A 46-year-old Hong Kong woman has become the city’s first – and so far only – female franchised bus driver from an ethnic minority group, after joining Citybus’s ranks last autumn.
Farzana is part of a growing number of women from ethnic minority groups joining the bus company, which is pushing for greater diversity in hiring, according to a general manager (people and culture) Roger Wong Wai-yip.
Wong said the number of applicants to the company from ethnic minority backgrounds in 2023 had increased by 15-fold from the previous year, while the number of female applicants for drivers from those groups had jumped 60 per cent.
Farzana began driving routes between Tuen Mun and other districts after receiving her licence last September. She told the Post she enjoyed her job despite hearing a few passengers’ unpleasant talk about her ethnicity and “skin colour”.
“They think I don’t know Cantonese, but I know what they are talking about,” Farzana said in fluent Cantonese. “Sometimes they look at me with a surprised expression and say, ‘wow, an Indian woman’.”
Farzana is among 200 female bus captains with the company, or 5 per cent of its total of 4,000 drivers. The company currently has about 200 openings for drivers.
A mother of a 19-year-old daughter and 22-year-old son, Farzana said she was inspired to apply for the job after seeing another woman “of a small build” behind the wheel of a doubler-decker bus last year.
“If she could make it, then I could too,” she said.
![Farzana said her husband and their two children had encouraged her to pursue a career as a bus driver. Photo: Handout](https://i0.wp.com/cdn.i-scmp.com/sites/default/files/d8/images/canvas/2024/05/11/90d32792-3edf-4acb-adcb-0b23f805561b_ab51f403.jpg?ssl=1)
Citybus put Farzana through a six-day training course to teach her how to drive a double-decker bus, and she was required to pass a road test.
Before becoming a bus driver, Farzana worked for more than a decade as an assistant to her husband, a truck driver delivering goods for customers. He and their children had encouraged her to “chase her dream” of being a bus driver.
“My children are very supportive and proud of my achievement,” she said, adding that they had taken the bus she drove and she intended to stick to the job “until my retirement”.
Reflecting that most of her friends were dishwashers or delivery workers for restaurants, Farzana said she now “encouraged them to fulfill their dreams [too]”.
KMB, the largest of the city’s five franchised bus companies, also has plans to ramp up its recruitment of workers from ethnic minority groups.
“KMB recognises the significant potential labour supply from the ethnic minority population,” a spokeswoman said.
The company currently has 23 staff members from ethnic minority groups serving as bus captains and mechanics, out of a workforce of 11,000.
“We have taken proactive steps to reach out to these communities, including holding recruitment talks in local mosques in Kowloon and conducting on-site interviews back in 2022,” she said.