DC Velocity - August 2010

she sees little pushback today from men at the corporate level, though she acknowledges it may be a different story “down in the weeds” in warehouses and distribution centers.

But in other ways, change has
come, or is coming. In January, Judy
McReynolds became CEO of truck-
ing giant Arkansas Best Corp., parent
of ABF Freight System. No one could
recall a woman before her being put
in charge of such a large transporta-
tion company that was not her own.

first chairwoman of the American Trucking Associations in the group’s 77- year history. In addition, women today run 11 state trucking associations, the most ever at one time.

In the public sector, Anne Ferro, former president of the Maryland Motor Truck Association, heads the Department of Transportation’s Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration. Deborah Hersman serves as chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board—only the third woman to do so in that agency’s 43- year history.

Long time coming

For women who’ve spent their careers in
logistics, progress can’t come soon
enough. Liz Lasater, founder and CEO of
full-service provider Red Arrow Logistics,
remembers that during her 20 years at big
international transportation firms, “my
male peers were more competitive with
me than they were with other men.”
Lasater, who held upper management
roles at her employers, recalls being fre-
quently “kept out of the loop” of need-to-
know information filtering down from
corporate headquarters. “At one company,
this went on for two years,” she says.

Lasater says the resistance from men came from within her own organizations, and not from vendors or customers. And it was more prevalent in the United States than abroad, she adds. “Throughout Asia and all the way down to India, it was always about business,” she says.

The challenge for women can be compounded if the business is family-owned. Rachel Parker, who is in the management program at trucker Covenant Transportation, the company co-founded by her parents in 1986, says she sometimes has to invoke her lineage to build credibility and be taken seriously by customers and vendors.

Parker says her mother, Jacqueline, like so many so-called trucking wives, was actively involved in the business but in back-office functions traditionally reserved for women while the men were out driving rigs or drumming up sales. “My father makes a point of saying that ‘My wife and I founded this company,’” she says.