For the women machinists striking for equal pay at Ford’s Dagenham car plant in 1968, the notion that the grandiose job title “vice president of human resources, Ford of Europe, Middle East and Africa” would ever belong to a woman would likely have seemed laughable. How times change: 46 years later, the tale of the landmark strike that brought Ford car production to a standstill is opening as the feel-good musical Made in Dagenham in London’s West End, while the vice presidential role is held by Donya Urwin: one of two female members of Ford Europe’s senior management team.

While her office at Ford’s sprawling Dunton Technical Centre may be a good few storeys above the factory floor, Urwin – raised in South Shields in “a blue collar family where the rights of the individual were regarded as important” – is full of admiration for her pioneering predecessors: “these fantastic women that dared to question the status quo in society and the industry at that time.”

The 2010 film tells how the machinists secured the backing of then Labour employment secretary Barbara Castle to re-classify their “unskilled” labour and move up the pay scale. This “brought to light that ordinary working people, when they feel strongly about something, can change big things,” Urwin says.

Nevertheless, she points out, the issue was “of its time” and the last 50 years have seen “huge leaps forward in industry, society and elsewhere, not to mention Ford Motor Company”.

Ford’s fortunes in Britain have wavered alongside those of every other car manufacturer (it no longer makes cars here, but turns out half of all Ford diesel engines), but even the trade unions representing its 13,700 UK workers acknowledge positive changes for women: the company conducts gender pay audits and offers one of the best maternity packages in the country, with a year’s leave on full pay for birth and adoptive mothers.

Ford may not be perfect, says Urwin (only 9% of its UK staff are female, and they’re still rare at top levels and in engineering and manufacturing roles), but she’s a firm believer that a strong corporate structure, with clear mechanisms for dialogue within the company is the key to progress on gender and other issues.

“It’s the corporate structure that allows change to flourish: it provides people with a voice and checks out how they think and how they’re feeling.”

The union structure so deep-rooted at Ford (every one of its hourly workers is in a union, as are half of white collar staff) allows for organised communication, which would otherwise only have to be reinvented in other ways, she argues.

Urwin’s own presence may be a sign of Ford’s gradually changing face, but she’s the first to admit the company has suffered like all corporations from “boiling frog syndrome” – the failure to recognise shortcomings in its own practices because all involved are too close to them. Arriving at the company in 2001 from Marks and Spencer (“I came from ladies’ lingerie to ‘body and white’ [motor industry-speak for untreated metal vehicle panels], but they’re both value-driven companies”), she brought an outsider’s questioning eye and a cheerful Geordie directness that may have floored a few more conventional managers.

There are four components to ensuring women thrive in Ford, she argues, starting with structures ensuring, for example, that an interview script is exactly the same whether the candidate is male or female (without intervention, Urwin says, it wouldn’t be). Next, behaviour must reflect that intent: “Structures won’t necessarily mean people behave properly: as a woman you get very used to saying something in a meeting, nobody notices it and then the man next door says it…”

Two further principles then come into play: the authenticity to identify and reject that sexist behaviour and the confidence to call it out. That happens, she says, “in lots and lots of small and large ways… for me the big thing is making sure all of that has a place in everything we do.”

If reformed internal structures don’t work in Ford or elsewhere, would she view quotas on women on company boards as a swifter route to change? On balance, Urwin would prefer other, more subtle mechanisms such as ensuring balanced selection pools “because of all the noise [quotas] bring. But I think I’d probably sooner manage the noise and have them push that needle because without them, I’m not sure the needle’s going to get pushed.” Quotas are coming in Germany and may well follow in the UK, she predicts.

In the meantime, besides checking its own internal practices, Ford has a job to do in meeting a supply-side challenge: ensuring enough girls and women are turned on to science, technology and maths careers (STEM) to provide the engineers and technicians of the future. Almost one in six of Ford Europe staff is female, but under 4% of senior engineering managers are women – a depressing statistic it’s hoping to change with a range of efforts to entice girls as young as primary age towards STEM subjects.

It’s a long pipeline, Urwin says, and while there’s plenty of effort going in, winning women over may take time. “It’s about women looking at places like Ford and thinking ‘I could do that’. Part of the challenge is they look at this huge building, and think its really masculine, it’s going to be a bit dirty, a bit greasy and probably not the place for me. So sometimes they’re the people we have to convince.”

While Ford will work hard to ensure it keeps the talented women it recruits, women too should be willing to push their comfort zone a little and consider flexible working options that may not be as simple as two regular days a week, Urwin argues.

For the car industry, as much as any, a mixed workforce is an essential element in getting the product right. Women, with the main input into most car purchasing, do not – for instance – share the male obsession with in-car cup-holders (first world problem, anyone?), and, says Urwin, the desire to design the perfect holder has to be tempered before the expense involved makes the car price prohibitive. Confessedly “not a petrol head” (she drives a Ford Kuga, for the record), she herself sees cars as most people do: as an interested consumer. “Sometimes it’s good just to have that voice to say, maybe we’re getting a bit carried away here.”