Episode #66: Women in Trucking

Ellen Voie, President and CEO of the Women in Trucking Association, joins the podcast to talk with Dr. Bill Kanasky about this association she started in 2007. Ellen and Bill discuss how and why the organization began, who its members are (its not only women!) and the roles that women play in the trucking industry. Ellen shares how she attracts women to a traditionally male dominated industry by telling stories to describe the roles women can play in the industry and how they keep in touch with their members. Ellen and Bill also discuss how the association works with drivers to support their physical and mental health and managing the truck driver shortage by recruiting more women to be drivers.

Full Episode Transcript

[00:05] Bill Welcome to the Litigation Psychology Podcast, brought to you by Courtroom Sciences. I am Dr. Bill Kanasky. With us today, very special guest Ellen Voie. Ellen is the president and CEO of the Women In Trucking Association, which I find to be a fascinating group. I follow them on LinkedIn and I love all the stuff that they post. Uh, Ellen, thank you so much for coming on the show today.

[00:35] Ellen Well, thank you for inviting me. Thanks.

[00:38] Bill Can you give us just a kind of a 30,000 foot view of how you came up with the idea to found this association focused on women in this industry?

[00:53] Ellen Sure. I was working for a large Midwest carrier, and my job was manager of recruiting and retention programs. And that was corporate level initiatives, and they should figure out how to attract and retain non-traditional groups. And one of the groups they wanted me to focus on was women. And at the time, the industry really wasn’t doing a good job attracting women. And I belonged to a women in aviation organization—I’m a pilot as well—and I thought, well, why isn’t there a women in trucking? Yeah, Women In Trucking Association. So I thought, well, if the pilots can have one, so can professional drivers. So, um, I actually based a lot of our dues structure and a lot of our, um, the association on the Women In Aviation International. And formed Women In Trucking, it’ll be 14 years—it was 14 years in March, so in 2007.

[01:48] Bill Well, congratulations. That sounds, that sounds wonderful. How many members do you have?

[1:55] Ellen We have about 5,200 members in 12 countries. So, and and I have to mention, Bill, that about 15 percent of our members are men. It’s not, it’s not necessarily for women; it’s about women.

[02:10] Bill That is, that is phenomenal. Can you break down, um, because I just, I’m curious about this. I do a lot of work, um, obviously I work in litigation, so I work on a lot of cases for, uh, trucking companies. And, um, I think maybe in 17 years of doing this, maybe I’ve only worked with two or three women in the industry. At what levels are women involved in trucking? I would imagine it’s more than just drivers. I mean, they’re, I think there are safety directors out there. Can you just kind of describe the roles that women play in the industry?

[02:48] Ellen Sure. So women make up about 10 percent of over-the-road drivers, um, and only about two percent of diesel technicians, which is a great job. Um, safety managers, uh, uh, I think in the 40s—I’m sorry, 20s for safety managers and in the 40 percent for dispatchers. Um, but as far as the executive teams, uh, women aren’t as well represented in the leadership area or on the boards of directors. So those are some areas of focus that we work on as well.

[03:21] Bill That’s, that’s excellent. What are, what are the strategies between your organization and maybe, uh, companies? How do you attract, how do you attract women to a traditionally kind of male industry? What are the strategies that you use?

[03:39] Ellen Well, first of all, you have to tell their stories. Um, we highlight women. We have a distinguished woman logistics, an influential woman in trucking, a driver of the year, and a member of the month, and we tell her stories. So that other women look at them and say, well, if she can do it, I can do it. And our big push is to get our drivers out to the non-trucking public. And so we have an image team that takes, uh, media, gives media rides. We’ve given Diane Sawyer a ride. We’ve given, uh, people from Wall Street Journal, USA Today. We give the media rides. We also give our elected officials, our legislators, and our regulators, uh, rides. We’ve, we’ve invited, uh, Acting Administrator Meera Joshi, um, and she has accepted. Uh, so, and we’ve given other FMCSA administrators rides in trucks. So we tell their stories. And when people see women doing this job, then they start thinking about, you know, putting themselves in that place as well. So it’s really about telling stories.

[04:44] Bill That’s, that’s excellent. Now, do you, um, do you have, do you have, um, conferences where everyone gets together? Maybe, maybe once a year? Or how do you, I guess, how do you all keep in touch as an organization and share, uh, these ideas with each other?

[05:05] Ellen Well, that’s a great question. Um, we actually had, just before the pandemic, we had our fifth conference and we had over 1,100 registered attendees. So we were on a roll. Um, this past year we did our conference virtually and we had over 600 attendees. But this year we hope to have our conference—both will have a virtual component and we’ll have an in-person component in November in Dallas. But we also keep in touch with our members. We have a weekly newsletter, we have a publication, we have a huge social media—11,000 on our Facebook page, I think eight or nine thousand on LinkedIn. Um, our emails go out. We’re on Twitter; I think there’s about 24,000 followers on Twitter. Um, Instagram, Pinterest, um, social media. But now we’re also creating chapters so that, uh, groups can meet in a local or regional way to get together and continue networking.

