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Category: Gender Studies

Inside a UCLA course on gender in motorsports

A Fiat Lux seminar examines the roles of women in motorsports, exploring gender, strategy and cultural narratives

Brazilian driver Aurelia Nobels competes in the F1 Academy series, an all-women single-seater racing series. Nobels has backing from Scuderia Ferrari./ Photo Credit: PUMA

Kayla McCormack

On a Tuesday evening in Rolfe Hall, a small group of UCLA students settled into their seats. A simple question — “Did you follow motorsports before enrolling?” — sparked an enthusiastic exchange about favorite Formula 1 teams and drivers. One student, raised by a McLaren-loving father, shared that his recent dive into the sport had converted him to a proud tifosi – a supporter of Ferrari and one of their drivers, Charles Leclerc.

This personal connection is what makes Motorsports and Society, a Fiat Lux seminar, so impactful. Co-taught by motorsports historian Steven Meckna; Sharon Traweek, associate professor of gender studies and history; and Fred Ariel Hernandez, lead scientist for the UCLA Disability Studies Sports and Society Lab, the course offers students an interdisciplinary lens on motorsports, with a particular focus on gender and representation from World War II to today.

Fiat Lux seminars are one-unit, discussion-based courses, designed to foster intellectual curiosity in a small class setting. They connect students with leading UCLA faculty and allow them to explore timely and complex topics — like motorsports through the lens of society, culture, and STEM. In recent years, women have worked in prominent and decision making-capacities in motorsports, particularly in strategy — an area Hernández and Meckna saw as paralleling broader increases in women’s representation in science, technology, engineering and math. They proposed the course idea to Traweek, and the three collaborated to develop the course.

As part of the content, students watched an interview with Bernie Collins, former head of race strategy for Aston Martin F1 Team and current Sky Sports commentator. Collins spoke about the intense pressure of strategizing during a race but also reflected on how race strategy has become one of the technical areas in motorsports where women have consistently thrived.

“We wanted students to hear directly from someone who’s worked both on and off the pit wall,” said Meckna, a retired history teacher and longtime women’s sports coach. “Collins offers insight into how demanding a strategist’s job is, but also how strategy has created more space for women, compared to some other roles that require extensive travel due to the rigorous Formula 1 race calendar.”

After watching the clip, Meckna pushed students to think critically about why these roles have seen more female representation than others, such as race engineering. Students pointed to the structure of the roles themselves — strategy positions can rotate more regularly, Collins suggested. In contrast, engineers, who serve as a driver’s primary point of contact during a race, typically spend over a decade developing their expertise and must travel extensively throughout the season, attending nearly every grand prix.

“Children,” one student said plainly, prompting nods around the room. The class explored how the physical demands, intense schedules and lack of institutional support can still pose barriers for women.

Yet even amid these constraints, progress has accelerated. “Not long ago it would have been almost unthinkable to have a woman in a senior technical position in an F1 team,” Meckna said. “Today, it is rare not to see one. This corresponds with the increasing numbers of women in STEM fields. I’m not trying to be Pollyannaish about it — we’re still light years from anything resembling equality — but steps forward have been big and fast.”

The 2025 Formula 1 season, which kicked off earlier this month in Australia, is particularly historic. Haas’ Laura Mueller is now the first female race engineer in F1 history, working with driver Esteban Ocon.

“In professional motorsports, where most drivers are men, there are women with decision-making power,” Meckna said. “Hannah Schmitz at Red Bull makes calls that will win or lose a race for her team. So does Laura Mueller. The same was true when Leena Gade led the engineering team at Audi during their phenomenal run of success.” Gade became the first female race engineer to win at the 24 Hours of Le Mans.

Progress on the driver side has been slower. There have been successful female racing drivers across IndyCar and endurance racing in recent years, including Danica Patrick and Lyn St. James, though no woman has started a Formula 1 Grand Prix since Lella Lombardi the 1970s.

“Part of this is numbers,” Meckna said. “There are many times more men than women in junior categories of racing. That is starting to change, though. More girls are now competing in karts, the first step on the road to Formula 1.”

Meckna credits these changes, in part, thanks to the unprecedented institutional support for women racers today. The F1 Academy, launched in 2023, was created specifically for this purpose. Each Formula 1 team is required to support a woman in the series, which opens opportunities for female racers to access the training, technology, telemetry, race simulation machinery and qualifying and race day routines of the top professionals in the sport.

“The history of motorsports mirrors broader societal shifts in gender equity,” Hernández said. “In the Sports and Society Lab, we’re interested in how structural changes, like educational access, media representation and community and institutional support increase inclusive opportunities for people with disabilities and women as athletes and in technical roles. This class gives students the tools to examine those systems within motorsports.”

