Can Women Change Oil?

As the daughter of a mechanic, I was raised around cars, trucks, tractors and other motor vehicles. I spent a lot of my childhood in the garage with my father, helping him put cars. He taught me how to change a tire before I was even old enough to consider driving a car. He also taught me how to change the oil and give a car a basic tune-up. By the time I was old enough to drive, I knew more than a lot of people ten years older than myself and took great pride in that knowledge. I was the only girl in our driver’s education class that was able and even willing to change a tire when it came time for our final examination.

Now, I’m 30 years old, married to a wonderful man, but he never had the kind of influence, mechanically, that I did. So when it came time to buy a new car, I was the one who made the decisions. I picked the car, I asked all the questions that needed to be asked and I made the best deal I could. When it came time to do the first oil change, he looked at me like I was insane because I suggested that we do the work ourselves. I’d seen it done and done it myself enough times that I could do it in my sleep.

This was a point of contention for us for quite a while because he felt that, because I was a female, I could not do the job properly. We ended up taking our car to a local shop and got the oil change, spending at least twice as much money as it would have cost to do it right there at home. Was it worth the price? I don’t really know, other than it kept me from having to crawl under a car.

Can women do the same work as a male? I think that some can, and I know that I can. I know that it isn’t exactly an ideal situation, but is it worth shelling out money every three months to have someone else do the work that you know you can do? In ways, it is worth it, especially if you have a husband who has no mechanical aptitude and can’t be of any help.

Is it fair to tell a woman that they should take their car to a garage simply because they are a woman? No, that isn’t fair, it’s sexist and rude. I’ve met many women who can rebuild engines if they so desire, and in fact, I think a lot of them actually have before. I have also met many who can’t. Most of them know that they are incompetent and they admit it.

So really, it should be up to the woman what she wants to do if she can do it. Would you really want to keep a woman from doing what she wants to do? Why should a woman be told no, you can’t do this simply because a male feels that she can’t?