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There are very few doors closed to women these days, but the trades are still a male-dominated world.
One woman in Regina is forging ahead and paving the way for others to come after her. Erin Vaughan says her shop, Kinetic Auto Service Ltd., is one of only two all-female-owned shops in Saskatchewan.
Vaughan is proud of that fact, but she wasn’t looking to break down barriers when she got into the trade — she said she was just looking through SIAST’s academic calendar.
“(I) didn’t get very far obviously. Automotive service technician wasn’t too far down the list. And I just thought, ‘Why not?’ I like working with my hands, I wanted to try something different and so that’s what I did,” she said.
Vaughan said she hadn’t spent a lot of time with or had a big interest in cars before that.
She went through the program and started working. Vaughan said she didn’t hit too many obstacles as she’s assertive and asks for what she wants.
“I was treated slightly differently, but oftentimes it was to my benefit, where, you know, ‘Oh, we won’t make her do that, it’s too hard,’ ” she said. “And in some cases I was OK with that, but in other cases I would be like, ‘No, I can do that.’ ”
She said she has probably run into more problems as a business owner, learning how to run things.
The last shop Vaughan worked at went bankrupt, so when the opportunity to open her own came up, she took it.
“I actually had never thought I would open my own shop because of the challenges that I saw from other shop owners,” she said.
She had a partner in the shop at first, but he recently left and now she’s the sole owner.
Vaughan said she tries to make the shop a place where women can feel comfortable, though she said she has found that all kinds of people can be uncomfortable in that environment.
The trades, in most cases, are still a mostly male environment, but Vaughan said she thinks that’s changing. She sees the trades getting more professional and she thinks that could help entice more women into, and make them more comfortable in, the work.
Vaughan doesn’t have a female auto technician in the shop right now, but that’s something she’s looking to change.
