Woman to woman: Teaching car maintenance classes

Story and photos by: Andrea Kelley

Graphics by: Rachel Wock

DURHAM, N.C. – Lisa Kowite just bought her own shop.

Old wood paneling is lying in tidy piles next to the now-bare walls. She’s slowly renovating the space, but today the garage door is open and the front of the shop is swept clean.

A tall Craftsman toolbox stands front and center, and Kowite has laid out tools on top of the shorter toolbox next to it.

Alden Rose, Kowite’s first student, stares at the assortment of ratchets and wrenches.

“This is a torque wrench,” Kowite says, picking up a heavy metal bar with a ratchet head at the top. She grips it at both ends and holds it out to demonstrate. “Keep in mind that all of these tools were designed for men, so none of them are going to fit you right.”

For the next hour, the two women review the different tools, how they work, and what they’re used for. 

This is Rose’s second class with Kowite, who launched FiredUp Automotive early in 2020. 

Kowite, an automotive technician who now works in Advance Auto Parts’ marketing department, started FiredUp as a way to teach women about cars in a place where they felt comfortable. 

“Women have a lot of concerns, I think, more than men do, about taking their car in for service,” Kowite said. “Whether someone is wanting to do more themselves to save money, or they just want to have more confidence when they go into a dealership, I feel like I’m in a good position to do that.”

Some of those concerns stem from a lack of female representation in the automotive industry.

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 2020 women made up just 9% of employees in the automotive repair and maintenance field. In North Carolina, women make up 6.1% of students enrolled in college automotive technician programs, an increase of 0.4% since 2014.

Kowite was one of those students. She started out as a middle school English teacher, but burned out and decided it was time to try something new. She enrolled in an introductory automotive class at Durham Technical Community College, “just to see if it would be a disaster.” She loved it.

Her instructor encouraged her to pursue a job in the front end of the business, communicating with the customers instead of working on cars, but she kept on. 

Kowite finished the two-year program and got a job at a dealership, where she met Marena Bauer, another female mechanic. 

Bauer attended DTCC a few years before Kowite and applied at the dealership for a mechanic’s job. She was hired as a receptionist, but continued to ask to move into a mechanic’s position.

“They kept kind of trying to steer me in other directions and offering positions in the office or moving towards management or something like that,” she said.

The dealership finally hired her as a mechanic, but her first few weeks weren’t easy.

“I remember my manager in the express lube telling everybody on my first day, ‘OK, you guys, you can’t cuss because we have a girl working down here,’” Bauer said. “Once they got to know me…everything kind of calmed down. I’ve felt respected there for the majority of the time I’ve been here.”

While many male-dominated industries have been working toward equality, the automotive industry is lagging.

Still, Bauer said she sees more women in the industry now than 10 years ago.

Kowite said she doesn’t think it’s typically hard for women to find a job in the automotive field.

“I was working on a degree,” she said. “I had good grades. I had good recommendations, I was already working on getting certifications. I think if you have all that stuff, they’re going to give anyone a chance. It’s really just a question of once you’re hired, can you do the work or not? That’s all they care about.”

Nathan Smith, who’s been the director of the Automotive Systems Technology program at DTCC since 2006, said he’s “absolutely” seen an increase in female students in the AST program.

“When you walk into the automotive program, the first thing you feel is, oh, this ain’t a bunch of good old boys,” Smith said. “You feel like, oh, I can do something here.”

He said equipment improvements have also made things easier for technicians in general.

“You don’t have to be able to bench press a Buick to be a mechanic,” he said. “The heavy lifting is done by hydraulics. To be successful in auto mechanics, you’ve got to have an analytical mind. That’s the key, and for whatever reason, it seems to me that young ladies a lot of times are better at that.” 

Yet there’s a long-standing myth, or assumption, that women are going to be treated unfairly or taken advantage of, whether they’re buying a car, shopping for auto parts, or taking their vehicle to a mechanic. 

“My female friends have told me so many stories that infuriate me about how they’re treated when they go to dealerships, or independent shops or anything like that,” Bauer said. “The blatant disrespect makes me so mad.” 

Bauer herself has experienced that, but said she has a method to combat it.

“I have a fairly abrasive personality if I sense the usual ‘here comes a dumb lady who’s gonna waste my time’ attitude, and it usually keeps people from disrespecting me to my face,” she said. “This has been my strategy for years, but women shouldn’t have to be rude to be respected. Kindness should not be misconstrued as ignorance.”

Kowite said she’s never seen anyone at the dealerships she’s worked for try to take advantage of a customer, but if an establishment is trying to take advantage, men and women are usually targeted equally.

“Whether men like to admit it or not, they typically don’t know any more about cars than women do,” she said. But the problem may also be the way proposed repairs are presented. 

When a dealership services a car, the technicians look it over for safety issues and necessary maintenance, and they are required to tell the customer if they find something unsafe. 

“We can’t have you driving out if you have a big brake problem, so we’re obligated to tell you about some things that you need,” Kowite said. But as in other industries, the technicians will also try to upsell other services they can perform.

“The only thing wrong with it is if it’s done in a way that makes you think that you have to do it,” she said.

She designed one FiredUp class to help women figure out the difference between necessary and unnecessary repairs, and how to tell if someone is trying to take advantage of them. 

“I can talk to them about how each system works and what they really need to do, what they don’t need to do, what can wait and how to make that decision,” Kowite said. She also discusses red flags to look for so customers know when they need to walk out and find a different mechanic.

Other dealerships and shops offer this type of classes for women, but FiredUp is unique because it’s taught by a woman.

“I feel like that’s where I can offer something kind of different, a safe place to ask the most basic questions,” Kowite said, “because I used to have those same questions.”

That’s what Rose was looking for when she heard about FiredUp. 

In her first class she learned how to safely use a jack to lift a car and how to jumpstart a dead battery, and today’s class has been all about tools.

With the tool demonstration over, Kowite hands Rose a stack of labeled index cards.

Test time. 

Rose quickly labels each wrench and ratchet laying on the tool box, and scores 100%.

“I haven’t really known a lot about cars,” Rose said, “But I definitely feel like I’m in the process of gaining knowledge.”

Bauer said FiredUp is a great program for people, like Rose, who don’t want to be mechanics, but want to understand cars better and feel more confident when they take their cars in for service.

“It’s so cool that she has created an environment for them to learn in where they know they won’t be judged, laughed at, or sexualized,” Bauer said. “Lisa is doing important work!”