High costs, poor public charging and manly marketing have skewed the electric car industry toward men, but women are encouraging their peers to go electric.
Vanessa Farrer, left, and her husband, Liam Flood, sit in BYD’s Shark, an electric car from China, in an Australian store. (Mridula Amin/for The Washington Post)
When Ashlea Wooten-Chapple bought her first electric car in 2022, she felt like it fit her life perfectly.
It was a Ford Mustang — just like her dad’s 1969 muscle car, which was still sitting in her mom’s garage with his initials stitched into its leather seats. But her electric version saved money on fuel, required less maintenance and had extra storage space that she could load up on Costco runs.
“I felt like Ford made this car for me,” she said. “It just makes sense for a busy mom or a career woman.”
But the marketing for EVs and online enthusiast communities didn’t always feel like they were made for her. Shortly after getting her car, she posted about it in an EV forum — only to get an onslaught of unkind comments and “a lot of mansplaining.” So, she started her own breakaway group geared toward women: the Mustang Mach-E Girls Club, which now counts 6,500 members.
“EVs are new,” she said. “It’s really important that women have a space where they can feel comfortable to ask a question or to celebrate because they’re so excited when they get the car.”
Wooten-Chapple is one of many people working to welcome more women into the world of electric vehicles, which has skewed heavily toward men for at least a decade.
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Men are twice as likely as women to own an EV, according to U.S. vehicle registration data gathered by the market research firm S&P Global Mobility. Men outnumber women slightly among car owners overall, but the gender gap is more than twice as wide for EVs as it is for gas-powered vehicles and hybrids.
“For EV sales to continue growing the way that they have over the past couple of years, it can’t just be a male-only thing. We’ve got to have women who are feeling comfortable” with EVs, said K.C. Boyce, vice president for automotive and energy research at the data analysis firm Escalent. “It has an impact on the ability for us to reach our climate goals, and it has impact on household budgets, with EVs being a lot cheaper to run than gas vehicles.”
Why men outnumber women as EV owners
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