Women in Engineering

Today is International Women in Engineering Day! It’s a good opportunity to reflect on what progress the engineering and automotive sectors have made. Unfortunately, it is well known that women in engineering and automotive careers are working in traditionally male-dominated spaces.

Engineering is one of the most male dominated careers. Even for example, in Bulgaria, which has the highest proportion of female engineers, there are twice as many men. In Britain only one in ten British engineers are women.

Is this imbalance actually a problem? Yes! Women make up half the population, but everything from crash-test dummies to smartphones to air-conditioning, even the size of a brick, assumes that an average human = an average man.

This doesn’t just lead to discomfort and annoyance, but is also dangerous. 95% of female police officers find that their protective equipment hampers their work, generally because their “unisex” stab vests don’t fit them properly.

So, female engineers will not only improve the quality of engineering, but will drive equality in other careers and workplaces too. But there are also good business reasons as to why we need to address this imbalance. Increasing the participation of women in a workforce will have a positive impact on the not only organisational culture, but on the financial success of the company.

One report found that companies with a gender balanced executive team were 21% more likely to outperform their rivals. They were also were 27% more likely to have industry-leading long-term value creation.

Of course there is little point hiring a woman just because she is a woman; she must also be the best person for the job. Promoting someone based purely on gender to meet a target does not address the underlying issue the industry is facing.

The underlying issue is that there are simply not enough engineers in the UK, whether male or female. There is an annual shortfall of about 182,000 engineers in Britain; trying to make up this shortfall from only half the population makes the problem twice as difficult to solve. The apprenticeship levy, which the Government introduced in 2017, was meant to encourage more young people into skilled jobs in engineering, but we actually now have fewer people starting such courses now than when the levy was brought in.

Partly, this is because engineering skills are complicated and expensive to teach, meaning that it is difficult to create new qualifications and even tougher to fund training properly. But there is also a problem in encouraging younger people to take the first steps on a career in engineering long before they decide to do an apprenticeship. If there aren’t many women even entering engineering, even fewer will go on to lead.

Perhaps our biggest issue is one of perception. This needs to be addressed well before we get to the recruitment stage. We must change the perception of an engineering career to one that young women aspire to.

Many people, especially young women, are turned off an engineering career because the images that generally come to mind are industrial – human / machine interaction, or task-based engineering. It’s seen often as labour-intensive or ‘dirty’ work. As a result, many young people don’t see the link between a qualification in a “STEM” subject like maths or chemistry and a future engineering job- “how does my physics A-Level help me fix a car?”

Of course, these images and perceptions do not reflect the reality and sheer diversity of what a career in engineering can offer, but we need to do much more to promote these many other facets of engineering: innovation, planning, creating, or more generally the notion of “making things better”.

Instead of the traditional images, we should be promoting the high-tech environments which exist today, and the opportunities that will exist in coming decades.

Perception is not something we can change overnight, but the opportunity is there for us to focus on what we can achieve, and to create the culture that gets us there.

At the same time it is important we keep opportunities open and transparent and encourage our women internally to apply for that promotion, or give them the confidence to put themselves forward for the training and development they need to progress further.

By removing the barriers, be they perceived or real, we will be able to address the lack of diversity in a balanced and more importantly, sustainable way to ensure we have the best people leading our industry.