This race car engineer is changing the industry. (Just don’t call her a ‘female’ engineer.)

This post is part of Mashable’s ongoing series The Women Fixing STEM, which highlights trailblazing women in science, tech, engineering, and math, as well as initiatives and organizations working to close the industries’ gender gaps

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I’ve got top race car engineer Leena Gade on the phone, and she’s telling me she doesn’t want to be known as a “woman” race engineer. After all, she’s working in an industry that gave her two “Man of the Year” awards — one from BBC Top Gear, the other for her work at the 2012 FIA World Endurance Championship, an international competition featuring up to six hourlong races.

“Walking away after a race feeling proud of how you’ve led a team and how they have performed is a great feeling,” she said about her work. But she also knows, “A great result doesn’t just happen; it takes preparation and practice and focus so when you have good result, there is relief and satisfaction.”

Gade is currently finishing up her first year as the lead race engineer for the Mazda Motorsports team on the No. 77 Mazda race car. She’s one of few women on the team (another woman is a data engineer). The drivers are all male. While her gender identity isn’t as important to her as many think, she’s winning races and earning titles in a field dominated by men. In motorsports, there’s a noticeable lack of women around.

Growing up in the UK (with a stint in India, where her parents are from), Gade, now in her forties, was exposed to a strong automobile and racing culture by her younger sister, who was a fan. She wanted to be part of it, too. “It was the behind-the-scenes TV coverage of how the team worked and developed that really got me hooked on the sport,” she said. She considered Brazilian race driver Ayrton Senna her hero (after he crashed during a 1994 race and died, she started following British driver Damon Hill). 

But federal labor stats in the U.S. paint a bleak picture for women in anything auto or engineering, with less than 10 percent of auto repair jobs held by women. When combined with architect jobs, engineering careers are only 25.5 percent female, based on 2018 data. And the niche world of motorsports is hard to break into, no matter your gender. 

“From the outside it looks really glamorous,” Gade admitted, but it’s ultimately a job, albeit a hard one to snag. Even for more general mechanical engineers, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates just over 300,000 jobs with that title. (I’d bet not too many of those engineers are on auto racing teams.)

Once out of college, where Gade studied aerospace engineering with materials science, she understood the challenge of breaking into her dream job. She worked for carmakers instead of motorsport teams as an adjacent career path. She volunteered on race teams for no pay and worked part-time side jobs, hoping to achieve her goal eventually. She finally broke through after more than six years at Jaguar, where she focused on building cars and learning how they worked, and earned her first racing titles in the early 2010s with Audi. 

She’s now in charge of the vehicle and its performance during races. She works with a group of engineers to prepare, monitor, and fix the engine and car system. She takes her mechanical engineering knowledge along with data from the car (after each race she downloads sensor data to review the car performance) and strategizes how to best tackle each race, depending on weather, conditions, length, and more.

“As they get to know who you are, you’re just a normal person with a job,” Gade said about her work at Mazda and previously at Jaguar, Bentley, Audi, and other companies. She works with other mechanics and drivers on test drives and in the garage. She emphasized the amount of prep work that goes into every race.

She’s now determined to encourage others, and to raise up women, in particular. She’s working to get more young girls into the sport, and into engineering as well, as an ambassador for Girls On Track, an FIA (the international race car governing body) program that exposes middle and high school girls to racing with go-kart courses and competitions.

“Girls might not even know a go-kart existed” until this program, she said, which makes it that much more enjoyable when she sees the kids at the schools she visits trying out vehicles like the karts and experimenting with them. Young people start to connect engineering skills to the fast, fun world of car racing, she says — and, even bigger picture — they see how an engineer keeps the world in motion. 

“We’re exposing people to what it is that we do,” she said of the program. She doesn’t consider herself a role model exactly, but she knows she has to step up to get more women involved in motorsports. “It’s fun to watch that happen,” she said.

She’s also involved in the racing organization’s Women in Motorsport group, where she’s supported and surrounded by women in different parts of her sport. 

Gade knew at 10 that she wanted to be an engineer. By 13, she was sure that she wanted to work within motorsports. The hurdle of being a girl never crossed her mind. Today she’s quick to downplay her “first female” status, though it’s true: She was the first female engineer to help win her team the endurance car race, the 24 Hours of Le Mans in France, in 2011. 

“On the day, I didn’t realize what had just been achieved and took two or three months for it to sink in properly,” she said, explaining that it was her favorite win because “as a team we did something that at the start of that week seemed against the odds.” Even toward the end of the endurance race, her own garage was doubtful they could pull it off.

It’s not just Gade who brushes off the female titles, “firsts,” and labels, placing them secondary to the job itself and team-building. A group of racing engineers, Kate Gundlach, Andrea Mueller, Danielle Shepherd, and Katelyn Supan, all told an IndyStar reporter in 2017 that they focus on the work more than their individual achievements.

“I don’t want it to be about that,” Andrea Mueller said about being the first female head engineer for a certain race series. “It takes an entire team to win one of these races, from the driver to the pit crew to the crew chief and engineers.” 

Then there’s others like NASCAR and General Motors race engineer Alba Colón. She’s outspoken and emphatic about her role within the industry.

“I fell in love with drag racing and I didn’t realize at the time that I was the first female, the first Latin American,” Colón said in an interview with NBC News last year. “Every day I go to my job and I think, people are looking because you are representing something that is not the usual thing,” she said in the interview. “I take this job with a lot of pride.”

Gade acknowledges femaleness in motorsports “makes it more difficult for anyone to want to do this,” but encourages other women to focus on the end goal. When striking up small talk on a plane, she says she describes herself as, “‘I’m in racing, I’m an engineer.'” No need to specify female.