They Arrived as First-Time Attendees. They Left Ready to Lead.

The first time I went snorkeling, off the coast of Honduras with my daughters, the reef opened up and there were fish everywhere. Big ones, small ones, every color and shape imaginable, moving in loose, glittering clouds in every direction I looked. I remember just floating there, turning slowly, trying to take it all in. That is, near as I can imagine, what it must feel like to be a fish who has spent her whole life swimming mostly alone, then suddenly finds herself surrounded.

This is the image that keeps coming to mind whenever I hear a woman describe walking into the Women In Automotive Conference for the first time.

It still surprises me when people tell me they have never heard of the organization. I have been around it for most of my career, long enough that I sometimes forget how few people outside this community know it exists. And on the ground, in a dealership or a corporate office or a manufacturer meeting, being outnumbered by men is not the exception. It is close to the default. So when hundreds of women gather in one place, it can feel overwhelming.

And it is.

For many women, that room offers the first real glimpse of their collective scale, of how many women actually do this work.

That is the room Enhild Herrera, Marlinda Phillips, and Selena Anderson walked into this year, each for the first time.

Before they found their people, they first had to walk into a room where they weren't sure they belonged. Enhild came alone, wondering how an introvert was supposed to socialize in a ballroom full of strangers. Marlinda arrived alone too, after two years of storms, surgery, and scheduling conflicts had already kept her away. Selena came with her boss, grateful not to be by herself, but uneasy about networking in an industry she had only recently become a part of.

Three different careers. Three different levels of experience. Same quiet question underneath: What happens when women who are used to proving themselves, or navigating this industry largely on their own, suddenly find themselves surrounded by women who already understand?

Three Women, Three Starting Points

Enhild Herrera has spent fifteen years in automotive, most of them running internet and BDC departments. Today, at Ingram Park Nissan, she manages eleven people in that department alone, along with an equity-mining team that moves customers from service to sales. She has also worked in finance, spent time at the sales desk, and manages marketing. She is the kind of leader with her hands in all the cookie jars: deep experience, wide range. And still, in fifteen years, she had never encountered anything like Women In Automotive. “I never knew about a group of women doing this, or that there were conferences about it,” she said. “Fifteen years, and it opened my eyes.”

Marlinda Phillips has been in the business thirty years, starting as a cashier and rising to COO within the same dealership family, Don Jackson Automotive. She jokes that she didn't find the automotive industry; it found her. Along the way she picked up two survival skills: a thick skin and a sense of humor. "If you don't have it," she said, "you are not going to make it." She'd been trying to reach this community since 2024, when a snowstorm canceled one conference and a total hysterectomy sidelined her from the next. This year, she made it, in spite of the flooding in Austin that caused travel challenges.

Selena Anderson is two years into automotive, working in marketing for Dealer Advantage Group. She came in eager to learn, but conscious that she didn't have a decade of dealership experience behind her. She represents a version of belonging that has nothing to do with tenure: women who bring real, transferable skill to this industry without having grown up inside it.

Their résumés looked nothing alike. But each of them arrived carrying some version of the same question: Do I fit here?

The Moment Apprehension Became Belonging

For Enhild, it was simply the size of the room. Fifteen years of knowing "women here and there" hadn't prepared her for a conference full of them, the same reef-opening-up feeling of realizing the water had been full the whole time. Then came her first mentoring session, listening to women talk openly about their experiences in the industry. "I was like, this is what I need in my life," she said. "I was craving learning that I didn't know I was craving." Something she hadn't realized was missing clicked into place. "Where, where you been all my life?"

For Marlinda, it was a security tag.

She'd bought a new dress for the conference and hadn't packed a backup, so when she sat down for the opening mentoring session and felt something odd against her skirt, there was no changing clothes and starting over. The security tag was still attached. "I was mortified," she said. "I thought, oh my God, after snowstorms and surgeries and everything else, I finally made it here, and I am going to be remembered as the girl that has the security tag, that stole her dress."

She owned it instead. When women complimented the dress, she pointed out her "cute little accessory" and laughed along with them. Later that day, in a session on networking, the microphone made its way to her for an impromptu elevator pitch. "I'm the chaos coordinator at Don Jackson Automotive," she told the room, "and I'd like to go ahead and use my networking card, because if any of you know how to get a security tag off a dress, please come see me. I did not steal this dress.” The room laughed, and something shifted. For the rest of the evening, women kept coming up to ask if she'd gotten the tag off, then stayed to trade their own embarrassing stories. Titles disappeared. What was left was connection. "The lesson I got from this," Marlinda said, "is that something that we think is embarrassing actually becomes the thing that connects us."

