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Concerns including safety at charging points and range anxiety mean that women are lagging behind men in the transition to electric vehicles, prompting calls for action to narrow the gender gap. 

While women have been found to make more sustainable choices in many areas, around the world men are more likely to embrace the shift to EVs. Auto Trader’s 2023 survey, No Driver Left Behind: Women and the Journey to Electric, found that a third of men in the UK would consider an EV compared with a fifth of women.

Multiple studies have shown women control or influence a majority of purchases, including cars. But some believe that understanding of female buyers’ needs and preferences is weakened by women’s underrepresentation in employment in the automobile sector — potentially costing the industry and slowing EV rollout.

Concerns about new technologies are common to all but safety is a particular issue for women during the transition to EVs. Range anxiety is one worry for many women considering the switch, says Rebecca Day, chief executive and co-founder of She’s Electric, a UK-based company that focuses on encouraging women to consider electric vehicles. Women may be concerned about becoming marooned when battery charge runs out, for example.

Another serious problem is safety at charging points. Kate Tyrrell co-founded rating system ChargeSafe after feeling unsafe when charging her EV. The service assesses the safety of charging points throughout the UK and awards a score out of five stars.

“I do find it quite troubling the amount of sites that are poorly lit or are put into areas that are not quite visible to passing traffic,” Tyrrell says. “This becomes a concern for personal safety from a female perspective.”

When an electric car is plugged into a charging point, for example, the driver is effectively trapped as there are no auto-eject buttons in EVs. To leave the charging station, drivers must first get out of their vehicle and unplug.

“You’re essentially a sitting duck, which is an uncomfortable thought,” says Tyrrell, noting that you cannot put your car into drive while charging. “When you are literally tethered to a machine in an area that people can’t see, with no quick escape route, that’s a really scary experience.”

Auto Trader’s “No Driver Left Behind” survey found that only 43 per cent of female respondents would feel safe using public chargers. 

The UK government recently reconfirmed 2030 as the cut-off for sales of new petrol and diesel cars, although it watered down rules to allow the sale of full- and plug-in hybrid vehicles until 2035. But Tyrrell says the charging landscape in the UK is already an obstacle to EV adoption. “If we can’t fix this by 2030, I don’t know how we are going to shorten that gender gap.”

Melanie Shufflebotham is co-founder and chief operating officer of Zapmap, an app and service that maps EV charging points in the UK, showing the type of charger and how many points are available.

“As the charging network was built up, sometimes these rapid chargers were put . . . at the back of a car park” and were “a little bit isolated”, she says — but “now that model has really moved on a lot”. 

Shufflebotham adds that people in the sector are now thinking more about the user experience, as the number of charging hubs in the UK has grown from 28,460 at the end of 2021 to more than 73,000 by the end of 2024, according to Zapmap data.

She says there is now a “whole category of what we call destination chargers”: high-powered chargers installed at convenient places such as gyms and supermarkets where people would normally need to park.

Another factor in the EV gender gap may be that they have generally been marketed towards men. “Women have been excluded, ignored, patronised and mansplained to by brands, marketing and the industry, almost to the point of total alienation,” wrote Erin Baker, editorial director at Auto Trader UK and author of the No Driver Left Behind report.

One research participant said they wanted the parts and functions of EVs simply explained in “lay person language”. 

Day, of She’s Electric, says that EVs have been marketed as “spaceships” but a majority of women “just want a car”. She adds that one difficulty with selling EVs is that the cars are no longer simply products but involve lifestyle changes and need to be marketed in this way.

Day recalls being part of panels where women’s questions about how long they would have to wait for the vehicle to charge have been brushed off.

“You’ve got to be really honest about this . . . you can’t sit there [as if] it’s going to be completely pain-free and this is some kind of utopia,” she says.

Looking to the future of charging, Tyrrell says: “I would like to see legislation for the industry where security cameras and lighting are mandatory.

“The industry also lacks a regulatory body to govern quality in site delivery, which is something we desperately need to protect the EV drivers of the future,” she adds.