Bonnie Stuck has been in the rubber industry for 46 years, and can recall when she was literally one of the few—if not the only—female in a company or large division.
She has lived through the discrimination that females face in a male-dominated field like tire and rubber, and because of that experience may have a different take on how to handle those situations than some younger women in the industry today.
"Back then it was very difficult. I was the second woman hired in the Tire Division at B.F. Goodrich as a technical person," said Stuck, now president and technical adviser at Akron Rubber Development Laboratory Inc.
"It really has changed a lot. It was difficult. I think the ones who survived were the people who really worked hard on learning and making yourself valuable to the company. And you pretty much kept your mouth shut. In other words, you didn't complain."
Along her career journey after Goodrich, Stuck has had stops at Bridgestone/Firestone,, Sovereign Chemical and as senior vice president of technical operations at Chem Technologies, before landing at ARDL. She has published numerous technical papers, holds four patents and has lectured at various venues.
During her time of dealing with old line manager and other colleagues, Stuck said she thinks she had more issues when she had her first child and then returned to work. Because she was the first technical woman to do that, there was a lot of pushback.
When she had her second child 3 1/2 years later, however, such feelings were mostly gone.
"There were still some hardliners, but it was different. And I think it's not unique to just being in a male-dominated business," she said. "I think that was in your family situation as well. We've changed as people have had children, and they've come back to work and they realize, 'Hey, your kids are resilient. If you put effort into your job and you put as much effort into your kids, they normally turn out OK."
It wasn't just within the companies she worked, Stuck said, but from suppliers—particularly from Asia at the time—who didn't want to work with women.
She never intended to make a career in rubber, but like many before and after her, once she got a taste of it, there was no leaving.
"I liked it so much, and it was so interesting that I wanted to survive," Stuck said. "I think there are people who concentrated on doing their job and tried to ignore some of the guff that you had to put up with. It just made you stronger."
She remembers a time when it hit her that she had reached a point where it was her performance, rather than her gender, that mattered most.
She was working with a male colleague at the BFG tire factory in Tuscaloosa, Ala., and they were running to reach the Banbury mixers at a certain point in compounding process. At some point on the trek, the man entered the men's restroom and exited it on the other side, as this was a short cut.
Upon realizing what he had done, the co-worker said, "I forgot you were a woman," Stuck recalled. "And I thought, 'He doesn't think of me as a woman engineer anymore.' To me that was a defining moment that things had changed."
And that's one of the things Stuck tries to impress on younger women in the rubber industry today, to know their stuff and, in today's society, she believes they will be respected.
"I tell them, 'Don't walk around with a chip on your shoulder looking for something,' " she said. "You will run into things that you think are sexist. But don't run around concentrating and looking for that because there's always going to be someone who is going to push the envelope and knock the chip off your shoulder, so to speak."
Stuck knows she's at the point of her career where it's vital to share her experiences and see to it that the "tribal knowledge" that veterans in the rubber industry have learned over the decades is passed onto the next generation of technical talent and leaders in the business.
She is spending a lot of time digitizing the technical library at ARDL, merging what she has amassed over her career along with what company Founder C.R. Samples had collected as well.
ARDL also does a lot of training, both internally and externally with groups like the ACS Rubber Division. And it's not just the older veterans who the firm leans on to conduct the training.
"We get the younger people involved in the teaching because the best way to learn is to teach," Stuck said. "You learn what your subject matter is, so we're doing a lot of that as well."
Passing on that knowledge is one of the three parts of her leadership philosophy, joined by leading by example and what makes a good leader.
"A lot of people consider strong leadership is you tell everybody what to do. To me, I think you get ideas and more from your employees if you listen to them, and you get them to do what you want them to do by explaining why you want it," Stuck said. "And I think that's a lot easier than being more of a military sergeant type of leader."
Years with company: 14
Years in rubber industry: 46