For Selena, it happened during the opening cocktail reception. She and her boss were standing off to the side, not quite sure how to insert themselves, when a woman she'd just met walked over and hugged them both. "I think she could tell that we were just kind of off by ourselves," Selena said, "and she invited us right in." It was a small gesture. It was also exactly the kind of welcome she'd been bracing not to receive.

The Lessons They Carried Home

You don't have to know everything to contribute. Selena stopped treating her relative newness to automotive as something to apologize for. "Rather than trying to hide that, I'm just leaning into it," she said. "It's okay to ask questions. It's okay not to know everything. And I bring a different set of skills to the table." She's begun posting more openly about the work she actually does, hoping to show other women the breadth of roles this industry holds beyond the ones they'd expect.

Leadership doesn't require constant armor. Marlinda came home determined to be less rigid. "One of the things we do is we wear the armor," she said. "We control the chaos, we make things move, and then we forget about what we need." She's practicing vulnerability at work now, and for the first time after a conference, she actually followed up: texting, connecting on social media, making plans to see the women she'd met again instead of letting their business cards disappear into a drawer. "I'm taking pieces of armor off," she said. "That's what I'm doing."

Experience is something worth sharing. For Enhild, the conference reframed fifteen years of knowledge as something other people genuinely need. She's started imagining herself training others, building internet departments for people the way hers was built, even speaking or mentoring one day. She's also putting what she learned into practice at home, including turning her phone off during a family emergency instead of staying tethered to nearly three hundred unread messages. "Boundaries," she said, "is one of them."

From Receiving Community to Creating It

None of these women treated the conference as something that ended when they flew home.

Selena signed up for mentorship, made plans to attend a regional social with women she'd met from CDK, and is now more intentional about showing what her work in automotive actually looks like. Enhild has started talking with women inside her own company about building a local group, taking notes from leaders who've already done it, and hopes eventually to mentor or speak herself. Marlinda has already decided two women from her dealership are coming with her next year, including a parts manager she's mentoring who has ten years of experience and hasn't yet been given the confidence to match it. "She just doesn't know it yet," Marlinda said. "But she's going to bust down walls."

The most meaningful outcome wasn't simply that these three women felt welcomed. It's that each of them left already thinking about who they could welcome next.

And there are still many women waiting for that invitation.

There are roughly 4.5 million people working in core sectors of the automotive industry. Reports put women at about 20% of that workforce, which comes out to roughly 900,000 women in core automotive roles. Five hundred of them were in the room at Women In Automotive 2026. That is about 0.056% of the women in this industry, gathered in one ballroom at the same time, and it still represents one of the largest single gatherings of women in the automotive industry.

Five hundred women can fill a ballroom and still represent only a fraction of the women waiting to discover that this community exists. This is why I love hearing from women who have discovered Women In Automotive for the first time. And I can’t wait for the day when the majority of women in the industry know this community exists.

But let’s start with bringing 0.1% of them together in 2027, shall we?

What They'd Tell Another First-Time Attendee

Selena's advice is to let go of expectations. "If you just show up, I think you'll be pleasantly surprised," she said. Enhild frames it as something closer to necessity, a need for women navigating a male-dominated industry to find people who understand what that navigation costs. "This is what I need in my life," she said, and meant it as advice for anyone still on the fence. Marlinda's version is the most direct: "You may never feel completely ready. You deserve to be there. You need to be seen. You need to be heard."

Bring Your Own Chair, and Make Room

Belonging, it turns out, isn't determined by tenure, title, personality, or whether you walk in alone. Enhild had fifteen years of experience and still felt like she'd been on an island. Selena had two years of experience and worried it wasn't enough. Marlinda had thirty years and a security tag she couldn't hide. All three found the same room, and all three found their place in it.

Marlinda put it best, thinking about how she wants to be remembered: "You don't have to ask permission. It could be a shabby chic chair, it could be a modern chair, it could be a farmhouse chair, it doesn't matter. Bring your own chair to the table and make room for all the other women that are coming through, because it is so important for us to make space so that they can thrive."

For these three first-time attendees, the conference gave them more than professional development. It showed them that they belonged in the room, and gave them the confidence to hold the door open for the women coming next.

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