The importance of dependable school transportation is woven into the fabric of our society, with business hours, work schedules, and other family commitments often fitting around the hours of the school day. And throughout history, women have played crucial roles in all these areas, from matriarchs of the home front to the frontlines of North America’s workforce.     

At Student Transportation of America, we’re proud of the hardworking women who make up close to 60 percent of our school bus drivers, dispatchers, mechanics, managers, safety personnel, and countless others dedicated to STA’s mission and the wellbeing of our passengers. Women have been making positive impacts on the transportation industry for decades, and to help recognize Women’s History Month, we’re highlighting some of our own female leaders alongside 5 inventors, entrepreneurs, and innovators who helped shape transportation as it’s known today. 

Helen Mary Schultz, the daughter of farmers and a business major in college, founded the first women-owned bus line, Red Ball Transportation, with a single route in northeastern Iowa. Throughout the 1920s, she grew her business despite competition from the railroad companies, regulatory and licensing issues, and fierce gender bias, and served as Red Ball’s general manager, mechanic, and bookkeeper. After acquiring several regional competitors and growing Red Ball to become the leading bus company in the state, she eventually sold to the Jefferson Highway Transportation Company in 1930, but not after earning the nickname “Iowa’s Bus Queen”.  

Margaret Wu is an inventor and industrial chemist who moved to the United States to pursue doctoral research at the University of Rochester, followed by several years working as a research chemist. She joined Mobil in the late 1970s to work on polymer synthesis, but changed focus several years later to synthetic oils and lubricants. When used in automotive oils, these synthetic fluids improved engine efficiency, provided better vehicle protection, and improve overall fuel economy. The American Chemical Society named Wu their Industrial Chemist of the Year in 2007 and she was the first woman to be made a Senior Scientific Advisor at ExxonMobil. In 2019 she was inducted into the National Academy of Engineering, and the following year she was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.   

June Robertson McCarroll attended medical school in Chicago, and later moved to California where she became the first woman doctor of the Coachella Valley. However, it was an incident on a desert highway that propelled her name onto the timelines of transportation history, when she was forced to swerve into a ditch to avoid colliding with an oncoming automobile. In the weeks that followed, McCarroll theorized that vehicular accidents could be mitigated with a painted line to designate driving lanes. After being rejected by numerous jurisdictions, McCarroll hand painted the very first lane marking – four inches wide and nearly a mile long – while continuing to lobby organizations to adopt the striping as a critical new safety standard. Seven years later, in November of 1924, the California Highway Commission adopted the proposal and painted 3,500 miles of lines on roadways across the state.  

Elizabeth “Liddy” Dole was the first female Secretary of Transportation in the United States, serving from 1983 to 1987. During her tenure, Dole championed a number of automotive safety initiatives, including the NHTSA’s mandate that cars manufactured in the U.S. from the year 1986 onward feature a center high mounted stop lamp (the brake light mounted between the two rear brake lights on most vehicles), creating significantly greater visibility in braking situations. She advocated strongly for seat belt usage by drivers and created manufacturer incentives for the installation of airbags. Dole also worked tirelessly with the nonprofit, Mothers Against Drunk Driving, to improve the rates of drugged and drunk driving incidents.  

Hedy Lamarr is known as one of the biggest names of Hollywood’s Golden Age throughout the 1930s, but she was also an inventor and entrepreneur. With World War II underway, Lamarr considered lending her ideas to the National Inventors’ Council, but after a chance meeting with a fellow inventor, began instead working on a frequency hopping, radio-guided torpedo. In the summer of 1941, they submitted a patent application for their “Secret Communication System”. While this particular invention failed to get adopted by the U.S. Military, Lamarr and her partner are widely credited with creating the spread spectrum technology that led to Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and GPS technologies that are utilized on many school buses today.  

Ready to make your own impact?

Take the First Step