Kerri Wirachowsky’s boss looked at her over his desk.
She’d just transferred into a job as a transportation enforcement officer in Kitchener, Ont. – a job she’d been doing successfully for six years at the Putnam weigh scale.
The new boss looked her up and down, his face inscrutable.
“Just so you know,” he said, finally. “I don’t think women belong in this job.”
Wirachowsky took a deep breath. ‘OK,’ she thought. ‘Here we go again.’
The ‘Preacher’s kid’
To understand what happened next, we need to go back to 1980.
Wirachowsky was 12 years old and living a fairly idyllic life. Her dad, born into a mining family in Timmins, Ont., had eventually chosen the church over mining. The family had spent the last four years in Huntsville, where Wirachowsky’s parents worked at a Baptist vacation camp.
“We lived part time in a house and part time at the camp, and my brother and I had a lot of freedom there,” she says.
But then her dad was offered a job with a congregation in Strathroy. This time he would be the Pastor, not the youth leader or assistant director as he had been up until then. So, the family pulled up stakes and prepared to move.
For Wirachowsky, it was a tough transition. “Not only was I the new kid in a small town where most kids had grown up together their entire lives. But now I was ‘the Preacher’s kid’ – something I’d never been before.”
It was the first time Wirachowsky felt defined by a label. It wouldn’t be the last.
A “ridiculous” family work ethic
There’s another thing you need to know about Wirachowsky, though.
“I come from a family work ethic that’s just … ridiculous,” she says with a laugh. “My mom and dad still work, and I know that’s where I get it. I’m just the same.”
Wirachowsky remembers her first job vividly. It was that same summer they moved to Strathroy. She was 12 – technically too young to work, but her mother marched her down to the local corn-detasseling recruitment center and signed her up for a summer stint.
Depending who you ask, corn detasseling is either a form of torture or a rite of passage for thousands of young teens in cornbelt areas. It’s a technique to eliminate random cross-breeding on corn-seed farms, and involves hand-removing tassels from every so-many rows of male plants.
“Oh, it was awful,” Wirachowsky laughs. “You were up at the crack of dawn for a 90-minute bus ride to the fields. The corn was soaking wet with dew, the leaves would cut you if you weren’t wearing long sleeves, and it was 90 degrees by early afternoon. And God help you if the foreman found you’d missed a tassel!”
But, in the cornfields, she didn’t have to be “the Preacher’s Kid.” Besides, she wound up with both a paycheque and a promised trip to Canada’s Wonderland with her parents.
And that’s how Wirachowsky got hooked on hard work.
As luck would have it, hard work was exactly what she needed to win over the local kids. It was a lesson she never forgot.
A first job in the transportation world
As she matured, Wirachowsky took her bred-in-the-bone work ethic to a series of part-time jobs during high-school, and then to a full-time position at the local newspaper. After that, she took it with her when she left home for her first job with Ontario’s Ministry of Transportation.
This was a temporary clerical position in the driver exam center in Kitchener. Wirachowsky worked her way into a permanent role fairly quickly, but what really intrigued her about that office was the enforcement officers. They flew in and out of the place, seemingly doing much more exciting work.
She asked if there was an opportunity there for her. There was, but it was again a temporary position as enforcement services clerk. It wasn’t quite what Wirachowsky wanted, but she dug into it and started learning everything she could about transport regulations.
As it happened, this was in the late 1980s, when a slew of new regulations were coming in. Hours-of-service. Trip inspections. Commercial vehicle operator’s registrations (CVORs). Intrigued, Wirachowsky dug further, eventually gaining fluency in all commercial vehicle regulations. When she finally got her chance to tag along with the enforcement officers, she was ready.
She also knew after her very first ride-along this was the job she wanted. “I liked being outside and on the move. Plus, the job was really interesting. I’d always been interested in mechanical things,” she says. But she was a 20-year-old woman trying to break into what was resolutely a man’s world. Would they accept her?
Yes, she was worried. But by now, Wirachowsky was used to overcoming preconceived notions of who she was and what she could do. So when an enforcement position came up at the Putnam weigh scale, she applied for it.
A less-than enthusiastic welcome
Wirachowsky got the job. But she got a less-than enthusiastic welcome when she arrived.
“My first training officer absolutely didn’t want a woman on his team, and he made sure I knew it,” she says.
There it was again. Being defined by a label. This time the label was “woman,” despite the fact Wirachowsky was also a well-trained, capable, knowledgeable employee.
