THIS is a man's world, even now. In the Europa Services near Lesmahagow, Mick Munday ploughs into a plate of chips, peas and gammon steak, smeared with mustard. His hair, a long silver sweep, looks as if it belongs cased inside a motorbike helmet.

Munday eyes me sceptically at first, then begins to tell his story. He likes strangers, he says, likes them better than people he knows well. I'm here to ask about female truckers, I tell him. What does he think of them? "The odd one is brilliant, but the others shouldn't be behind the wheel. They're useless some of them, but the good ones are very good. But I suppose that's the same with men. There's some arsehole men drivers as well."

Munday has been driving on and off for 39 years. He likes the lifestyle, the independence, the way you meet people briefly at a stop, hear their stories then get back in your truck and head on down the road. Most people's stories, he says, contain some tragedy. For a while he lived with a female trucker; they spent their weeks coming and going, only sharing time together on a Wednesday. "Handling the vehicle, she was brilliant, but her attitude on the road was disgraceful. It was, dare I say it, like a lot of women have got. They think you've got to make room for them all the time. She'd wrangle them out as good as anybody. But her idea was everybody else had to get out the way of her."

Only two per cent of the truck drivers in Scotland are women. This means that at any given time at a truck stop, it's unlikely you will come across a woman, unless she's dishing up chips behind the canteen counter. The punters will usually be male. In other words, the scene will be rather as it is at 4pm on this Wednesday, a smattering of men dotted across the sun-streaked grey formica tables, and a couple of women in white caps on food. A few tables away from Munday, a Welshman and two Aberdeenshire drivers discuss the matter of women in trucking.

"Live and let live, " says one of them. Another laughs. "I used to know a lady driver, " he says, "called Jo The Dyke. She was big, like. She used to knock all the men. She thumped them. She was a rum girl she was. I haven't seen her in a long time." The third smiles. "Some people say women shouldn't do the job, but I dare say, why not?" Meanwhile, at the canteen, the women tell us there have been a couple of women in during the past day, one at breakfast time sat at the back right-hand corner of the room on her own reading a book. The owner of Europa, Manio, says he has only talked to three or four in his years running the place. If there is any oestrogen here, it must be in the water.

It would be easy to assume, on an afternoon like this, that there were no women truckers out there. One driver gave me a guess-estimate that there are perhaps only one in 2000. But the fact is that they do exist and, with a current shortage in drivers, the government and logistics sector hope their numbers will soon increase. Over the last year, their target for recruitment has been women and, with the help of the Scottish Executive, Skills for Logistics set up a women-only training scheme. Here in Scotland, Anne Halliday is one of the instructors at Glasgow Training Group. She is evangelical in her recruitment of women to the cause.

"When I'm speaking to girls in the pub or when I'm at a party, or whatever it might be, I'm saying to these girls, try truck driving. They've got a rubbishy shop job and they're getting paid minimum wage and I say, 'As opposed to being hassled in a shop with some 17-year-old manager, you could be out in a truck, on your own, doing your own thing, and earning a really good wage'." She believes there is a simple reason why women do not consider the job: it does not cross their minds. "They just think of shop work, they think hairdressers. A mother is never going to say to her wee daughter, 'when you grow up maybe you'll be a truck driver'."

As a young girl, Halliday grew up watching Pigeon Street. Long- distance Clara, a female truck driver with wild, curling hair and an independent lifestyle was, for her, a kind of role model. A song from the show declared, 'Long-distance Clara drives a juggernaut/Way down the motorway to the busy port/Long-distance Clara - nothing's too far away/Picking up and dropping off, load after load'. It's surprising, perhaps, that more women didn't go on, under her spell, to get behind the wheel. "I really honestly believe, " Halliday says, "that in order to get girls to do it, it's just a matter of telling them that they can. I think girls still look at the trades and jobs like driving as a world that they're not part of."

Still, even Halliday would never have thought of it as a career if she hadn't trained in heavy goods driving through the Territorial Army. It is perhaps indicative of the narrowness of the industry's draw that most of those women working in it came to it through family connections. They are the daughters of truckers. Their brothers and sisters drove trucks.

They grew up with the idea that shifting a large truck was almost a normal life skill.

Parked up in a services in Bothwell, a nine-year-old girl sits high in the cab of a truck next to her father. It's her school holidays and he has taken her out for the day on the job. Andrea Gardner, a driver for Bullet Express, points out the girl. That could have been her about 17 years ago.

