Shining light: Onwurah says she is working hard to keep engineering in the spotlight
Chi Onwurah is not your typical politician. She is a woman and she is an engineer. That makes her a rare breed among the balding middle-aged white men with degrees in economics, philosophy and politics who usually walk the corridors of power.
It’s an exciting time for her to be in Westminster as engineering is having a moment in the spotlight. Politicians are investing millions in high-tech manufacturing in an effort to rebalance the economy away from financial services and they are taking steps to encourage more youngsters into the profession. But sometimes she feels she is flying the flag for engineering almost single-handedly and she feels the pressure. She explains: “Probably engineering is more respected now than at any time since the industrial revolution. There is pressure on me to make sure that we grasp this opportunity.
“We don’t want it to be a fad. We want it to be a permanent change to the culture, and for that to be achieved we need to keep politicians’ minds focused. Engineering is in vogue today, tomorrow it could be something else entirely.”
Onwurah is the Labour MP for Newcastle upon Tyne Central, a position she has held since her election in 2010. Her connection to the city runs deep.
She was born in Wallsend in the 1960s, and after two years in Awka, Nigeria, she grew up in Newcastle. She joined the Labour party at 16, and is now working to attract companies to invest in the city and the wider region. It’s an opportunity she relishes.
“I enjoy standing up in the chamber and speaking for Newcastle,” she says.
Recently, she put forward the experiences of her people in a debate in the House of Commons following the death of Margaret Thatcher. She raised the issues around transport and the economy in the North East.
“I remember during the Thatcherite government, we were told engineering was no longer the future. It was all going to be services. That had a devastating impact on the region,” she says.
“Now we see that engineering is the future. It is important to the North East and Newcastle economically, but I also think it is something that the region can teach the rest of the country.”
But adapting to life in Westminster after 23 years in industry has not come easy. “There isn’t really a job description for being an MP,” she says. “Knowing the rules is a challenge, Westminster is very big and quite complex – it is a whole learning curve.”
Another challenge is keeping up with the 2,000 emails and letters that she gets every week, and prioritising her time. “When you are an MP you have so many people wanting to meet you. If I’ve got a choice between supporting world malaria day and world human rights day, I can’t do both at the same time. What do I do?”
On top of her work representing her constituents, Onwurah is in the shadow cabinet. Shortly after getting elected, the party made her shadow minister for science and innovation and, earlier this year, she became shadow minister for cyber security, social enterprise and digital democracy. With her background in electrical engineering and experience in the telecoms industry, it is a good fit. Directly before taking office as an MP, Onwurah worked for five years as head of telecoms technology at industry regulator Ofcom. The job involved forward-looking technical analysis to help the organisation understand how the market was moving and improve regulation. It called for study of the detailed drivers around telecoms networks and fibres, and the motion of light and glass.
She says her experience in the industry has helped her get ahead in politics. “Having a good understanding of technology makes me quite rare in parliament and therefore helps me a lot in making unique contributions. It does really help to know how the systems and the boxes work as well as understanding how the things might evolve in the future.”
One area in which this is particularly useful is cyber security and surveillance, in particular tapping fibres. “I understand how light waves carry telecommunications data and how you can get your hands on it and that really helps. The problem with a lot of politicians and media is that they see technology negatively because they don’t understand it. They are afraid of it.”
She is a firm believer that engineers need to get more involved in politics and shout about the good work they do.
She campaigns to get more women into engineering and is “absolutely determined” to make progress on the issue before she leaves politics. As part of this work she has held debates in the House of Commons on girls and information communication technology, and the coverage of science in the media. She arranges meetings, speaks at events and has written in the media on it.
Her motivation is a personal one. Onwurah studied electrical engineering at Imperial College London between 1984 and 1987 and says that around 12% of the students were young women. Nationally the statistics for the number of girls studying electrical engineering are about the same today. “In 25 years we have had no progress,” she says.
She describes her time at university as “very unpleasant”. “The atmosphere was terrible, it was very misogynist and racist at times. The Royal School of Mines had an annual lesbian sex show. The rag mag was full of racist and sexist things. It was ruled by the confederation of Conservative students, who were quite a nasty bunch.
“Most of the men there had never engaged with someone of the female sex unless they were married to them, or they were their sister, and that was very tangible,” she adds.
As a result she left university after three years attaining a Bachelor of Engineering rather than completing the four-year masters course.
She says that a lot has changed at Imperial in 25 years, and after decades of thinking on the issue, Onwurah is clear about what needs to happen now. “We have to stop passing the buck and everyone take responsibility for it. If industry really wanted gender balance in engineering it would get it. We just have to put more effort in,” she adds.
For her, the solution is a concerted effort across all fronts. This includes sorting out the issues around childcare and providing networks for women to share experiences in the profession.
For youngsters, boosting perception of engineering among girls by improving media coverage of the sector, making science more attractive to them, improving science teaching in schools, and getting more female role models for them to aspire to, needs to be done at the same time.
As a child growing up in Newcastle surrounded by industrial heritage, she had no trouble knowing that she wanted to become an engineer.
“Newcastle has great engineers and they were always well respected. I remember being entranced as a child by Charles Parsons’ steam turbine ship the Turbinia in a museum in Newcastle.”
When it came to making the choices about her future, she was adamant that she wanted to make things – simply explaining how things worked through science was not enough. After watching Star Trek as a child she became captivated by the idea of building spaceships and decided that electrical engineering was her best bet.
She pursued telecommunications at Imperial which was a small but growing area at the time. In her final year she was sponsored by Northern Telecom, now known as Nortel Networks, and joined them as hardware engineer on graduation.
Over the next eight years she worked her way to senior engineer and then project manager at the company, working in the UK and, later, Paris.
She came back to the UK in 1995 to work in product development for Cable and Wireless. During a four-year stint at the company she led the development and planning of a £300 million global virtual private network service.
A year in product strategy for Global TeleSystems followed, and then in 2000 her career took her to the US, where she built wireless networks for Teligent.
Onwurah spent the next two years in Nigeria, building the country’s first GSM network for the African telecoms company MTN. The network allowed people to use mobile phones for the first time in the country.
“The project had a lot of challenges associated with it but the difference it made socially and economically was huge. GSM made telephony available for so many people,” she says.
The project proved to be one of the highlights of her career, and she subsequently moved back to the UK to work for Ofcom.
“I really enjoyed my engineering career. I did a variety of roles throughout almost the entire value chain because I was always interested in learning new stuff.” Along the way she completed an executive MBA with Manchester Business School too.
The decision to move from Ofcom to politics came in 2009 when the MP for Onwurah’s home turf announced that he would be standing down at the next election. “I thought if I’m ever going to represent my home city then this was the time to go for it,” she explains.
“I didn’t think I had much chance to be selected, so it didn’t really feel like a decision to leave engineering.”
But Onwurah was selected from a 14-strong all-women shortlist. One person who disagreed with the idea of all-women shortlists joked that because she was an engineer she was as close to a man as she could get. Overall, though, the panel valued her engineering background and the fact that she was a local.
“Quite a few of my fellow engineers wondered why I was getting involved with that dirty, disreputable and grubby profession of politics rather than sticking to the pure glory of engineering. People say that they are very different careers, but I see them as twin forces for positive change,” she says.
She misses engineering and does her best to seek out the company of engineers, which is tricky in Westminster, where very few others have worked in the industry. She is hoping to be the candidate for Newcastle in the next election, but ultimately she hopes to return to engineering.
“That is the environment where you get concrete results. If you make something work it’s going to work for just about forever – you can’t say that in politics,” she says.