[06:03] Bill That, that is, uh, that’s really sensational. Does your group, uh, particularly in your newsletters or—and I would love to help you with this because I tell you what, it’s not a matter of uh, if, it’s a matter of when—have you ever discussed legal topics? You have to understand the trucking industry is in the crosshairs of the plaintiffs’ bar, and there’s a lot of money, there’s a lot of nuclear verdicts out there. And the more women be—the more that women become involved in the industry, the, the likelihood is that they’re gonna be deposed one day, or they’re gonna have to testify at trial. Are these topics that you guys have addressed or at least have a plan to address?

[06:43] Ellen Um, I—we’d love to. I know that we’ve addressed sexual harassment issues. Um, and you know, you mentioned that in your years you haven’t had too many female drivers that you’ve represented. That’s because women are safer drivers. And the American Transportation Research Institute found that men were 20 percent more likely to be involved in a crash in every statistically significant area, whether it’s at night, corners, intersections, whatever. Because women are risk-averse. And whether that’s in the cab of a truck or in the, in the boardroom, women take fewer risks. And so that creates a different conversation, creates a different way of decision making. But as far as litigation, I would love to have you on my radio show. I think we talked about that. And, um, we do webinars. We do webinars every month, um, so to educate our members. And our members are comprised of corporate and individual members. So that would be something of interest.

[07:46] Bill Um, yeah, no, I’d be happy to do, uh, that for you. And by the way, the only thing about the women being safer drivers… you, you haven’t seen my wife drive, apparently, have you?

[07:59] Ellen Commercial drivers! Commercial drivers.

[08:01] Bill Yeah, I, uh… I don’t, don’t even get me started on that topic because I’ve, I’ve, I’ve… my insurance company is like on speed dial. Thank you, thank you for that. Um, let’s, yeah, let’s, let’s, um, let’s… this is definitely, uh, I certainly want to keep in touch because I do a lot of webinars for, um, you know, Taita, for, um, other trucking organizations, for the actual trucking companies, insurance companies. And I, I know it’s something that for your group would be very valuable, uh, because it’s a topic that’s not going away. It’s only gonna grow. And it’s quite frank, litigation scares everybody to death. And you want to, you want to be ahead of the game, have a plan before the lawsuits file. I think that’s something I can, I can help you fill in those blanks. But tell me about—so I’m looking up your bio and, um, well, let me, let me start. I made an epic mistake. Now you’re going to laugh at me and I just kind of—like how dumb can somebody be? And I, right here, dumb dumb dumb. So I want to educate myself before this podcast. So, idiot here, I type in the Google “women truckers.” Take a wild guess what came up.

[09:16] Ellen I don’t know.

[09:21] Bill A lot of, a lot of, um, photographs of very, very attractive female trucker. So I kind of like, oh, that was dumb dumb dumb. So I had to make, I had to revise my search, uh, to find more information. But then I found your, um, uh, XM radio show. Tell us about the XM radio show cause I’m very jealous. I’ve always wanted to grow up and—no one knows this, that’s why I have so much fun with this podcast—I always wanted to be the next Larry King or the next Howard Stern. And I ended up being a clinical neuropsychologist working on trucking cases instead. But, um, please tell me about the show and how you cause this—this is fascinating to me.

[10:00] Ellen Well, here’s what’s really funny about that. Um, in high school I want—I wanted to be in broadcast journalism. And I actually went to Trans-American School of Broadcasting. And then in college, um, my first semester I actually passed my third-class radio operator’s license and worked for a radio station um, for just a year or so. And found out that you don’t make any money. You don’t make any money. Um, but so, um, I started Women In Trucking in 2007 and I kept being guests on other people’s radio shows. In fact, I had a monthly segment on a show called “Freewheeling.” It’d be on the Dave Nemo Show. And finally they came and they said, well, why don’t we give you your own show? And that was about three years ago. Um, so I’m in my fourth year and every Saturday morning from, um, 10 to noon. And I love it. I just love it. It’s a call-in show and it’s most—it’s the trucking channel on SiriusXM, so 146. So it’s typically people in transportation. So, um, it’s, it’s a lot of fun.

[11:10] Bill Okay, I, well hey, I, I gotta get on this show. I gotta get on this show. I could be like a regular contributor to this show. This would be fun. And, um, I gotta get my own show. I’m so jealous. I’m so jealous of you right now. I’m very proud of you. Congratulations. But boy, I’m, I’m, I’m jealous. I gotta, I gotta, I gotta get to work on this. But, uh, no, that’s, that, that’s terrific. And I think that’s great because it just helps you get the word out.

[11:36] Ellen I can put you in—let’s, Bill, I’ll put you in touch with the right people.