"I used to go out on the lorries with my dad. Summer holidays and things like that. I just loved it. I thought being in a big lorry, dead high up, was dead powerful. My dad took me everywhere, he took me up north. He says I would just play houses in the passenger seat and I'd eat all his sandwiches. You were king of the road because you were in this big thing."

When she got older, she went into haulage herself, as a transport manager at first, which she still does as part of her job now. Her enthusiasm was so great that she talked her husband, once a baker, into switching trades and trucking for a living. It was, however, only earlier this year that she gained her Class 2 licence and started driving herself.

Gardner is neither a tomboy nor a girly-girl. She wears immaculate false nails, painted with tropical palms, the souvenir of a Florida holiday, but also wears jeans and thick-soled boots. As a child, she played with Barbie dolls, not toy cars. "But I loved the powerful fact of my dad's lorry. I used to wash it for him at the weekend, get all the flies off the front of it. And I love the industry. I think you have to be really thick-skinned to work in transport; it's all banter, it's a laugh, it's a carry on, you've got to give as good as you get.

But it's a relaxed atmosphere. Obviously the language content can be a bit high, but it's water off a duck's back, nothing's personal."

Though her husband was behind this new career, her dad wasn't quite so sure. "I'm not saying my dad was not supportive. He said, 'It's not a job for a woman', because of all the heavy lifting and things involved. 'But, if you want to do it go out and prove everybody else wrong, do it.' And my mum, she was scared. 'Oh no, you're not going to drive one of those big things are you?' Again it's back to the male/female thing ... I'm a wee girl."

Gardner, like many of the women I talked to, sees one of the great advantages of HGV driving as a career as its flexibility. Though this seems improbable, given its image of long-haul trips stretching out for weeks at a time away from home, much of the short-distance work is compatible with family and other commitments. For Gardner, these are her twoyear-old daughter, who goes in daily to nursery from noon till 5pm after spending the morning with her mother. Both parents work full-time, but on different shifts, her husband finishing at 5pm, she around 8pm.

For Sue Chappelhow, the commitment is her horses, and just earlier in the year she came third in her class at the Horse Of The Year Show. A sporting career like this takes time and commitment. "I don't think I could have got a job to fit round my horses as well as this one. It's a job you can juggle if you've got children, split shifts, and night work. There are loads of jobs out there, not just long-haul, lots of different varieties of job."

I meet Chappelhow at the Falkirk Asda depot following her daily morning cake delivery. It's 11am on a Monday and she has been up since 5am, a relatively late start for her. Normally she wakes at 2am and is back home in Cumbria by now, ready for an afternoon with her horses.

Chappelhow is a trucker's girl - her father owns a tipping-truck company - but that's not the only reason she got her licence. She got it because she wanted to be able to drive her horses around, to transport them from show to show. The two HGV activities seem to blend together in her family. There had always been, when she was growing up, horses, tractors and trucks. Almost everyone in her family had a licence. Her mother had one; so did her aunt, and so it was natural that she did.

"My mum just started because she was helping dad out. You've got to bear in mind that when she started she would have been about 4ft 11ins and about size six - if that - a tiny minuscule person. But she used to get on fine. And then they didn't have power steering either. She used to literally have both hands on the steering wheel to haul it around." Like Gardner, Chappelhow has exquisitely filed French-polished nails, the result of skills picked up in her own previous training. Before trying her hand as a trucker, she took a beautician course in Northern Ireland. Now she sees no going back to that field. A convert to trucking, she says, only if she shatters both her legs will she give it up, she enjoys it too much - the lifestyle and the money are too good. "The money is much better than most jobs. My friends have been to university and they're struggling to get jobs. They are not even on

half the wage I'm on and I feel sorry for them. Looking at my school year, there's a handful of us have got our own houses. I'm 24 and I've had my house 18 months now."

Both Chappelhow and Gardner say they have rarely had men be rude to them about their driving. There is, however, the occasional reaction of disbelief when they tell someone what they do. "The best one, " says Chappelhow, "is blokes if you're out and stuff. 'What do you do for a job?

Nah, you can't drive wagons.' They look at you and think you have to be 6ft God-knows-what and 6ft wide. It is going back to stereotyping and it's got to be banished. The only people who ever come out with comments about women not being able to drive trucks are men that are inadequate at the job. I've had it a couple of times but you just ignore it and think, well, how sad. It's them that have got the inferiority complex."

