Comment & Analysis
The number of engineers that Engineering UK believes will be needed in the next seven years runs into the hundreds of thousands. Meanwhile, the UK Resource Centre for Women in Science, Engineering and Technology says more than a third of engineers believe “women don’t perform as well as men” in all fields – and at all levels of seniority. Wouldn’t it be great if one half of the population in Britain were able to embrace and do well at technical professions? That figure of 600,000 new engineers needed in the coming years might not look so unachievable.
At the House of Lords today, and surely, in an ideal world, that would be renamed the “House of Lords – and Ladies”, representatives from the sector skills councils and from manufacturing businesses were keen to talk up the important role women can play within industry. A senior HR manager from Jaguar Land Rover told me that just 8% of the workforce there were female. It’s engaging in programmes such as “Women and Work” from skills agencies such as Semta, the sectors skills council for engineering and manufacturing, that could help change that.
Some of the peers at the event in Westminster had their own stories to tell. Baroness Sharp of Guildford, a Liberal Democrat, said her daughter had gained a first-class degree in electrical engineering at Loughborough University and had gone to work at IBM. There she had been told to identify whether she was a “gizmo person or a people person”. The question has to be: why couldn’t she be both? Eventually IBM decided on a sales role for the Baroness’s daughter.
Sara Andrews, group human resources director for automotive supplier Johnson Controls, said at the same event that 8.5% of the company’s UK staff were female – “which for a manufacturing company is not too bad”. But she said in comparison with other industrialised nations, British engineering firms were lagging behind counterparts in Europe and the US in terms of employing women on the shopfloor.
More than 70 Johnson Controls staff, she said, had been through Semta’s Women in Work programme. The feedback, Andrews said, had been “fantastic”, and allowed Johnson Controls to understand some of the barriers that women face in traditionally male-dominated areas such as engineering, such as a lack of female managers and inflexibility in working practices – more part-time working and job sharing could be welcome, for example. “There is a lack of mentors and females in senior roles,” Andrews added.
Lynn Tomkins, director of UK operations at Semta, said it was not a matter of sexism that engineers believed their female counterparts did not achieve their potential. “You would find the same story in other industries,” she said. What was needed, she said, was the confidence among women that they could do what is typically thought of as man’s work just as well. “It’s inspiring women to believe they can do the jobs that, in fact, they already know how to do.”
Perhaps if more female engineers received encouragement from employers, and technically-gifted girls were given the appropriate support at school, that target of 600,000 engineers might not look so fantastical.