Pop culture often dictates that women and car culture don’t mix. Perennial classic car flicks like Bullitt and Vanishing Point can be exhilarating to watch, but a woman’s place in the films is nearly nonexistent—and if present at all, she is relegated to being a metaphorical hood ornament.

A contemporary depiction of a woman as a “gearhead” has not hit the mainstream, but it doesn’t bother Kat Perry, who has been elbow deep into cars since she was a teenager.

When Perry’s dad first showed her how to check the oil in a car, and taught her at fourteen years old how to take apart an engine, Perry was hooked. She has a passion for classic cars, she says, because she likes to go fast and she prefers the “tough looking body style.”

Perry pulls the cover off her project—a 1967 Camaro. When she first got the car, she would often work on it after dark until she got the engine running. “It still needs work,” she says. Right now, she is in the process of stripping off the cherry red paint. The hood shows spots of gray primer peeking through. Looking at her hands, she describes the phantom vibrations she feels long after she stops sanding off the tired paint.
With four years under her belt as an automotive technician, Perry says it’s hard to find other women who do mechanic work, and when she first did work on a high school friend’s car he was pretty surprised. “I was always considered girly in high school,” she says.

When she goes to get oil or parts for her Camaro, her long blond hair and delicate features often lead people to think she doesn’t know anything about cars, and the employees of the store encourage her to buy more expensive products or parts that her car doesn’t need. “They will recommend more expensive oil types, and they will try to see what I know. Most of the time they are surprised,” she laughs.

Women make up less than one percent of the maintenance and repair industry, according to the Bureau of Labor and Statistics. But Ben Macri, department head of the automotive technology department at City College of San Francisco, says he has a whole garage full of women. There are always female students, and he says that it is very common to see women in automotive technology today. “The field is changing—things are much more technical now,” says Macri.

Michou Olivera is a classic car enthusiast who works at Luscious Garage, which specializes in hybrid vehicles and prides itself on being an environmentally friendly shop. It is not exactly a welcoming environment for gas-guzzling muscle car lovers, so Olivera has to keep her true passion under wraps to prevent riling up the clientele.

“More women should be into cars,” Olivera says as she reaches into a stack of papers, digs around, and pulls out issues of Car Craft and Hot Rod magazines. With a mischievous smile, she explains how she has to keep them hidden away from the customers. She got the job at Luscious while studying automotive technology at City College of San Francisco.
Olivera’s eyes light up when she’s asked about her 1967 Chevelle. Photos of her three classic cars, including the black Chevelle, are hung above her workspace at Luscious Garage.

There are only three cars sitting in the small space at Luscious, and it looks more like a showroom than a workspace. Carolyn Coquillette’s shop throws every paradigm regarding the way a garage should appear right back in her critics faces. The environmentally friendly, hybrid specialty shop, with its clean floors and artsy paintings hanging on the walls, illustrates the changes in the industry.

Coquillette wanted to offer her clients something beyond the usual garage. “People who own hybrids are probably open to something different,” she says. “Most people are thrown off when they walk in to the shop,” adds Coquillette, “but by the time they leave they want to hug us.”

And Coquillette is all for women in the automotive field. “I started wrenching eight years ago,” she says. “I didn’t like not knowing how to fix something on my own car.” She also doesn’t see anything odd about being a woman in the car industry “I grew up in Michigan [and] everybody worked on cars.”

Still, nearly every day a customer comes into the EconoLube and Tune where Kat Perry works and approaches the male mechanic on duty first. “Sometimes customers approach the guys—they think they know more.” But she doesn’t seem fazed. “It’s what you’d expect, being this kind of job.”

It still may come as a surprise to see a woman under the hood of a car as opposed to sitting on top. To Perry, doling out that surprise each time has become a part of life. Whether it’s a lifelong passion or the next logical step to take, a woman’s place in the garage is becoming less of an anomaly.