The trucking industry is short of drivers and has turned to women to fill the gap. So how does it feel to take on macho man at his own game, asks Jane Mulkerrins

But lorry driving, perhaps the last bastion of the working-class male, is now falling into the delicate hands of the fairer sex. While many reject the title “lady” truckers, a growing number of women are steering a career path for themselves from inside the cab of an HGV.

According to the Office for National Statistics, in autumn 002 there were approximately 14,000 women in the UK registered as being HGV or van drivers. In autumn 2003 this had grown to just over 18,000 — a rise of almost 30% in just 12 months. And although comparative figures do not exist for 10 or 20 years ago, female truckers were undoubtedly thin on the ground back then.

“Until recent times the number of female lorry drivers in UKroad transport had barely reached treble figures,” says Dave Young, editor of the industry magazine Truck and Driver.

Pat Nicholson, a female lorry driver from March in Cambridgeshire, agrees. She began trucking 23 years ago and was something of a novelty on the roads. Now 56, and still driving, she says: “When I started in the business I was the only woman I knew driving lorries — it was absolutely a man’s world back then. Women are much more apparent in the job these days.”

Take Helena Burrows, for example, who last month passed her HGV test and is now qualified to drive a rigid vehicle, such as a tipper truck, up to 35 tons. Just 22 years old and 5ft 2in tall, Helena initially took the course in order to train as a paramedic, for which she needed an HGV licence. However, she enjoyed the thrill of trucking so much that she is now planning to work as a lorry driver.

“I love driving the trucks, being so high up and being in charge of such a big vehicle,” she enthuses. “I’m not at all put off by the fact that the industry is seen as male-dominated.

I love driving and I want to do this, and I don’t have any fears about being a woman in that world.”

But the rise in women truckers is not due simply to the increased feistiness and self-confidence of women. Jason Vallint, head of logistics at the Transport Research Laboratory, believes the overriding reason why women are now welcome in the industry is the crippling shortage of men entering it.

“There is a huge labour shortage in the UK industry, with some estimates claiming there’s a shortfall of as many as 80,000 drivers,” says Vallint.

Furthermore, the average age of a truck driver is 52, meaning that haulage firms need new blood, and quickly, before all the truckers retire.

Vallint lists bad pay, horrendous working hours and a poor public image of the job as contributing to this shortfall, as well as the cost of training, which is around £2,000 and has to be met by the individual. The average salary is £20-25,000, usually for a 55-hour week. “Nobody wants to do the job any more — it’s as simple as that,” he says. “So employers who would not have considered employing women before now have to.”

Some haulage companies have responded to the driver shortage by paying for employees’ training, and working hours are improving. With the enforcement of the European working time directive across the industry next year, drivers’ maximum hours will drop from 60 to 48 per week. As a side effect, this may also make the business more appealing to women.

“I’m not sure that I would drive lorries if I had to work nights,” admits Cathy Vinall, a 39-year-old mother of two from Thetford in Norfolk, who has been a trucker for two years. “I can just about bear the 4.45am starts five days a week, but fortunately I’ve never had to do overnights,” she says. “Even so, I think the hours have always put lots of women off.”

Cathy explains that although she always fancied driving as a career, it was impossible until her children reached a certain age. “They are teenagers now, so they can get their own breakfast and go off to school,” she says. “It wouldn’t have been possible before.”

And how do Cathy’s daughters feel about their mother being a truck driver? “They were a bit embarrassed at first,” she says. “And my husband, who is also a lorry driver, was very miffed that I passed my test first time.”

But while hours and training may have improved, there is little that can be done about the more entrenched attitudes on the road.

Denise Waterbury, 39, from Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk, has been for driving for 15 years and believes the job requires a certain toughness.

“It can be quite seedy and horrible,” she admits, referring to sexual harassment and the times she has walked into a truck-stop bar in oily overalls and been genuinely mistaken for a stripper. On other occasions she has been approached by the prostitutes who patrol motorway truck stops.

“When I am parked up at night and the prostitutes sidle up to the truck, I just shout, ‘Sorry love, you’re not my type’, out of the window at them,” she laughs.

She has also often been forced to use the men’s showers because of the lack of facilities for women at truck stops. “You don’t really have any choice — not when you are out on the road for five days,” she says.

Dave Young believes such problems may soon become a thing of the past. “Attitudes are changing purely because traditionalists who don’t like women driving are dying out.”

But sometimes it isn’t the men who are the worst offenders. Waterbury will never forget the time she was mistaken for a prostitute by the woman owner of a truck stop.

“I had just nipped in to use the loo, when the woman from the counter asked me to leave, saying, ‘We don’t have your sort in here’,” recalls Waterbury. “I just thrust my truck keys at her and pointed out that I was driving a lorry, not a car.”