Getting to Work: How Transport Shapes Women's Experience in Auto Manufacturing

Sneha smiles as she remembers her first day at the Tier-2 auto-components factory where she works, one of the many mid-sized firms that feed parts to India's automotive supply chain.

Eight years on, she still speaks with pride about what the job has given her – financial independence, confidence, and the ability to make decisions about her own life. She hopes to become a senior executive at this firm one day.

Then the conversation turns to her commute.

She travels nearly 18 kilometers each way. The journey is often longer than it should be because she depends on public buses that stop frequently along the route. By the time she starts work, she is already tired. By the time she reaches home, she has little energy left for anything else.

Not far away, in the same industrial cluster, Rahul manages a shop floor at another Tier-2 auto-components supplier. The women on his line do the same kind of work as Sneha, on similar wages, in a factory that faces the same constraints hers does. However, their commute works differently.

Over the past year, Good Business Lab (GBL) spoke with workers and employers across nearly 40 automotive firms, with deeper consultations at around 10 companies, to understand how transport affects women's participation in the industry. One theme came up again and again. Availability of safe, affordable transport doesn't just factor into the actual commute experience; it also shapes whether women accept jobs, whether families support them, how exhausting the workday feels, and sometimes whether they stay in these jobs at all.

The long way home

For Sneha, the challenge begins before her shift even starts.

She leaves home early in the morning, walking 30-35 minutes to the nearest bus stop to catch the local bus. Boarding early, before the route fills up, she reaches the industrial area in a reasonable time. The trip takes an hour to an hour and a half on a good day.

The journey back home, though, is another story.

The returning buses are more crowded, forcing her to wait longer and making multiple stops before she reaches the bus stop closest to home. From there, and on the walk to the stop each morning, she navigates long stretches of road that are quiet and often empty. Even during daylight hours, she experiences unwanted attention on these walks, in the form of comments or stares from men on passing bikes. When this happens, she’s often forced to take longer routes to be among more people.

On the days she misses the bus, it gets harder still: she has to find a shared ride or flag down an auto, weighing each one, trusting a stranger because there is no other way home.

Some months, nearly 8% of her salary goes towards commuting.

The cost is only part of her challenge. By the time she reaches home, she has little energy left for the chores waiting for her or the diploma course she has been working towards, hoping it will open a path beyond the shop floor. When the commute runs long, her mother sits on the edge of her seat, praying nothing untoward happens to her during this uncertain journey. The exhaustion builds over weeks, and staying much longer at a job that drains her this way becomes harder to imagine.

Sneha and several of her colleagues have repeatedly asked their HR team whether the company could provide transport. The response has remained the same. Most male workers manage without company buses, they are told, and the current number of women workers is too small to justify a separate arrangement.

However, what many HR teams overlook is that commuting affects men and women differently. For men, a long commute is exhausting. For women like Sneha, it’s both exhausting and unsafe. While everyone prefers a shorter, more comfortable commute, women often face additional challenges when their transportation needs are not met. These challenges can shape their experience of a job long after they’ve accepted an offer.

A solution of their own

Rather than wait, Sneha and a few others have started building their own fix.

Inspired by Sneha, several women from her own and surrounding villages have joined the firm over the years, and many face the same commute. Recently, a few of them began pooling money each month to hire a shared van. It is early days, and the arrangement is far from settled.

The cost, split between a handful of women, runs higher than the bus fare. Some days the driver doesn't turn up; on others, someone drops out, and the per-person share climbs until the numbers no longer work. When it does run, though, it shortens the journey, takes away some of the daily uncertainty, and gives their families a little more peace of mind.

Sneha's resourcefulness is real. But it is worth asking how much of this should have fallen to her, and whether a firm can count on every woman being enterprising enough to solve, on her own, a problem the firm chose to leave alone.

What it looks like when a firm steps in

This is where Rahul's firm offers a contrast.

He is candid about why his company acted. Recruiting and keeping women has been hard. Many lived far from the plant, and families were reluctant to let them travel long distances to and from work on their own. Safety on the journey, more than the job itself, was what made families skeptical.

That changed when the company invested in providing transport. Women now travel in company buses with security staff, route tracking, and a system that confirms they have reached home. A WhatsApp group connects them with female HR and supervisors, where they can flag a missed bus or raise a problem. These measures reassured workers and their families, making the firm a preferred destination for women workers in the cluster.

Rahul has seen the positive impact of employer-provided transport. Women on his line arrive less worn down, get home at a predictable hour, and spend none of their wages on the commute.

Some companies have figured out that transport is integral to creating an inclusive shop floor. Others still leave it to workers to solve.

Why it matters for firms

Our fieldwork suggests that this difference matters.

In a willingness-to-pay survey of over 200 women, many said they would hypothetically accept a pay cut of up to 10% of their monthly income for a job with safe, reliable transport – more than for almost any other amenity studied. These are stated preferences, not observed behavior. But they show how heavily women weigh transport when they decide whether to take a job.

Our broader research points in the same direction. Workplaces without safe transport, alongside gaps like childcare and clean restrooms, are linked to higher attrition and lower productivity among women. For many, a safe commute and proximity to home shape whether they stay in a job at all.

When transport is missing, women manage long, draining journeys on their own until, for some, the job is no longer worth it, and, in some cases, the pool itself shrinks because women candidates may not be willing to accept jobs at all. But our field insights show that when it is provided, it can become one of the main reasons for women to join and stay.

The harder part is that providing amenities like transport requires major upfront investment. Not every firm is in a position to invest in providing transport - either lacking the resources or not seeing the business need to do so. Making this provision for women also can become more cost-intensive, and many firms don't feel they have sufficient women to justify the investment.

In industrial clusters where several firms sit close together and face the same gap, GBL is exploring whether a shared, pooled transport model could make safe commutes viable for women even at firms too small to run a system on their own. The approach is nascent, and will only work if built around safety and trust from the outset. But it points to a way forward that doesn't depend on any single firm's size.

Sneha is finding her own way. A firm that wants more women on its shop floor can't count on all of them doing the same – but with the right transport models, it wouldn't have to.