How Women In Logistics Can #BreakTheBias

As a woman, mother, leader and colleague, I’ve been talking about the health of gender diversity in the logistics industry. Let’s put it this way. If I reached out and asked the question: ‘What do you think about gender equality in the logistics industry?’, I’d bet that the answer would be an uncertain one. Logistics faces similar diversity challenges that other industries like manufacturing and automotive are up against. As someone who started working as a female engineer over 25 years ago, I’ve seen and experienced this first-hand!

In our workplaces, we have to make sure that women have access to opportunity. Girls should be educated from a young age on roles across industries that previous generations might not have considered. More physical roles like construction, skilled labor, mining, firefighting and security have long been the preserve of men, though that is changing.

Aside from hands-on, frontline jobs, our society has become increasingly digitized and the job market is digitally driven. Similar gender gaps exist in sectors such as I.T, tech and project management – and many more.

With the pandemic having a negative effect on women globally – something we’re calling the ‘she-cession’, it’s something we need to proactively monitor and act against as the pandemic continues.

What we’ve been focusing on lately is unlocking opportunity and enablement. This International Women’s Day, we’ve doubled down on initiatives to build awareness of how women are already breaking biases and how there is room to do more.

We’ve interviewed leaders and frontliners, spoken to men and women across the organization. We’ve uncovered some pretty powerful stories too. Take the female leader undertaking a stint as a FedEx courier that every manager must experience to understand the business from the ground up. She realized a week in that team members were taking bets to see how long she’d last – how tough she was. Those bets? All lost.

Another courier described how she loves to see people’s faces when she pulls up in her 40-foot truck. And then there’s the female pilot who challenged the biases she faced as a single mother who happens to fly planes for a living.

It’s human stories like these that keep the gender conversation front-of-mind in boardrooms, job interviews and the aspirations of our girls in classrooms and universities. And I can tell you first-hand that women in logistics are flying the flag, every day, for gender diversity. Luckily, more and more women are seeing logistics as an industry they want to be a part of.

Breaking through biases doesn’t happen overnight. But if we keep pushing - together, the future is ever brighter for girls and women everywhere.”?