As reports pour in of engineering skills shortages in the UK, one glaring issue remains the lack of gender parity. Engineering UK estimates that the UK will need 182,000 individuals with engineering skills by 2022, so we will have to double the number of engineering graduates and apprentices. And a conscious effort will have to be made to attract women into the engineering sector. Women constitute merely 8% of the engineering workforce, despite a slightly higher 15% of engineering graduates being women.
But some developing countries have a significantly higher percentage of women in engineering. The Royal Academy of Engineering has reported that countries such as Myanmar, Tunisia and Honduras have the highest proportion of female engineering graduates, 65%, 42% and 41% respectively. In Iran, 20% of students entering mechanical engineering courses at the University of Tehran are female.
Why is the UK lagging so far behind in terms of diversity?
Silvia Boschetto, chair of the equality and diversity steering group at the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, thinks that the profession may finally be trying to remedy the situation. “I think it’s more welcoming than it’s ever been,” she says. “Diversity and inclusion is much more in everybody’s mind. There’s much more effort going into the area than in the past.”
But Benita Mehra, president of the Women’s Engineering Society, believes that the ratio of men to women has not changed much in the past 10 to 15 years. “It’s a subject that isn’t often chosen in the UK by parents and careers advisers, so people don’t appreciate the opportunities available,” she says. “People choose subjects that are more visible, like medicine and law.”
Girls may be attracted to Stem subjects despite early negative influences, and Mehra believes it’s often owing to an inspirational person in their lives. She says: “We find women who choose engineering have been touched in some way by someone to understand it and choose that subject. Somebody has influenced them.”
Bola Fatimilehin, head of diversity at the Royal Academy of Engineering, thinks that those influences are likely to be close to home rather than figures in the public eye, saying “A lot of girls get into engineering if their parent is an engineer.”
The lack of prominent female engineers is emerging as a conspicuous factor when investigating the scant number of women in the industry. According to the academy, only 4.6% of registered professional engineers are women.
The absence of visible evidence of career progression for female engineers has been detrimental. Fatimilehin suggests there isn’t just the disparity between the number of female engineering graduates and working female engineers, there are also many who drop out of the profession.
There’s a perception that women leave because they have children but she says “research shows that they get tired of working in a male-dominated environment and they feel they’re not getting the recognition and access to the exciting work they want to do”. Social stereotypes of men and women become reinforced and many women begin to feel alienated.
Mehra adds: “Having more senior women who are retained in the workforce helps. Women don’t always share that they want to be a go-getter and be promoted. We need to be a little more honest and say what we want to go for.”
It does appear that perhaps science and engineering disciplines are valued more in developing countries. The engineering profession is seen as a mark of prestige and privilege, often associated with a high economic and social standing. Fatimilehin believes engineering does not hold as much cultural worth in the UK, and that further discourages women.
“The UK doesn’t have a good reputation of women going into engineering,” she says. “Part of it is about how much engineering is valued. In developed countries, even if everything around us is engineered people don’t see it – we’re used to having a sophisticated environment. But in developing countries you see the impact that an engineer has. Engineers in developing countries are held in much higher regard. And the UK has the lowest proportion of engineers in all of Europe.”
Boschetto concurs. “With developing countries, they’re looking for ways to improve, they want to jump out of the social position they’re in, and engineering is a way of doing that. In Anglo-Saxon countries it’s not seen that way.”
Ros Taylor, founder of the Ros Taylor Company, a corporate leadership consultancy, says that the low regard for engineers in the UK is reflected in their pay. Not only is the average starting salary behind those of medicine and dentistry, but women engineers make an average £25,959, compared to men who receive £27,260. It’s not difficult to gauge why women are disinclined to venture into engineering.
The cause of reluctance on the part of women to go into engineering can also be traced back to school. Up until GCSEs, the fraction of girls and boys picking maths and physics appears to be equal, and statistics show girls generally outperform boys. However, at A-level stage only 20% of girls retain those subjects, a figure that has not wavered for the past two decades. Even worse, only 4% of engineering apprentices are girls, and the number seems to be on the decline. One adverse factor could be the curriculum, as science subjects are not mandatory after GCSEs.
