Written by Martha Bytof
The UK’s shift to electric vehicles is often framed as one of the great stepping stones of the net zero transition. Sales are climbing, infrastructure is expanding, and the 2030 deadline for new petrol and diesel car sales looms as a genuine turning point for the industry. But if we take a closer look at who is actually behind the electric wheel we find that electric vehicles remain, overwhelmingly, a male purchase.
The core gap
According to Auto Trader’s No Driver Left Behind: Women and the Journey to Electric report, women hold 49% of UK driving licences, yet are buying EVs at a fraction of that rate. Indeed, a 2023 survey of over 2,000 people covered by This Is Money found that only 11% of EV owners in Britain identified as women. This isn’t a new phenomenon either – Statista data from as far back as November 2021 found 76% of UK EV drivers identified as men versus just 23% as women, suggesting this gap has been entrenched for years, not a passing side-effect of early adoption.
Women currently hold around 40% of all UK car registrations – a share that has grown steadily over the past five years, but which itself already sits below the 49% female share of driving licences. So the wider car market has never mirrored the driving population – but it’s nowhere near as skewed as EVs. Even more telling: among petrol or diesel drivers, the gender split is close to even, roughly 50/50. Put simply: petrol and diesel driving is basically at parity by gender, overall car registrations sit at around 35% female, and EVs are down at 23%. The EV gap isn’t just bigger than the driving-access gap – it’s bigger than the ordinary car-buying gap too.
What makes this more striking is that it isn’t simply a driving gap. The overall gender gap in UK driving licence ownership has been narrowing steadily among younger age groups – recent figures put licence ownership among 17–24-year-olds at roughly 44% for women versus 46% for men, close to parity. Women are learning to drive in numbers nearly equal to men. Yet when it comes to electric specifically, the split reverts to something closer to 50/50 for petrol and diesel versus a decisive minority for EVs. In other words: this isn’t a driving-access problem. It’s an EV-specific one.
The irony at the heart of it
Coming from a background of communications, and the study of behaviour more broadly, it’s well documented that women are often the ones driving household sustainability habits: recycling, reducing food waste, cutting back on single-use plastic, choosing greener products day to day. If anything, women are frequently the more environmentally conscious decision-makers in a household. So why does that consciousness fail to translate into the switch from petrol to electric?
The answer isn’t that women are less willing. It’s that the industry hasn’t made the switch feel like it’s for them.
Where the gap comes from
Part of it is a straightforward knowledge barrier. Studies attached to the Auto Trader report found a meaningful share of women believed EVs were more expensive to run than petrol or diesel cars, when in fact the opposite is typically true. Confidence gaps around charging, range, and running costs are consistently higher among women than men – not because the concerns are irrational, but because the information hasn’t reached them in a form that resolves those concerns.
Part of it is marketing. EV advertising has leaned heavily into performance, technology and innovation – perhaps a more traditional currency of car marketing aimed at men – while independent research suggests women prioritise practicality, safety, and lifestyle fit far more highly when choosing a car. This tracks with the broader pattern in car buying generally: research on US car-buying behaviour found only around 38% of women report feeling confident buying a car, and women are roughly twice as likely as men to be undecided about their choice. Their purchase decision-making leans toward affordability, durability and reliability over the luxury, performance-led branding more commonly aimed at men. Without meaning to, the industry has built a sales pitch that is not aimed at the buyer it most needs to win over.
Part of it is structural. Women make up just 17% of the UK’s engineering and technology workforce. The people designing the vehicles, planning the charging infrastructure, and writing the customer communications are disproportionately not the people the industry is failing to reach. Therefore, this might not be a coincidence – it’s a blind spot with a clear cause.
Why I care about this from a corporate stance
I believe that barriers like these are rarely fixed by one landmark policy; they’re worn down by hundreds of small decisions made inside ordinary organisations – the language used in a customer email, the assumptions built into a piece of design, the “default user” imagined in a boardroom. Anyone making decisions, writing copy, or shaping design has some ability to either reinforce a blind spot or close it.
Glasgow’s experience as the UK’s first self-declared “feminist city” is a useful model here, even outside the world of electric car charging. The council’s approach to feminist urbanism didn’t start with a grand redesign of the city – it started with a simple discipline: stop treating women’s experience as an afterthought in decisions about transport, safety and public space, and instead build their perspective into the process from the start. Turning this around means focussing on better lighting, more walkable routes, safer transport planning which ended up benefiting everyone, not just women. That’s the pattern worth borrowing: incorporating a mindset that is trying to include everyone, which we aim to translate into our EV charging hubs as well.
The EV gender gap is, on the surface, a story about cars. But it’s really a story about what happens when an industry designs for the customer it already has, rather than the one it needs. When wanting to make electric cars the norm, this is crucial. If we can offer a charging experience that is accessible, safe and works for everyone – I am certain people are more prone to switch to EVs. Destination charging – parked at a hotel, a shopping centre, somewhere with light, people, and time to spare – is quietly one of the best entry points for closing that gap. It’s calmer, safer, and more forgiving of the “I don’t know enough about this yet” hesitation that keeps showing up in the data. That’s exactly the kind of experience more women say they want.
A demand for the new UK and Scottish Governments
This is why we’re putting our weight behind point 3 of Greenwheel Electric’s EV Manifesto, published ahead of the Scottish Parliament elections. It highlights that fewer than one in five EV drivers in Scotland are women, despite women consistently showing more environmental awareness in their vehicle choices – and it locates a meaningful part of the cause in safety concerns at charging hubs specifically, rather than reluctance about electric driving in general. We, at Greenwheel Electric, are already working to address this at our own sites, but the manifesto is clear that it can’t stop there: it calls on the Scottish Government to introduce minimum safety standards for charging providers across the board, so no driver’s sense of safety depends on which operator happens to run the hub nearest them.
We’d extend that same call to the new UK Government too. Charging infrastructure doesn’t stop at the border, and neither should the expectation that it’s designed with every driver’s safety in mind from the outset. Minimum safety standards for charging hubs – covering things like lighting, visibility, staffing or monitoring, and clear reporting routes – shouldn’t be a competitive differentiator between providers. They should be common ground amongst all EV charging providers.
This article focuses specifically on women and EVs, but Greenwheel Electric is committed to destination charging spaces that are safe and accessible for everyone.
Sources: Auto Trader – No Driver Left Behind: Women and the Journey to Electric · This Is Money, 2023 · Statista, UK EV Drivers by Gender · SMMT / One in 22 vehicles now zero emissions · SMMT / Carwow, UK car registrations by gender · UK Department for Transport, historic licence and ownership data · YouGov, EV owners vs petrol/diesel owners · Engineering UK – Engineering and Technology Workforce · CJ Pony Parts (US market, car-buying confidence data), citing CBS News and Edmunds