Still waiting for change: Funding for the latest government-led spending scheme aimed at attracting more women into engineering has been woefully underspent The lack of women in engineering is a problem that refuses to go away, to the point that many people’s throats have become hoarse discussing it. In answer to industry calls to resolve this historic issue, fuelled by fears of the looming skills crisis, myriad government-led initiatives have arisen to try to solve it. Campaigns such as Your Life aim to inspire young people, and aim to increase the number of girls and women studying Stem subjects by 50% over the next three years – an ambitious goal.
However, there is growing concern that the multitude of initiatives and funding commitments are doing little to enact real change.
Looking at the all-too-familiar statistics, little has changed in terms of women in engineering. According to the government’s equality office, women now make up 46% of the UK’s workforce, but only 15.5% of the Stem workforce are women (excluding medicine). Just 8% of engineering professionals are women. Additionally, despite the fact that girls outperform boys in GCSEs and A-levels, and that there are more women graduating from university than men, just 12% of engineering and technology undergraduates are women.
These figures have remained largely unchanged over the years, despite the massive amounts of government attention and funding allocated to try to improve them.
The inherent failure of such well-meaning ‘get more women into engineering’ schemes has been highlighted by MP Meg Munn’s recent criticism of the Employer Ownership Fund (EoF). The fund enables employers to design training projects that can address skills shortages that are holding back their businesses, providing 50% match-funding to firms.
As part of the EoF, an injection of £30 million was announced by skills and enterprise minister Matthew Hancock last June, to secure the supply of engineers and boost the number of women in the sector. The total amount was split to focus on three key areas prompted by recommendations made in the Perkins review of 2013, with
£10 million directed to a call to ‘Developing Women Engineers’ and £10 million to a call to ‘Improving Engineering Careers’. A further £10 million was made available last autumn to develop engineering skills in smaller companies.
Prospective bidders were encouraged to explore how they could support employees, particularly women, looking to return to the sector, and how individuals with relevant skills could be helped to progress to become fully qualified engineers.
Of the £10 million earmarked to develop women engineers, just £104,000 had been spent – with just three applications received – by the December 2014 closing date, prompting Munn to dub the EoF “not fit for purpose”.
“These figures call into question how serious the government really is about tackling our significant engineering skills shortage,” she said. “It’s all well and good supposedly setting aside £30 million to help employers increase the supply of engineers, but the funding has to be accessible. This has simply not been the case with the EoF.
“The government claims to be serious about fully engaging employers to invest in the skills of women engineers, but an underspend of around £9.9 million calls this commitment into question.”
Meg Munn MP dubbed EoF scheme 'not fit for purpose'
So why did so few employers apply for the funding? Industry experts from Skills4Stem, a skills and succession planning consultancy for engineering firms, told Munn that the application criteria for the EoF were both “onerous and too expensive”. The consultancy said that numerous employers it worked with had found the £40,000 match-funding requirement difficult to meet.
This feedback prompted Munn, who is also patron of the Women’s Engineering Society (WES), to write to the minister for skills and equalities, Nick Boles. She highlighted her concerns about the accessibility of the scheme and stressed that the current criteria were likely to deter many employers from even applying.
In his response, Boles assured her that the application process was “fast and simple”, and that the £40,000 threshold was a “reasonable commitment” for employers to meet. However, Munn points to the recent Engineering UK findings in its State of Engineering report that most engineering enterprises (97.1%) are either small or micro, and that overall 86.9% of engineering enterprises have fewer than 10 employees. Because of their small size, most of these businesses will most likely not have £40,000 lying around, she says.
Munn suggests that a better option for small businesses would have been grant schemes rather than match-funding, with the commitment on their part being the time and effort to set up the in-house skills training or recruitment drives.
The president of WES, Dawn Bonfield, has joined Munn in questioning the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) on the EoF’s apparent lack of success, which Munn says many feel has been “pitched in completely the wrong way”.
“I want government to talk to the people who work in the industry and find out what would be manageable for firms and what they could do to help,” says Munn. “It just seems the EoF has been set up without talking to the people concerned. They need to do it again.”
In response to Munn’s criticisms, a spokesperson from BIS said: “Feedback from both successful and unsuccessful applicants has shown that the EoF application process is not preventing companies from applying. The threshold for our latest round of funding has already been reduced from £40,000 to £10,000, to allow more smaller companies to apply.
£10 million was earmarked to boost women in engineering stats but only £104,000 was spent
“It is only right that there are checks in place to ensure that government investment results in the best impact, with companies that will make good use of it. Funds for the scheme have not been underspent – payments are made in arrears after private investments are made, so payments will continue to be made in coming months. Any uncommitted funding is put back into the programme to support projects.”
Many of Munn’s concerns over the EoF’s lack of success are shared by Philippa Oldham, the Institution of Mechanical Engineers’ head of transport and manufacturing. But she says she wasn’t surprised by the lack of spending, as many of these schemes suffer from “marketing issues”. Oldham adds: “I don’t think we can fairly say it has been an unsuccessful campaign, as they didn’t even create enough of a campaign for it. It wasn’t even open for a year, and there wasn’t even enough time for people to register its existence. I wonder how many companies even knew about it, let alone had time to apply for funding.”
Two ways in which BIS could improve are better publicising of its schemes and demystifying the funding options available to employers, says Oldham. A good place to start would be a simple drop-down menu on the BIS website, clearly listing the various options, she adds. However, Oldham joins Munn in questioning whether match-funding is the right way to go about encouraging more women into the industry, and they suggest government could do well to learn from successful schemes that are running around the country.
One such initiative is the Daphne Jackson Trust, a charity that offers fellowships that combine a research project with a retraining programme held in a university. Since 1992, it has helped more than 250 scientists, technologists, engineers and mathematicians return to careers after a break of two years or more for family or health reasons.
This, says Munn, is the type of scheme that government should be supporting. The Perkins review recommended that the government support the trust to broaden out its fellowships for industry, not just for academia. Whether it follows this recommendation remains to be seen, but Oldham and Munn stress that this is the kind of solution that government should focus on to increase the retention of female engineers.
Oldham also suggests that government can make a much bigger impact by ensuring that policies are in place for equal pay and flexible working. “Government could also help run workshops, schemes or showing best practice work arrangements such as those at Jaguar Land Rover or Arup,” she says.
In addition, she feels that to get more girls studying Stem, it would help to shift away from overdone inspirational drives targeted at young children, such as the Your Life campaign, and towards improving careers advice in schools.
Overall, it appears that the failure of the EoF and similar government-led schemes lies in the tendency to rush to help without analysing the roots of the problems. Oldham says that while in theory the EoF scheme appeared good, it was formed in a knee-jerk reaction to the Perkins review, with little time spent on analysing the complex reasons why there are so few qualified female engineers. “Government is just missing the point,” she says. “It is waving a wad of cash at it and thinking that will solve the problem.”
So while throats may be sore discussing how best to boost female numbers in engineering, there is still more talking to be done between industry and government to ensure that the right action is taken.