Former racer Susie Wolff and three-time F1 champion Niki Lauda smile at each other

From left: Former racer Susie Wolff and three-time F1 champion Niki Lauda share a smile. Wolff is now the F1 Academy managing director. / Photo Credit: Thomas Ormston/Wikimedia Commons.

Cultural shifts are underway not only in the paddock but also in the stands. Several students shared that their interest in motorsports and the class itself was sparked by the Netflix docuseries “Drive to Survive,” which has expanded Formula 1’s U.S. fan base, especially among women. Today, F1 fans are estimated to be around 40% female, up from just 8% in 2017, as well as significantly more culturally diverse, F1 CEO Stefano Domenicali said in 2022.

By connecting historical barriers with contemporary breakthroughs, the seminar helps students trace how representation in motorsports has shifted and where challenges remain. The course equips students to explore what progress looks like and to critically examine what else is possible.

“There’s so much potential to build on this,” Traweek said. “Motorsports intersect with engineering, emergency medicine, gender studies, environmental science and more. I know we all have hopes to see this course expand into a larger offering.”

This story was originally published in UCLA’s Newsroom, here.

In memoriam: Sandra G. Harding, 89, global trailblazer in feminist philosophy and critical science and technology studies

She was a Distinguished Professor of Education and gender studies at UCLA in 1996-2014, directed UCLA’s Center for the Study of Women from 1996-1999

Sandra G. Harding (1935-2025)

Cynthia Enloe, Emily Harding-Morick, Gail Kligman and Joni Seager

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Sandra G. Harding, a global trailblazer in feminist and postcolonial philosophy, critical science and technology studies and social justice and activism died March 5. She was 89.

Harding is internationally acclaimed for her pioneering development of “standpoint theory,” which apprehended science as a contextualized and culturally embedded undertaking, in sharp distinction to the conventional view of science as neutral and objective. Her standpoint analysis challenged both Liberal analytic philosophy’s tendency to think of science as value free, and orthodox Marxism’s approach that limited its standpoint epistemology to primarily a class perspective largely ignoring race, ethnicity and gender. Her work had enormous impact across disciplines, sparking lively debates and critical engagement with her ideas.

Harding developed her analyses first through socialist-feminist organizing, women’s rights activism and then ever-widening engagement with Civil Rights, Poor People’s movements, LGBTQ rights and anti-colonial critiques. She situated standpoint theory as an organic methodological development rooted in her social justice activism, noting that “it tends to emerge whenever a new group steps on the stage of history and says ‘things look different from the perspective of our lives’.” An important component of standpoint theory is what she identified as “strong objectivity,” a term that describes research grounded in the experiences of those who have traditionally been excluded from the production of knowledge.

Harding was a professor at the University of Delaware from 1975-1996, and then at UCLA until 2014; prior to her retirement, she was Distinguished Professor of Education and gender studies and then Distinguished Research Professor Emerita. She served as Director of the UCLA Center for the Study of Women from 1996-1999.

She authored or edited 18 books, including the prize-winning “The Science Question in Feminism” and “The ‘Racial’ Economy of Science: Toward a Democratic Future.” A forthcoming book, “Decentralizing Knowledges: Essays on Distributed Agencies,” will be published posthumously. Astonishingly prolific, Harding also published more than 100 scholarly articles and book chapters.

Harding was in considerable demand globally as a visiting lecturer, and over the course of her distinguished career presented more than 500 invited lectures across 6 continents. Harding also served as a consultant to several international entities including UNESCO, the UN Commission on Science and Technology for Development and UNIFEM. In 2013 she was awarded the John Desmond Bernal Prize by the Society for the Social Studies of Science.

Harding was always attentive to the importance of building networks with intellectual allies and activists. She was a highly influential and lifelong member of the Society for Women in Philosophy (SWIP), and in 1975-1976 worked with SWIP to edit syllabi for the first feminist philosophy courses offered in the United States. She was a member of the editorial board of Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy from its founding in the 1980s to 2000. In 2000 she was invited to become co-editor of the leading international journal in women’s and gender studies, SIGNS: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. 

In 2016, Harding collaborated with scholars from Latin America as a co-founding advisor for a new academic journal, Tapuya: Latin American Science, Technology, and Society, created to serve as a forum for science-technology-society research that elicits conversations within Latin America, between Latin America and Euro-American cultures, and across global peripheries. A brief memoriam on the journal’s homepage remarks that “Sandra understood the need to question whose perspectives have shaped Western science, philosophy, and social studies of science. She also recognized the urgency of amplifying STS scholars from the Global South. That’s why, in 2016, she conspired with Latin American scholars to create Tapuya. This journal exists because of her tenacity and vision.”

Harding is survived by her daughters Dorian and Emily, her beloved granddaughter Eva and sisters Constance Joy and Victoria.

A celebration of Harding’s life will be held later in 2025.

Media Contact: cchaveznava@college.ucla.edu

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