The Automotive 30% Club Purpose, Our Members & What We Do.
We are a network of over 70 automotive CEOs and MDs who have made a commitment to be inclusive leaders and build diverse gender-balanced businesses.
The Club was founded by Julia Muir in March 2016 with 12 Founder Members to change the game in the sector. We are not a women's network, and the vast majority of our members are men, but we recognise the irrefutable value that women's and all specialist EDI networks bring to create inclusive cultures and encourage members to support such networks.
![An online meeting discussing Inspiring Conversation Global Parents Day [screenshot]](https://www.automotive30club.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/Inspiring-Conversation-Global-Parents-Day-750x444.jpg)
We specialise in sharing best practice on how to increase female representation, because they are the most underrepresented group and untapped talent pool for automotive, that of course includes intersectional women. Caroline Criado Perez's influential book "Invisible Women" brilliantly educates us that unless we have women clearly on our agenda, the tendency in society and business is always to default to the male version of anything, or to simply assume women can be catered for by tweaking or adapting what was designed for men. So, the sector needs to counteract that and have a plan to specifically increase diverse female representation, by ensuring we are no longer inadvertently excluding women through our language, imagery, working practices and culture.
We do this through a large number of digital meetings taking place every month throughout the year where representatives from member companies share best practice and solutions. Julia Muir also delivers personalised workshops tailored to the individual needs of the member company. The members pay a membership fee to cover the administration costs of this huge level of activity.
To find out more about membership, please visit the Join page.
There is no fee to join in with our LinkedIn campaigns #WhoInspiresYou? #ThisGirlIsMe and #MyApprenticeshipStory, and they are all also open to non-members. Our aim is to reap the business benefits of high-performing gender-balanced teams, bringing together different lived experiences and perspectives in an inclusive culture. We share inclusive leadership practices, values, and policies to tackle our skills deficit and get our careers on the radar of wider recruitment markets.
We vehemently oppose positive discrimination because discrimination in any form is wrong, and we help members put in place innovative practices to ensure they will attract, select, and retain the best person for the job. Our 30% by 2030 KPI is a metric that enables us to measure progress, and to scrutinise the root causes of why women are so underrepresented in certain roles versus the general population and our automotive customer base. It is not a quota.
So, we are very busy taking action and implementing changes to ensure automotive organisations are employers of choice for both sexes.
“30 by 30” Strategy
This seeks to achieve business transformation through people - understanding that diverse gender balanced teams lead to better business success. The strategy has six steps:
- Know Your Data - be accountable for progress
- Reach Out to New Talent Pools – find new sources of skills
- Recalibrate for Inclusion – design for productivity not presenteeism
- Welcome In The Women - recruit equitably
- Pull Women Through The Pipeline – promote proportionately
- Hold On To Your Investment – maintain the balance
Members share an enthusiasm to improve the gender balance and diversity in the sector, to improve the image of the industry, serve the customer base better, enhance company performance, and make the workplace an equitable environment by removing unconscious bias and obstacles that prevent talented diverse women progressing up the career ladder.
The Automotive 30% Club Collaborate To Accelerate and Share Best Practice, Using Our Collective Intelligence to Create Innovative Solutions
Our annual conference brings together both industry speakers and external guest speakers to inspire and inform our members and their "30 by 30 leaders" to share company case studies and best practice. We very carefully curate the content to include advice on how to develop and lead an inclusive culture from respected automotive leaders, as well as Equity Diversity and Inclusion experts from outside the sector. A popular session in our conference has become the ideation session where members work on a shared challenge to find workable solutions. Attendance at the conference is included in the membership fee.
To find out more about our past conferences please visit the Conferences page.
We have closed circle digital meetings that provide a forum for members to candidly discuss key topics and share what has worked in their businesses. Such group meetings are quarterly and include the Retailer CEOs, the Aftermarket Leaders, the OEM People Directors, the 30 by 30 Leaders, the Early Careers Group, and we are planning to launch a Finance and Leasing Group by the end of the year.
We have 11 members who have chosen to be Patron Gold members. They meet quarterly and provide Julia Muir with advice and guidance on steering the direction of the Club and its priorities. All our activity sponsors are also Patrons. We have 16 Silver Members who have stepped forward to be strong advocates and ambassadors for the Club, who meet quarterly to share best practice and take part in communications campaigns to demonstrate their commitment to building gender-balanced businesses.
You can find out more about our Patron/Gold, Silver, and Standard Members by visiting the Members page.
We hold three large open digital events per year called Inspiring Conversations. These take place to mark International Women's Day, International Men's Day, and Global Parents' Day. The format is a panel of interesting guests from various roles within the sector, sharing their stories and raising awareness of issues.Mazda UK and Toyota GB, both Patron member companies, run cohorts of retailers who are Auto30Club members to share best practice within the brand. Julia Muir attends these meetings to provide advice and assistance where required. So, there are lots of opportunities to share best practice and learning across the sector, as well as valuable signposting to experts from outside the sector.
To find out more about the meetings and events we organise, please visit the Meetings page.
The Purpose of Our LinkedIn Campaigns.
The #WhoInspiresYou? Campaign encouraged people from across the whole automotive sector (not just from our member companies) to name and fame women who are ensuring other women can have successful automotive careers. Each post served as a nomination for our 2024 Inspiring Automotive Women Awards, and from them we will select our award winners to be named in January, and one of them will be selected as the overall Inspiring Automotive Woman of the Year and will receive her award at The Institute of the Motor Industry (The IMI) Awards Dinner on March 13th. The campaign also gives industry colleagues the opportunity to give public recognition to women who inspire them, which many nominees find very motivating.
We feature our IAW Award winners in a series of short, filmed interviews called Inspiring Stories, to reveal more about them, their careers & the advice they have for other women. To find out more about our awards and read the stories of the amazing women in the industry, visit the Inspiring Automotive Women section.
In November we will repeat our successful #ThisGirlIsMe campaign, that aims to position automotive women as relatable role models to girls, because If They Can See It, They Can Be It! It will coincide with diverse women from our Early Careers Group member companies visiting schools to explain their route from girl to successful automotive woman. We particularly urge women in technical and operational roles to visit to break gender stereotypes.
Our other Early Careers Group campaign is #MyApprenticeshipStory in February to coincide with National Apprenticeship week in England. This showcases the diverse variety of women undertaking a large range of automotive apprenticeships. Again, this coincides with female apprentices from our member companies visiting schools to tell them the story of how they became an apprentice, what they do, and what they like about it.
We believe in the importance of visible female role models in attracting other women to careers in the sector. For many years we have evaluated school visits to both single sex and mixed groups & have found that female role models are essential to engage with girls to make them realise the sector employs women, yet boys also always find the visits from women equally valuable.
We also strongly believe that showcasing on social media the women undertaking a huge variety of non-stereotypical roles, helps to counteract the image the sector has of only employing men. The female names being shown in our campaigns are still only a small proportion of the male names and faces that appear daily in all forms of media representing the sector, so we are aiming to show a gender balance and that we don't exclude women.
To find out more about our LinkedIn campaigns please visit the Campaigns page.