The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ 2025 household survey counted 901,000 automotive service technicians and mechanics, and women were 1.8 percent of them, or roughly 16,000 people. The same bureau projects about 66,200 openings a year, on average, in that occupation from 2025 to 2035.
Ford’s March 22, 2023, release for its Built Ford Proud campaign introduced actor Sydney Sweeney as the “only girl in the shop” and said she documents restoring a vintage Bronco on her TikTok channel. Her Auto 101 tutorials teach viewers to check tire pressure, and Ford and Dickies launched a workwear collection alongside the campaign. A driver who learns to read the placard in the door jamb is a better-served customer. Those tutorials are aimed at owners, though, and they do not touch what happens after someone applies for a job. The record I found points to that stage.
Collision work and mechanical work are different counts
The BLS table splits the trades. Women were 4.2 percent of the 130,000 automotive body and related repairers, 1.8 percent of the 901,000 service technicians, and 1.8 percent of the 369,000 bus and truck mechanics and diesel engine specialists. The collision share is more than double the mechanical share and still under five percent. These are survey estimates with sampling error, so a tenth of a point up or down should not be read as a trend. The bureau’s Occupational Outlook Handbook lists a different headcount for service technicians, 825,800 jobs in 2025, because it comes from a different program.
What women technicians report about the first years
The TechForce Foundation, which publishes the industry’s technician supply reports, interviewed 31 women technicians in the U.S., Australia, Canada and the U.K. for a 2022 white paper. That is a small sample, and I read it as testimony, not measurement. In it, 93 percent said they were discouraged from becoming technicians as children or teenagers, and 84 percent reported bias at work from customers, co-workers or management. Of the women who gave a reason for leaving a past employer, 62.5 percent cited a lack of advancement. They also described uniforms cut for men and shops without women’s restrooms or locker rooms. The workplace items on that list, from the uniform order to the promotion path, are things a shop owner controls.
Tools, pay structure and the beginner
The Occupational Outlook Handbook puts median technician pay at $50,620 a year as of May 2025 and says some shops pay hourly while others pay by the amount of work completed. It also says technicians typically own their common hand tools, while power tools and diagnostic equipment are usually employer-owned. A newcomer therefore buys a tool set before the first paycheck and, in a shop that pays by work completed, earns according to a speed she has not had time to build. That is my reading, not a BLS finding, and it falls on every beginner regardless of sex.
The shortage and the service counter
TechForce’s 2026 Technician Supply, Demand & Opportunity Report puts annual demand at 241,842 new technicians across ten sectors, against 101,743 students completing technician programs in academic year 2023-24. It reports that seven of the ten sectors are more than 95 percent male, and it argues the shortage is partly self-inflicted when half the population is effectively excluded. A shop with an empty bay books work later or turns it away, and the customer meets that at the service counter. The Auto Wire’s recent look at Clark Howard’s retired car-repair rule covers the cost side of repairs.
The bureau publishes its 2026 annual averages early next year, and the number to check is the women’s share of service technicians against 1.8 percent, keeping the sampling caveat in mind. A more telling number would come from a single shop: how many women it hired in the last three years, and how many were still there.
Who owes a new technician the most help getting started: the shop that hires her, the school that trains her, or the manufacturer that needs her?