The gender car gap

As I read Andrew’s story about the lack of car enthusiasts among his children’s generation relative to his own, I felt moved to put fingers to keyboard because my experience has been so very different.

His is an understandably male perspective because, as he points out, he never met a female petrolhead when he was young, and it is true that when I was a girl back in Portugal the fact my school books were plastered with pictures of cars made me not merely something of an outlier among my friends but probably quite weird.

Not that I let it stop me. Much to the dismay of my girlfriends I’d venture out, flip phone in hand, camera on, to capture any faintly exotic cars I could find in the wild – and by exotic, I mean anything without a European badge on it, like a Honda S2000; bonus points for the rarer sight of a Lexus IS200. Remember, I was a small town girl. I had no one with whom to share my badly taken, shaky images, but I’d keep them for my own, mementos from the world’s most boring safari.