Car industry strives to raise female representation

Hildegard Wortmann, member of the VW Group board of management for sales (credit: Getty Images)
Linda Jackson, Peugeot CEO
VW Group board, featuring just two women
Porsche Cars GB has started a program to encourage women in media

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6 mins read

14 June 2022

The meeting that took place in Gaydon last month should have been just like any other for Joana Fidalgo, an engineer working across departments within Jaguar Land Rover investigating new materials – except for one thing. “I looked around and then the penny dropped: I was surrounded by women. It was the first time that had happened for me,” she told Autocar.

Five of the six people in the meeting were women, some of them category winners in the Autocar Great Women in the British Car Industry initiative, now in its seventh year.

They included Danella Bagnall, vehicle programme quality director and now an Autocar Great Women Hall of Fame inductee after multiple wins in the Vehicle Development category, and Louise Reynolds, this year’s winner in the Karen Gibson Vehicle Development category, following her promotion in 2021 to vehicle line director.

Visit the Autocar British Women in the British Car Industry site to learn more about the winners.

For Fidalgo, it was a pivotal moment. “I’m actually surrounded by women I really admire and look up to. I’m coming from manufacturing and powertrain strategy, so often I’m the only girl in the room,” she said.

Since Autocar started the Great Women initiative in 2016 to highlight the women who have succeeded or, in our alternating Rising Stars event, are on the path to success in this male-dominated industry, car companies have become much more focused on raising the female representation in their businesses.

Within BMW, for example, boosting the share of women in management is now one of the performance criteria that determine the size of the annual bonuses given to those on the board of management.

BMW’s target is to hire or promote women to 25% of management roles by 2025, up from 19% at the end of 2021. Overall, the proportion of women in the BMW Group global workforce at the end of last year stood at 20%.

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Despite the seemingly modest target, it’s still not easy to hit, BMW noted in its 2021 company report.

“This remains a challenging task in that it’s still the case that more men go through the process of vocational training, particularly in technical fields, and are therefore in the majority on the labour market,” it wrote.

One bright spot was the number of women in its Global Leader Development Programme rising to 47%. The reason to increase diversity within Volkswagen’s higher echelons is to “avoid groupthink”, the German giant wrote in its company report looking back over 2021.

Volkswagen reported that it beat its internal targets to end the year with 13% of first-tier management (defined as senior, top and board level) being female, with the second tier at 18%.

Toyota, the employer of this year’s Manufacturing category winner, Mairi Gordon, helpfully gives a geographical snapshot of male-to-female staff ratios globally for 2021, showing, for the Japanese brand at least, there are big differences from region to region.

Globally, 17% of Toyota’s workforce is female, falling to 15% for management and 12% for directors. In Japan, the overall figure drops to 13%, with just 3% in management positions.

Dramatically, Toyota’s China division is 46% women overall, with 40% management (but just 6% at director level). Its European operation is 34% women overall, 18% for managerial positions and zero for directors.

Toyota has a plan to boost numbers (without giving an exact figure) by 2025 by making the workplace environment more female friendly – for example, offering the option of homeworking to more than 50% of employees “irrespective of whether teleworking for childcare or nursing purposes” – it wrote in its latest company report.

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The key figure is 30%, according to Julia Muir, a former Ford executive and founder of the Automotive 30% Club, an organisation set up with the aim to boost female representation in car industry management positions in the UK to 30% by 2030.

“Once a minority achieves 30%, the wider group accepts them as no longer a minority and they’re therefore seen as equal,” she told Autocar.

Muir’s organisation has signed up firms including the Volkswagen Group, Toyota, Renault, Stellantis (home to our outright winner, Alison Jones), Bentley and Mazda in the UK, plus dealer groups such as Vertu, Lookers, Inchcape, Arnold Clark and Marshall.

“Club members have made significant improvements: some are already at 30% for leadership roles,” said Muir.

The exact figure across the industry isn’t tracked, though, which is a frustration for her.

What the UK doesn’t have that France and Germany do is mandatory quotas for female representation at senior management level.

Renault’s board ahead of the recent annual general meeting featured 46% women, beating the required 40%. Renault also employs this year’s Marketing category winner, Louise O’Sullivan.

France last year boosted its decade-long board mandate with a second target to make it law that companies with more than 1000 employees must have 30% of their executive management female by 2027, increasing to 40% by 2030.

The UK, meanwhile, has voluntary targets as suggested by the Hampton-Alexander Review, which concluded last year, with the aim of getting rid of the ‘one and done’ boards with a single token woman.

As of January, companies in the FTSE 350’s biggest listed companies had an average of 38% of women on their boards. The executive leadership stood at 31% on average as of October 2021, although it was perhaps no surprise that 69% of human resources directors were women but just 12% of chief information officers were, according to the review figures.

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The two automotive companies in the FTSE 350, Aston Martin and TI Fluid Systems, blotted the industry copybook with zero women in the top executive category below board level.

The straight-line argument is that if your management makeup doesn’t reflect the diversity of your customer base, you are already on the back foot.

Many of our past winners have flourished within Ford, and the same goes for this year, winning the awards for Mobility and Digital (Usha Raghavachari), PR and Communications (Emma Bergg), Operations (Alexandra Walker) and Aftersales and Workshop (Sarah Brettle).

In Ford’s recently published annual report, it revealed that women accounted for a quarter of its global staff from middle management and above.

It also included this concrete evidence that its inclusive strategy works: “Based on the data collected from the nearly 200 dealers located in our 10 most diverse US markets, we learned that dealers with women and employees of colour in management positions largely outperformed the dealers who lacked diversity in management.”

Stellantis leader Jones saluted

Alison Jones has been named the overall winner at Autocar’s Great Women in the British Car Industry awards for 2022.

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The most successful car companies this decade will be those that can hunt down new opportunities offered by the pressing need to reuse and recycle, and it’s therefore a measure of how highly regarded Jones is held within Stellantis that she has been given the responsibility for this within the 14-brand organisation.

Her promotion in May to oversee the circular economy strategy at Stellantis is her first global position in the company after a stellar period guiding first the PSA brands of Citroën, DS and Peugeot in the UK and then also Vauxhall and the former Fiat Chrysler Automobiles brands.

With her new title of senior vice-president of circular economy, she reports to Philippe de Rovira, one of the top executive team (as chief affiliates officer for sales finance, used cars, parts and service and retail network).

Jones will be charged with working out how to generate revenues of €2 billion (£1.7bn) by 2030 from both extending the life of Stellantis vehicles and then finding value in their constituent parts when they are finally scrapped.

In announcing her appointment, Stellantis praised Jones’s “great leadership style, robust business knowledge, a continuous commitment on transformational topics and a strategic vision”.

Jones built up this vision over nearly 20 years working for the Volkswagen Group in the UK, joining in 2000 in customer services and rising to finance director in 2004. She left in 2019 as head of the Volkswagen brand in the UK after a 2016 promotion from aftersales and customer quality director for the wider group.

In successfully navigating the UK car industry to earn a globally focused position, Jones has followed Stellantis colleague Linda Jackson, now head of the Peugeot brand and celebrated in Autocar’s Great Women Hall of Fame.