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Ask a person in the street to name an engineer and, if they can, it will undoubtedly be a white male. The UK has been catastrophically bad at attracting women into engineering – the profession is sex-biased globally, but the UK has one of the world’s most unbalanced workforces.
This matters greatly. We need more engineers, yet we seem to be selecting from only around 50% of the population. Since there is no reason to suppose women are inherently less able to be engineers, this represents a terrible waste of talent.
And for reasons of basic fairness and social justice, it should concern us that girls do not appear to have equal access to a potentially rewarding, fulfilling and well-remunerated career.
We should also be concerned that the engineering profession is alarmingly close to being a monoculture. Diversity can spark more creative and effective thinking, opening up new avenues of thought and minimising the risk of group-think.
In business, greater boardroom diversity has been associated with greater success. Many organisations also have a duty to promote gender equality.
Why is the situation so bad in the UK? One important factor is our pronounced arts–science divide and early specialisation. At an absurdly early age, young people are railroaded down a path towards either the arts and humanities or the sciences. Bridging the two is difficult, particularly for those who wish to specialise at university.
Baccalaureate-like systems provide a much more rounded education, enabling students to keep their options open for longer. A broader education system would ensure that engineering careers remained a possibility at later ages (and would ensure that even the arts-focused had some degree of scientific and technological literacy). Furthermore, engineering can flourish in the space where scientific principles meet design creativity.
Early specialisation isn’t the only issue for engineering in schools. The discipline has very little presence in schools and awareness is low (so students’ choices may rule out engineering as a career option before they have even discovered what it is).
The emphasis on science and maths as subjects in their own right – rather than as enablers – also does engineering a disservice. Linking science and maths to problem-solving via engineering could do much to persuade students of their relevance to everyday life.
So, alongside a broader range of options, a greater awareness in schools of engineering would be an advantage. As well as providing students with a broader understanding of what engineers do, more emphasis might usefully be placed on promoting science and engineering as ‘enabling’ subjects – providing a young person with useful creative problem-solving skills that can be applied in any area of life.
The gender imbalance in UK engineering is a long-standing issue that shows little sign of changing, despite much well-intentioned effort. Perhaps it is time to consider more radical solutions.
Our preliminary analysis has identified some notable features of girls choosing A-level physics and/or engineering. They are often academically very able, come from families with a strong background in science and engineering, and are proud to be ‘different’ from other girls. They also attend schools that explicitly push girls to study physics post-16.
Taken together, these factors seem to provide a level of resilience, or ‘immunity’, against the many factors that act as barriers to girls’ progression, including pervasive views of physics and engineering as ‘masculine’. If we are to get more women into these areas, we are going to have to change the conditions within which girls make their subject choices.
So, if the situation is to change dramatically, the physical sciences and engineering will need to broaden their appeal. They may need to think hard about how they present themselves – the elitist emphasis on how ‘difficult’ they are may be off-putting to many able students, particularly girls.
Perhaps even the term ‘engineering’ – poorly understood and with much historical baggage, conjuring up images of men in overalls – needs to be jettisoned. Such perceptions could all be barriers, and the last things we currently need are unnecessary obstacles that prevent women and other under-represented groups from entering and refreshing the profession.
Professor Louise Archer is Professor of Sociology of Education at King’s College London. She is a principal investigator on the ESRC ASPIRES project, a five-year longitudinal study examining children’s science aspirations and career choice (age 10–14).