The first meeting of the Women of Trucking Advisory Board (WOTAB) on Wednesday, Nov. 9, made headlines as the initial convening of an advisory board sure to have policy influence. It also brought news of a Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration report called "Crime Prevention for Truckers," geared to better understanding the nature and prevalence of harassment and assaults against truckers, specifically women and minorities.
As may well be expected, this first, daylong WOTAB meeting featured a lot of detailed discussion about women in various trucking workplaces, but ultimately it led to raising the profile of plenty key issues that impact all drivers.
WOTAB, comprised of 16 diverse founding members, was created to focus on recruiting, retaining, supporting and ensuring the safety of women commercial motor vehicle drivers and strengthening the trucking industry as a whole. The board's mandate, as spelled out in last year's highway bill and promoted as part of President Joe Biden's Trucking Action Plan, seeks to open up the trucking trade to more women, as they currently make up just 7% of operators.
Yet much of the policy discussed at the first meeting went way beyond a gender binary and into ideas that would fundamentally impact trucking generally. That is to say, the ideas discussed on that day don't just matter to the women of trucking, but the men, too.
Joyce Brenny, a Minnesota-based small fleet owner who sat across from Department of Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and FMCSA Administrator Robin Hutcheson, said just the bare fact of holding the meeting kind of blew her mind.
"It felt surreal," she said. "Like a real, honest 'yeah we're finally listening' kind of moment. I'm almost at a loss for words."
Brenny, who started driving herself in 1980, said the subject of crime and harassment at times devolved into finger-pointing and fighting that she tried to steer back toward constructive conversation. Fellow board member Soledad Munoz Smith, operations VP for 175-truck, Texas-headquartered Munoz Trucking, agreed there was a "back and forth" between some members, though she tried to keep the focus on solutions to problems herself.
