Women Answer Call for More Drivers
When she started trucking over the road nearly 30 years ago, Dorothy “Dottie” Bryant figured she was probably one of the first of her gender to drive a big rig for a living. But she later discovered that at least one woman had preceded her — and by several decades.
At a tollbooth on the New Jersey Turnpike, Bryant, who was hauling a load of lumber, stopped to chat with a fellow woman driver. When asked how long she had been in the business, the woman said she had started while her husband was overseas fighting a war.
These days, that company is growing. More and more, trucking fleets are targeting women in their search for drivers. Much of the industry realizes that women, along with other so-called minority groups, such as African-Americans and Hispanics, are part of a great, underused labor pool.
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 |  Michael James - Transport Topics |
| Dorothy "Dottie" Bryant (left) and her daughter Kimaywin are among the industry’s 160,000 female truck drivers. |
“She had been driving since World War II, and there I was in the 1970s thinking, ‘Wow, I’m a pioneer,’ ” Bryant said in a recent interview. “Yet there were a whole lot of women out there [as truck drivers] that you just didn’t hear about, because they didn’t get the exposure in the news media. It was a humbling experience, but it also made me very proud to be in such company.”
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