How does this all translate on the road? Twenty-year-old Julie Farren at Farren's Freights takes me out for a drive. She pulls off gently, unselfconsciously, and a clumsy driver myself, I admire her poise. She likes, she says, the power of being in the raised cab. Like Gardner, she was taken on summer holiday trips by her father, long-distance jobs to London, with treats like the pictures or a swim at the end of them. "I never really thought of doing anything else. It's always stuck in my head that this was what I wanted to do." Driving along, I watch the eyes of the drivers in the other trucks. It's hard to say if they look longer or harder than they might normally do. "When I'm out driving, " she says, "sometimes I can tell people are looking at me thinking, is that a woman?"

Perhaps the most interesting route to a trucking career is Halliday's.

Originally the boss of her own cleaning business, she made the jump from a female-dominated field to the male world of trucking. It wasn't an obvious one at first. When she first got her HGV licence through the Territorial Army, she didn't imagine she would ever use it outside the TA.

It seemed, simply a good security blanket and fallback, after all, "with a Class 1 or Class 2 licence, you're never going to be out of work". It was only several years later she was badly injured as a passenger in a truck accident in the TA, that she was forced to reconsider her work. She would do something that was easier on her injury than the cleaning business; she would, bizarrely given the cause of her accident, drive trucks for a living. "I think, in a way, it's kind of therapeutic. That's the worst thing that has happened to me in my life, that injury, caused by a truck accident. And now I'm doing something that I really enjoy and it's still within that sphere. It feels like a suitable pay-off."

Halliday, who has experienced two such contrasting fields of work, believes there is no real difference in aptitude of the genders to either job. "The best employee I ever had, for the cleaning business, was a man. He was by far the most thorough employee I had. And in terms of teaching women driving, I see no difference. Some of them are good, some of them are bad. Some of the men are good, some of the men are bad. They say men are more spatially aware, but I don't know whether it's been proven. But on the other side of the coin, women are supposed to have peripheral vision. So who's the better driver? I think it's just down to the individual. I think honestly the reason more women aren't in trucks probably goes back to the time when there was no power steering."

In the whole of her time driving, she has never had a man ask her what a woman is doing driving a truck. "I don't know that men say that kind of thing, or if they do, they're the same kind of guys who would joke over fat people and people with beards." She recalls that when she did her licence at the TA, she did so at the same time as a man. He went on straight away to try and get a job in the industry, and hated it. The men, he said, would never help him out; they would just stand and laugh at him trying to reverse a trailer. Halliday found the opposite. "The first couple of weeks I was out, if I drove into a truck stop and it was really busy, I actually would just get out and ask somebody. I'd go, 'Look I don't want to kill anybody, could you help me, talk me through it or just park it for me. The guys were always brand new and they always said to me, 'I was there once, I remember what

it was like'."

The problem with recruiting women into trucking was never really whether women could drive or not. Nor was it that they might not be strong enough to move the weights around. Rather it was one of image.

There is an aspect of trucking which while alluring to some, remains the put-off for others, and for women in particular: the so-called trucking culture. It's the greasy food, the chips and pie, the lack of comforts, the absence of fellow female company. Truck stops have that air of belonging to another age, of even another place, a particular version of masculinity. It's easy to see why women might not want to hang out there. It also takes a certain mentality for long haul. Mick Munday has it.

So does the Welshman on the nearby table, who says, difficult as he thinks the industry is getting, he wouldn't get out of it. "I couldn't go home and be with her at home every night. I like the lifestyle, aye. I'm home Friday to Sunday. More than that and we'd be at each other's throats." And women, sometimes, have it too. But if they don't, that doesn't mean trucking is not for them, just that it might be short haul, not long, for packed lunches not truck stop lunches and home to look after the kids by evening.

It's easy to portray trucking as a hyper-masculine, sexist industry, but that would be doing it an injustice. Most men, after all, share a view rather like Munday's: that there are good and bad drivers of both genders. Munday gives examples either way. Recently he watched a woman undertaking a particularly tricky reversing manoeuvre while delivering in Castleford. She pulled into the yard through a set of gates, perfectly, in one go. "I took my hat off to her, " he says. "A good woman driver is the best, better than any bloke."