Mechanics Stories: women driving change
With a new story about mechanics, BAMM is celebrating women in the automotive workplace - women who are gaining space within a male dominated industry. This is a story about Laura and her team at Spanners With Manners, London’s first all female garage.
Laura Kennedy has been working in the automotive industry for 20 years. Six years ago, her and her wife Siobhan opened their garage Spanners With Manners.
“Having been in the motor trade for so long, everywhere I’ve worked obviously I’ve been the only girl.”
Just off the A406 motorway in North London sits what looks like a regular little garage. To an untrained eye, this is just another workshop – it has cars, jack stands and tools everywhere. Only on the second look do the differences jump out. Yes there are posters of women on the wall, but it’s a 1960s Wonder Woman, not a magazine spread or soft-core calendar. A stained towel sits on the side of an oil dispenser and if you look closely, you can’t help but notice the patterns of a repurposed baby muslin cloth. A bold tiger print fridge standing straight appears in the middle of the gray concrete garage and you can spot a handbag lying flat on the office sofa, not to mention the coffee mug with Christopher Hemsworth’s face on it and the nameplate sitting on the office desk: big boss. In other words, this is female territory.
It is not spotless, or even calm. There’s frantic barking coming from the warm little office room where the owners' three small dogs are yapping at the phone ringing off the hook. You can hear Laura, Meghan and Angel at the back of the garage, chatting over the sound of roaring engines. They’re fixing the clutch of a silver Volkswagen. This general air of dishevelment and chaos is really not so different to the other garages. However, there are distinctions.
“For some reason when you put a group of blokes together they kind of become like a school playground. They cover someone's tools in grease or they will hit someone in the stick when they leave and it just makes you think ‘for Christ sake you’re 45 years old’ and they row about stuff, they scream at each other's faces. It’s simply not a nice environment to work in.”
Calling this garage you’d be forgiven for expecting a female voice initially and then for things to revert to stereotype in the workshop. But when you ask to speak to the head mechanic, the manager, the owner, every voice you hear on the phone is female. It’s not a gimmick, and even more weirdly, it’s not even deliberate – “I wouldn’t be opposed to blokes working here, but they’ve never applied.”
It is a simple fact that women are outnumbered by men in the automotive industry. But from engine bays to the managers’ offices, they are disrupting the narrative, proving that the road less traveled is not reserved solely for men.
“I’m sort of 90% self taught because none of the guys I worked with were not really up for showing me ‘this is what this is, this is how this works’ so I had to learn it myself. My advice is that if you really want to do it then just take it. Knowledge is power in this game and the more you know the more you can intimidate people with your knowledge and your craft and that’s just by putting dedication and wanting something.”
Typically, there is a certain amount of ‘knowledge gatekeeping’ that is standard in the auto mechanic industry. Spanners With Manners is quite groundbreaking and unique in the sense that they are making an effort to share and create open dialogues with customers: “We have people who come to us because they know they’re going to get the mickey out of them in other places but when they come here they feel confident because they know they’re not judged”, or fooled around.
Laura and her all female team probably sound like some kind of unique unicorn of feminine success - wonderful but also tragic in its solitude against the rest of the industry. Having considered expanding the operation, the main obstacle at this stage is the basic lack of female mechanics in the job pool: “Ideally in my head I would have loved to have a brand in East London, South London, West London but the reality is just that, at this moment, there’s not enough women in this game and it’s probably going to be 20 to 30 years before there are enough women that are getting into this.”
We believe change in the industry is happening, but is happening too slowly. And this doesn’t need to be spearheaded by workshops with a feminist agenda. “I don’t have any issue having a bloke here but also a bloke never came to look for a job. If a bloke was to come to work here they would have to be really easy going because - first of all you would have three women who would be above you and who would be telling you what to do. If someone was to come in they would have to be fine taking criticism and criticism should not be a bad thing”
Words by: Victoria Landell Mills and Hélène Jeunet
Photography by: Hélène Jeunet