[11:41] Bill Exactly. See, it’s not what you know, it’s who you know. Um, so as I’m—so finally, so once I got my, my Google search the right way so that a bunch of pictures weren’t coming up—I’m an idiot—uh, I finally came across several articles about, about, you know, women in the trucking industry. That was the proper search term, by the way. And the one thing that came up which I found to be, um, very interesting and something that’s actually dear to my heart—again, something a lot of people don’t know—um, in my training in becoming a psychologist, I worked in many medical facilities and I was doing research and clinical work in medical psychology. And a lot of that was trying—the, this is, this is around where obesity became a national epidemic. And so I was working a lot on, uh, with cardiologists, with dietitians, to make exercise programs and dietary programs that would work with people. Um, trucking is notoriously a very unhealthy—for drivers—a very unhealthy industry. And so as I was reading about women in the industry, that issue kept popping up. What does the industry—uh, I’m sorry—what does the association do to address, um, those issues? Because we know that, you know, obesity, diabetes, heart disease, this is something that plagues, plagues drivers.

[13:12] Ellen So we do competitions, uh, with Rolling Strong, and drivers win prizes, or anyone who enters win prizes. They’ll last for a month. And so every so often we’ll do competitions. We also send out a lot of emails with healthy eating and tips and things like that. And one of the things I’m really proud of is we partnered with an organization called Aspire, and they have what they call “Fit to Pass.” And that’s for drivers to pass their CDL physicals. And, um, some of them because of health issues don’t get a two-year card. They have to come back after three months or six months or a year. So Fit to Pass is coaching, um, with a coach. And I, I actually signed up for it. And, and my pilot’s license is due this month as well; I have to get a physical for that. So, um, we offered 90 days free. Amazon paid for it. All of our drivers got free Fit to Pass counseling and something called TalkNow, which was mental health counseling. And that was for 90 days. And then, um, then Total Transportation of Mississippi picked it up for the next 90 days. So our drivers got it for 180 days free. And then they could sign up for a year for $15—$15 total for a year. So, I mean, we’re—we realized that their health is very important and so is their mental health.

[14:38] Bill Yes, that is a topic, um… in fact, uh, last month we, we spent the whole month talking about mental health issues, um, with really in all industries. Um, boy, what a tough year. But particularly for, I think, the trucking industry and their role, which by the way has not been covered appropriately by the media. They’ve been too busy… well, let’s not get into that. But it’s, it’s a, it’s a role… I, I would put, I would put the trucking industry up on that top tier of heroes right along with the healthcare folks. Unfortunately, they have not gotten, uh, nearly enough credit, and that, that really, um, that, but that that bothers me. Um, it bothers me a lot. Uh, Ellen, this has been so fun. Last question for you. Um, there’s been, um—and this is like this speaking of impending doom—I’ve been reading a lot for the last couple years. We have a truck driver shortage problem, is what it—what sounds like. We don’t have enough truck drivers. And I know that one of the—we did a, we did a podcast, we were talking about, um, the trucking industry as a whole, we discussed this issue. And it sounds like there’s a lot of foreign-born, foreign-born truck drivers filling that void. How, how, how is your organization and maybe you personally, how are you approaching the, the, the driver shortage issue? Because you know, if you have trucks full of supplies, that’s wonderful. If you have, if you have no one to drive those trucks, you’ve got yourself a problem, don’t you?

[16:30] Ellen Well, let me tell you that 14 years ago the trucking industry would say to me, “Ellen, we don’t care about the gender of the driver, we don’t care about ethnicity, we don’t care about their age.” And, and then I’d start pointing out like, “Really? Well, how come your uniforms are all made for men? How come your trucks are designed for men? How come you don’t have women’s restrooms or showers?” And, and it really wasn’t a level playing field. And so over the years—and I didn’t, I didn’t have, uh, gender-related data—everywhere I’d go, I’d raise my hand and I’d say, “Do you have that broken down by gender?” And they go, “Well, no, because women weren’t statistically significant.” And that’s what I heard over and over. Well, fast forward 14 years, the message has been sticking, and they’re like, “Oh wow, we get it. Women are safer drivers. Wow, we need to re-evaluate how we’re designing trucks and our facilities and the uniforms.” I mean, just to make women’s uniforms, you know? So the industry has really changed and now they’re saying, “We see the value that women bring in the boardroom as well as in the cab of the truck.” And now they’re saying, “Tell us how to attract women because we want to attract more women.” Women make up half the population and only one out of 10 drivers, so we have a long way to go. And I think we can fill that need, um, whether it’s women or other minorities, but of course we focus on women. So we’re going to help fill those seats, uh, and and we’re going to create change in the industry so that we can do that.

[18:06] Bill That is fantastic, Ellen. Thank you so much for being on our podcast. This is very, very informative. Let’s make sure that we keep in touch because I want to help- you know help me help you. I think we can help each other out. But I’m very—I mean just authentically impressed by what you have accomplished in this, in, uh, in this industry. And I wish you, I just best wishes going forward and you let me know how I can help you.

[18:32] Ellen Uh, sounds good. We’ll be in touch.

[18:35] Bill Great. Thank you so much. And to our listeners and our viewers, thank you so much for participating. Another edition of the Litigation Psychology Podcast brought to you by Courtroom Sciences. We’ll see you next time.