well, I have never actually heard it worded just like that but I do get asked a lot how I got into the job. So I'll tell you.

I got into the job the same way that many female truck drivers (mothertruckers I've heard us called! I wouldn't feel happy referring to myself as one but I like the wordplay) get into it - I was going out with a trucker, went out with him in his truck a few times and thought, this looks like fun, I'll do this. I had already been a driving instructor for a couple of years and had always loved driving so it was not the huge leap that it could have been. I was in need of a job, I needed one that required little brain power and little human interaction, so I started on agency driving vans and then the agency paid for me to do my HGV licence.

"Why don't you work in a nail bar or something?" is one question I have been asked. "I bet you get a lot of comments" is one of the most frequent comments I get. I deliver building supplies so driving a lorry onto building sites is what I do all day every day. It is a totally male dominated world although the company I work for normally has at least one girl in each branch, generally doing the accounts. I cannot deny that being the only woman in the area doing my job does give me a thrill, it is part doing a job that suits me (or used to), part feminist crusade and part showing off.

My truck's wheel base is 2' longer than the others in the fleet, which makes a pretty big difference to the turning circle, so there comes a point when my truck will not turn into spaces that the other trucks can. On building sites it is sometimes suggested in an underhand way that the reason I can't get the truck into the space when all the blokes can is that I am incapable and that they should send a proper driver. Obviously this is very irritating and can really get me down because there is part of me that feels pretty incapable anyway at times. Equally, if one of the blokes refuses a reverse manoeuvre he may well be told, "your lady driver did it" so it works both ways. Sometimes the builders play us off against each other and I have been rung up in my truck a couple of times to confirm whether I did the reverse or not!

There are days when I wish I didn't do this job, when it's -5 outside for example, but I have never wished I worked in nail bar. Although I do have beautiful purple sparkly toenails at the moment.