“I was sick to my stomach after my first day, thinking I’d made the worst mistake of my life,” she says. “But then I just decided I was going to make it work, whether he liked it or not.”
Just as she did with the kids in Strathroy, Wirachowsky worked patiently to win the team’s acceptance. She learned about curling, because that’s what her training officer loved. She made friends with every single mechanic at the scale. She learned how to ride a creeper under the trucks, and told the mechanics she wanted to know the tiniest thing she ever missed.
It worked. Soon Wirachowsky’s mechanical knowledge matched her mastery of the regulations. Plus, she learned how to handle herself with truckers and mechanics. One day a driver swung down out of his cab, looked at her with her clipboard and chalk stick, and asked:
“Are you a mechanic?”
“No. Are you?” she deadpanned.
Taken aback, the driver shook his head.
“OK, that’s cool,” she went on. “Because when I’m done, I’m going to show you everything I found. And whatever it is, you should have found on your trip inspection. And then we can call a mechanic to fix it.”
Still. Wirachowsky prided herself on being fair. She never put a driver out of service without making sure he understood why. “You get what you give, right? I always did my job. You just don’t have to be mean about it.”
This ain’t no fairy tale
In a fairy tale, this would be the place where we celebrate Wirachowsky vanquishing the lingering discrimination and sexism in the trucking industry. But that’s not quite what happened. Instead, after six years at Putnam, she decided she was ready for a new challenge. So, she applied for an area-patrol job that would take her back to Kitchener.
And here’s where we rejoin her, standing across the desk from her new boss, experiencing the depressingly familiar feeling of knowing she wasn’t welcome.
But this time, she had some new tricks.
“I don’t think women belong in this job,” the boss was saying.
She eyed him. “Well, there’s a lot of men who don’t belong in this job either. And I will kill myself to prove to you that I’m as good as any man.”
North American champion
True to her word, Wirachowsky worked hard and smart at that job. She mastered the area-patrol work. She started teaching CVSA basic training, and then Level I Inspections. She qualified as a CVSA trainer, and then a national trainer. Soon that boss – to his credit – came around and became one of her greatest supporters.
In 2001 he encouraged her to compete in Ontario’s qualifying round for the CVSA’s North American Inspector’s Championship (NAIC). This is an event where jurisdictions across North America choose their best drivers and inspectors via local competition. Those winners later compete at an international event.
“I’d competed years before, but I wasn’t really prepared. I didn’t want to try again, but he pushed me. ‘Do it for me,’ he said,” Wirachowsky laughs.
So she did, and she won the provincial competition. Later, when she went to Minneapolis to compete against 53 inspectors (all men) from across Canada, the U.S. and Mexico, she scooped first place as the North American Grand Champion, along with several other honors.
Wirachowsky — a small, blond woman – was now officially the best CVSA inspector in North America.
CVSA comes calling, and another uphill battle
“That’s when things changed for me,” she says. “Once I realized the breadth and strength of CVSA as an association, I wanted to get more involved.”
She started in 2003 by accepting a volunteer position as one of the Canadian co-chairpersons for the inspectors competition. Three years later, the CVSA president asked her to lead one of the association’s standing committees. She asked for the Vehicle Committee, because that’s what she loved best.
“In my career, there were plenty of men who supported me. But the ones who define me are the ones who gave me the grief.”
Kerri Wirachowsky
This also was an uphill battle. At her first meeting both the vice-chairman and the secretary resigned their positions. Wirachowsky calmly appointed replacements and carried on. She may not have been sure she’d chosen the right people, but she did know she was good enough to lead that committee. She just needed the rest of the world to catch up.
In 2017 Wirachowsky left the Ministry of Transportation and started a new career working for the CVSA as director of roadside inspection programs. Since then, her job has expanded to include development and supervision of two inspection-program streams, one for autonomous trucks and the other for those with real drivers.
“I feel like I’ve found my niche in life,” she says now. “This is the best job I’ve ever had. It’s not for everybody. But it’s perfect for me.”
Defined by sexism?
And what about the sexism and discrimination she’s had to battle to get here?
“It never really goes away. Even today, when I stand up at industry events or to teach, the majority of the people in the room are men. But more and more, there are women – young women – in the audience, and many of them come up to me afterwards to say how much they appreciate seeing me in a leadership role.”
She pauses for a moment, and then goes on. “It’s hard, but you just work through it. In my career, there were plenty of great men who supported me. But the ones who define me are the ones who gave me the grief. They helped make me who I am today.”
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