Accelerating female inclusion in the automotive industry

Deloitte’s 2025 industry study confirmed that more is required to ensure better female inclusion in automotive. We consider the study’s findings against mobility sector initiatives and UK employers’ current and future legal obligations to female staff.

Learning from Deloitte’s 2025 industry study

Deloitte published its 2025 report entitled “Driving diversity and inclusion for women in the automotive industry” following a global survey of automotive professionals across OEMs, dealerships, suppliers and car finance companies. The report paints a clear picture: despite increasing awareness of the importance of diversity, women are still underrepresented at all levels in the sector, and especially so in senior management.

According to the report, many in automotive acknowledge that progress on gender parity has stalled, and that women continue to face persistent barriers to advancement. A striking 68% of survey respondents perceived that women are underrepresented in automotive leadership positions. This lack of female role models at the top, combined with unconscious bias and inflexible workplace policies, has contributed to a sense of stagnation in recent years.

The report recommends that businesses in the sector move away from rhetoric and superficial changes and toward those which make a practical difference to their staff, such as a genuine openness to flexible working arrangements, equitable compensation and benefits and an open and supportive culture. The report emphasised the importance of training, both to support reskilling and upskilling in a changing industry and to spread awareness of unconscious bias at all levels.

Deloitte also stressed the role that mentorship and sponsorship can play in supporting career progression and returning to work after maternity leave or a career break (to mitigate against what Deloitte refers to as the ‘vanishing women’ phenomenon).

Finally, the report noted that leadership buy-in and accountability – both within the business and to external stakeholders – is crucial to making meaningful change. Any culture is fostered from the top down and supported by regular reviews of data and staff surveys.

Other gender inclusion initiatives in automotive

Deloitte’s article follows a number of initiatives in recent years aimed at improving diversity an inclusion in the UK automotive industry.

In 2020, a group led by the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT) set up a diversity and inclusion taskforce to spearhead the delivery of a new DEI campaign spanning to 2025. It published its SMMT Group Diversity and Inclusion Strategy, which set out five key pillars: empower, inspire, enrich, engage and sustain. By targeting those pillars, the SMMT Group’s aim was to see year-on-year improvements to staff survey results and an increased percentage of underrepresented groups in automotive by 2025.

In late 2022, the Automotive Council launched the UK’s first automotive Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Charter, which contains a number of pledges to create equitable workplaces, including: (i) removing bias and encouraging diversity in recruitment and promotion; (ii) supporting career progression through training, sponsorship and mentorship; (iii) appointing a board-level DEI champion; and (iv) collecting and reporting DEI data. The Charter currently has 27 signatories across the breadth of the industry.

In 2023, this was followed by the Automotive Council’s best practice guide, “Shifting gears: How to better recruit and retain women n the UK automotive sector” and the launch of the automotive 30% club, by which OEMs pledged to increase the proportion of women in its workforce to 30% by the end of the decade. For more discussion of this, see: UK Auto Industry pledges to address diversity shortfall. Given that the Automotive Council’s membership represents 99% of British vehicle manufacturing, this is a significant commitment.

Gender inclusion and employment law

Employers with 250 or more employees (which will include OEMs) should now be used to analysing gender-related data given the introduction in 2017 of a legal requirement to publish gender pay gap statistics and submit them to the government. This has allowed for greater scrutiny of the make-up of large automotive employers and contributed to the initiatives aimed at closing that gap.

Employers must also be mindful that any apparently neutral policies or practices could be indirectly discriminatory on grounds of sex where they unjustifiably place women at a substantial disadvantage. A classic example of this is a lack of flexibility around working hours or shift patterns, given that this could create difficulties for primary caregivers (which case law accepts are more likely to be women). Awards for discrimination are uncapped and can be significant, including compensation for injury to feelings.

In light of the risks of indirect discrimination, it is often appropriate for employers to offer a degree of flexibility to their working arrangements. Cementing this is the statutory right to make a flexible working request, which can be made by an employee regardless of length of service and must be dealt with by employers reasonably, in accordance with the statutory process. The request can cover changes to working hours, times of work and the place of work (whether from home or another office). Employers (and employment tribunals) must consider Acas’ Code of Practice on requests for flexible working in relation to any such request.

The Employment Rights Bill (ERB), expected to be implemented later in 2025, will strengthen the right to flexible working by specifying that employers can only refuse a valid request where it is reasonable to do so in light of one of the specified statutory reasons for refusal. That requirement for reasonableness (which is not defined) is expected to make it harder for employers to say no.

The ERB also adds to the recently implemented employers’ duty to prevent sexual harassment. The duty, which came into force in October 2024, allows tribunals to add up to 25% to damages awarded for a successful sexual harassment claim where an employer failed to take reasonable steps to prevent it. As it stands, this duty often requires thorough risk assessments, staff surveys, meaningful training, robust policies and sensitive handling of complaints. Under the ERB, the duty to prevent will be enhanced to:

i. require “all” reasonable steps be taken;

ii. cover all forms of harassment, rather than only sexual (and will therefore include harassment related to sex); and

iii. introduce liability for an employer where the harasser is a third-party.

Projections for the automotive industry

The automotive industry has been alive to the need to take DEI seriously for some years now. However, the findings of the Deloitte report suggest that more still needs to be done. As Deloitte rightly noted, there is a clear business case for taking DEI seriously – numerous studies have found a correlation between a diverse business and increased productivity and innovation.

As we discussed in our earlier article (Navigating automotive workforce restructures amid falling UK car production), 2025 has brought several challenges to the automotive industry already, be it due to the pivot to electric vehicles, the adoption of artificial intelligence or supply chain disruption. The industry therefore already needs to be open to change.

Employment law is also currently developing, with the statutory duty to prevent sexual harassment still relatively new and the ERB set to bring in the biggest set of changes to workplace laws in a generation.

This time of change presents OEMs and others in automotive with a key opportunity to weave DEI into the fabric of a future-proofed business which facilitates – and benefits from – the success of its female staff.