Building Equality Into Self-Driving: Stakeholder Perspectives and Research Findings from CCAM-ERAS

Autonomous mobility will not just change how we move, it will reshape who gets to build, run, and benefit from that future. This piece builds on themes first raised in a recent PAVE Europe webinar, held in collaboration with the CCAM-ERAS project, and explores them further: what does it actually mean to build equality into self-driving, and what will it take to achieve it in both representation and outcomes?

Representation is still uneven, but the door is opening

The webinar was candid that the sector remains male-dominated, even as attitudes and demographics shift. Some organisations working in autonomous mobility are already seeing meaningfully more balanced teams than the wider tech and engineering fields, driven partly by the appeal of emerging technology to a new generation of talent. But progress on headcount hasn't fully translated into progress on leadership: persistent biases and assumptions about who is suited to technical or engineering roles remain in play, particularly at senior levels.

The discussion pointed to a deeper root cause than recruitment pipelines alone: the conditioning that shapes career choices long before anyone applies for a job. If children are still being taught, implicitly or explicitly, what counts as a "male job" versus a "female job," then structural fixes need to start well before university, in early education, through visible role models, and through sustained exposure to STEM pathways from childhood.

On the industry side, closing the gap requires more than good intentions. Concrete organisational levers, mentoring programmes, flexible parental leave, and tying diversity outcomes to management performance and compensation, were raised as practical ways to move representation from an aspiration to something measured and owned.

Equality of outcomes: why representation changes the product, not just the workforce

Perhaps the more striking theme from the webinar was that representation isn't simply an internal workforce issue, it directly shapes the safety and usability of the technology itself. Men and women differ in travel patterns and in how they perceive and assess safety risk. A development team that reflects that diversity is better placed to design vehicles, services, and safety features that work for everyone, rather than defaulting to assumptions drawn from a narrower set of experiences. Decisions as fundamental as how emergency assistance is triggered, or whether a vehicle door should default to locked at night, are shaped by whose perspective is in the room when those features are designed.

This has a direct economic dimension too. Europe's transport and logistics sectors already face labour shortages, and expanding the available workforce will depend, in part, on attracting more women into roles that have historically excluded them, not because of unwillingness to do the work, but because of the conditions historically attached to it, from time away from home to physically demanding environments. As automation reshapes those conditions, it may open the sector to people it has previously shut out.

Equality of outcomes also extends to adoption. If autonomous vehicles and services aren't designed with women's safety concerns and usage patterns in mind from the outset, uptake itself will suffer, a reminder that inclusive design isn't a compliance exercise, but a commercial and public-trust imperative.

A growing evidence base

These themes are increasingly borne out by a wider body of research examining how AV acceptance, safety, and equity intersect, and what actually works in response.

Large-scale survey evidence backs up the idea that gender gaps in AV acceptance are real but not universal. A study of over 8,400 drivers across eight European countries found that men were consistently more willing to use, buy, and activate automated driving functions than women, but only in wealthier, higher gender-equality countries such as Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, and the UK. In lower-GDP countries with lower gender-equality scores, including Italy, Poland, Romania, and Spain, no significant gender gap emerged at all, and acceptance among both genders was higher overall than even male acceptance in the first group (Torrao et al., 2024). The authors suggest this may reflect that greater economic and social equality gives women more freedom to express reservations about a new technology, rather than gender itself driving scepticism ,reinforcing the point that acceptance gaps are shaped by context and conditions, not fixed traits.

Qualitative research digs further into what sits behind those numbers. In-depth interviews and focus groups with women across multiple countries found that safety, not technology scepticism, is the dominant concern, worry about being alone with strangers on driverless public transport, discomfort and past negative experiences with taxi drivers, and the practical burden mothers carry when travelling with children. Interestingly, the same women who were wary of driverless buses were often more positive about driverless taxis, reasoning that removing the human driver removes a source of risk they associate with taxi journeys specifically. The study points to concrete design responses, visible safety cues, in-app passenger information, emergency communication tools, and vehicles designed with input from mothers and older women ,as ways to convert that wariness into confidence (Kim et al., 2024).

There is also emerging evidence that how the case for AVs is framed can shift public support substantially. A nationally representative U.S. survey found that baseline support for self-driving cars sat at just over a quarter of respondents. When people were told that AVs could offer affordable mobility to older adults, lower-income households, and people with vision impairments, support roughly doubled, rising to around half of respondents across all three scenarios. The researchers argue this points to a practical policy lever: prioritising AV deployment toward underserved groups doesn't just serve equity goals directly, it also builds the public trust the technology needs to scale (Ehsani et al., 2024).

Taken together, this research reinforces the webinar's central argument: representation and equality of outcomes aren't separate tracks running alongside AV development, they are core to whether the technology earns public trust and delivers on its promise at all.

What success looks like

The webinar's participants converged on a few consistent markers of success: inclusion metrics built into projects from the outset rather than bolted on afterwards; cross-sectoral collaboration between industry, policymakers, and educators; and a recognition that young people, regardless of gender, represent an underused lever for solving both the sector's skills gap and Europe's wider youth employment challenge. Above all, the sense was one of urgency: the underlying technology is largely here, but the harder work, regulation, inclusive service design, and genuinely diverse teams, is still ahead, and it is work that any organisation in the sector can begin today.

This exploration builds on the foundational research within the CCAM-ERAS project, and reflects the project's ongoing focus on ensuring the transition to connected and automated mobility is one that works for everyone, not by design of a few, but by the deliberate inclusion of many.

Watch the full webinair here PAVE Europe: Driving the Future: Skills and Jobs in the Age of Autonomous Vehicles

References

Ehsani, J. P., Michael, J. P., Igusa, T., Mueller, J., Chang, C.-H., & Yenokyan, G. (2024). Advancing transportation equity and safety through autonomous vehicles. Health Equity, 8(1), 143–146. https://doi.org/10.1089/heq.2023.0107

Kim, S., Anjani, S., & van Lierop, D. (2024). How will women use automated vehicles? Exploring the role of automated vehicles from women's perspective. Transportation Research Interdisciplinary Perspectives, 27, 101228. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.trip.2024.101228

Torrao, G., Lehtonen, E., & Innamaa, S. (2024). The gender gap in the acceptance of automated vehicles in Europe. Transportation Research Part F: Psychology and Behaviour, 101, 199–217. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.trf.2023.11.002