Fatimilehin says: “You can drop science after your GCSEs and never look at it again. Countries that have a broader curriculum that includes science further ahead will have more engineers.
“Places where girls do best in science are single-sexed private schools. In state schools the league tables are based on grades, and children who are seen as unsatisfactory in science are advised not to do it as it makes league tables look bad. Where there’s no boys there’s no competition, and all girls feel equal.”
Lack of support in schools and derisive attitudes towards ambitious female students are key influences in dissuading girls from picking maths and physics post-GCSEs. Taylor recounts an incident from one of her workshops in a school: “When I did a seminar with year 5 and 6 girls, one girl stood up and said she wanted to be an engineer and work with Nasa. The guidance teacher fell off his chair laughing and told her she would have better luck becoming a nurse. She felt insulted.
“I’m sure there are women visiting schools as inspirational engineering figures, but it’s just not enough. We need to do more to inspire them at an early age.”
The perception that boys are gifted at science and problem-solving whereas girls have to make deliberate effort to conquer the subjects leads teachers to commend boys while neglecting girls who are inclined towards engineering.
So the percentage of girls pursuing engineering in university remains low. Only 15% of engineering graduates are female, and, barring computer science, engineering courses receive the lowest number of female applicants. Only 17.3% of staff running science and technology courses are female, which can also affect the image girls have of engineering.
Developing countries are not alone in attracting more female engineers than the UK – the rest of Europe also seems to be ahead. In a Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering survey in 2015, 35% of women questioned in Germany expressed an interest in engineering, compared to 30% in the UK. In India and China, the figures were 78% and 60%, respectively.
In research by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, statistics showed that the number of female engineering graduates in Mexico had increased by 150% between 2008 and 2012, compared to 31% for the UK.
One factor in limiting recruitment onto engineering courses can be cognitive bias in exams. A way to eliminate this is to introduce “blind trial” examinations, which are in place in certain countries. Mehrnoosh Haeri, who obtained her mechanical engineering degree in Iran and is now working in Canada, describes the entrance exam she had to take: “There is no discrimination between women and men entering engineering programmes in universities in Iran. There is a national entrance exam each year. You are then ranked among all the people who have taken the exam country-wide. Universities don’t decide your acceptance based on your gender. They don’t even know your gender. All they know is your rank among the thousands who have taken the exam.”
In recent years the UK has seen a positive factor develop because of an approach some are calling “humanitarian engineering”. The gist is that women will gravitate towards engineering disciplines more strongly if they can link them to a social cause, such as using their skills to help destitute communities. The Women’s Engineering Society found that modifying the name of an engineering course but maintaining similar content had an impact on the number of women applying.
Mehra says: “Women are choosing science subjects with a social element. When you add ‘bio’ to an engineering degree it makes a difference.”
Boschetto, who has a degree in mechanical engineering, says it was a similar sentiment that led her on her path: “I got into it because I wanted to change the world, and I wanted to do it through alternative energy. Girls and even boys today are more driven by the outcome, what it delivers for society.”
Things could still turn around. There are initiatives that are reaching out to girls to show them the potential of the profession. One starting point would be to transform the education system. “It’s about making it interesting,” says Boschetto. “People have different learning styles. You need to mix it up a bit so it works.
“It’s about diversity of thinking. If you go for one type of demographic then you don’t get diversity.”
Fatimilehin says a focal point at the Royal Academy of Engineering is to look into this aspect: “We need to improve social understanding of what engineering is. We’re working with employers to create change. If the culture is all-male, women are going to want to get away from it.”
Employers need to commit to changing the testosterone-fuelled cultural climate of engineering. Taylor says: “Women are often in the minority and they always have to be more skilled in terms of influence. Men feel comfortable with men, so they want to bring people on board who are mirror images of themselves.”
Schools, parents, employers and employees need to work together to make the engineering sector an even playing field for men and women.