Women make up roughly half of the working-age population, but in HGV driving their representation remains tiny. Office for National Statistics data cited by Driver Hire Training, covering the 12 months to September 2025, puts the proportion of female HGV drivers at around 1%. The Department for Transport’s 2024 road freight overview, using ONS Annual Population Survey data, produced a slightly higher estimate: women accounted for 2% of an estimated 280,000 HGV drivers.
The precise figure should be treated cautiously given the relatively small number of women in the occupation, but both datasets point to the same striking imbalance: approximately 98–99% of HGV drivers are men.
That disparity persists despite the industry’s continuing need for drivers. According to the latest Department for Transport statistics, 26% of HGV businesses reported driver vacancies in the final quarter of 2025, up from 24% a year earlier.
Better pay or benefits elsewhere, existing drivers leaving the industry and driver retirement were the three most commonly cited reasons for vacancies.
Against that background, the continued absence of women from the driver workforce represents a sizeable recruitment challenge – and potentially an opportunity.
‘I wanted to prove to myself that I could’
Donna is among the small number of women who have recently entered the profession. She obtained her Class 2 HGV licence on 4 July 2025 and has since been driving refrigerated vehicles for the food industry, primarily delivering to supermarket regional distribution centres.
It was a career change, but driving was hardly unfamiliar territory. Donna had previously worked for Royal Mail and other delivery companies, while her former husband, grandfather, uncle and son have all been HGV drivers.
Donna, sitting in the cab of a lorry
“I decided to get my Class 2 HGV licence because I thought: I could do that, and I wanted to prove to myself that I could,” she told Driver Hire Training.
For Donna, obtaining the licence itself was relatively straightforward. One of the bigger challenges was returning to test conditions after years of ordinary car driving.
“When you’ve been driving cars for so long, you pick up bad habits over time, and you have to focus on picking up good habits again,” she said.
Does HGV driving require physical strength?
One perception Donna believes continues to deter women is that they will not be physically capable of doing the job.
The reality depends heavily on the type of haulage work involved. Some jobs can involve significant manual handling, while in others the driver has relatively little physical involvement with the load.
In Donna’s current role, she says the most demanding task is coupling and uncoupling.
“For me, the most physically demanding part of the job is winding the trailer legs up and down,” she said. “The rest is just driving and reversing into position.”
She believes assumptions about women’s physical capabilities nevertheless remain widespread.
“Another thing that needs to change is the assumption that female drivers can’t physically do the job,” she said. “We can. We are out here proving them wrong.”
For Donna, the bigger problem starts before women even apply.
“I think the biggest barrier holding women back is that it’s not promoted enough that being an HGV driver is a job that women can do,” she said. “In the past, it was considered a man’s job, and not enough has been done to debunk this assumption.”
Toilets remain a very practical barrier
Changing perceptions alone, however, will not remove all the obstacles. One of the problems Donna highlights is familiar to drivers across the industry: inadequate welfare facilities.
For women, the shortage or poor condition of toilets can create an additional barrier.
“Sometimes you’ll go to places where we are delivering, or to a truck stop, and there will be one toilet for both genders,” Donna said. “With so many male drivers using them, you can imagine these toilets aren’t always in the best state for women.”
The problem goes considerably wider than one driver’s experience.
Poor access to toilets at delivery and collection points has repeatedly been raised as a welfare issue for UK lorry drivers. Unite has continued to call for improvements, arguing that despite commitments from government and employers, drivers still face inadequate access to toilets at customer premises and insufficient roadside facilities.
The issue affects male drivers too, but inadequate privacy and sanitary facilities can create particular difficulties for women – making infrastructure designed overwhelmingly around a male workforce part of the recruitment problem itself.
The concern also regularly surfaces in discussions among women already driving HGVs. Female drivers have described having to plan journeys around toilet availability and questioned what options are available when spending nights in their vehicles.
‘You don’t have to work nights’
There is another image of HGV driving that Donna thinks deserves challenging: that entering the industry inevitably means spending nights away from home. Some driving jobs certainly require nights out or extended periods away. Others do not.
Donna initially worked Monday-to-Friday day shifts but found that she was seeing less of her family than she wanted. She therefore reduced her working week. She now works three day shifts.
“You don’t have to work nights, and you don’t have to be away from home,” she said. “It can be a really flexible job.”
That distinction could be particularly important for recruitment.
International and long-distance haulage may involve substantial time away, but regional distribution, construction, waste, supermarket and other transport operations can offer very different working patterns.
If potential recruits associate the entire HGV sector with weeks on the road, some may therefore be dismissing a career without knowing the range of jobs available.
Other women are making the same career change
Donna is far from the only woman to have entered HGV driving after pursuing a different career. Anna Gicko, for example, told ATL Haulage in 2025 that she had wanted to drive trucks from a young age but initially followed a different path. During the Covid-19 pandemic, she decided to retrain and obtained her HGV licence in her thirties. At the time of Gicko’s interview, ATL said it had seven female drivers in its workforce.
Other accounts from women working in UK haulage reveal a mixture of experiences. Some describe encountering assumptions about whether women can handle vehicles or physical tasks, while the availability of appropriate toilets repeatedly emerges as a concern. But being part of a heavily male-dominated industry does not necessarily mean receiving a hostile reception.
Donna says one of the things that surprised her positively was the willingness of other drivers to help.
“There are so many experienced guys in the industry who will help you out,” she said. “People who work at different companies, from different countries, it doesn’t matter. If anyone sees you struggling, they’ll help.”
She says experienced drivers in the yard regularly offer advice, whether she is dealing with an unfamiliar vehicle or another practical problem.
Read more: Driver retention is no longer just about pay: predictability and work-life balance now lead
Can haulage afford to overlook half the workforce?
The gender imbalance in HGV driving will not provide a simple answer to Britain’s recruitment problems. Driver shortages and vacancies are connected to a much broader set of issues, including pay, working conditions, retirement, working hours and the attractiveness of the occupation itself. Recruiting more women would not remove those problems.
But the numbers raise a difficult question for the industry. More than a quarter of HGV businesses were reporting vacancies at the end of 2025, while women still account for only around one or two in every 100 drivers.
Improving recruitment may therefore require more than encouraging women to obtain an HGV licence. It also means examining whether working conditions, roadside infrastructure and the way the profession is presented make it realistic and attractive for them to stay.
For Donna, however, the message to women considering the profession is much simpler.
“Go for it and do what you want to do,” she said. “You’ve got nothing to lose.”
