Women in Engineering

In a large auditorium of a local school in sevenoaks, we had the opportunity to make a presentation to nearly 200, (it seemed like hundreds at least) of 14 year school girls who were about to choose their school subjects for GCSE; we wanted to promote STEM subjects and Engineering as a career choice.  As the school was a girls' school we thought we could "borrow" the excellent work undertaken by Atkins in their report "Women in Engineering"

It was great to see a small handful of children already interested in Engineering and a number whose parents are already involved in the Industry, whilst typically some were unsure what they actually did - "Something to do with Project Management".

Importantly by the end of the presentation by a show of hands, a much larger number of schoolgirls were now more interested in pursuing engineering, if we inspired just one person into engineering it would have been a result.

I wanted them to challenge the idea of Engineering and push the boundries of their own views of it. Ultimately we need to show a younger generation that Engineering could be a future career for them.

For my presentation I shared with the students and blatantly plagerised (for a good cause) a great brochure from Atkins about Women in Engineering. Typically we started with the "Victorian" image of Civil Engineering, with Brunel standing proudly infront of huge steel work chains, and then we started to show the width and breath of Engineering and how it is involved in our lives.

This Atkins graphic was used as an illustration

Source: Atkins Brochure, Page 11

Despite the impression that Engineering can be underpaid, again Atkin's research just shows that this perception is wrong.  This information appeared to go down well with the audience.  Considering we do import on school children the imporance of a well remunerated career we should celebrate the potential salaries available.  As a recruiter, we could also suplement this reseach with our own headline figures for senior engineers and freelancers.

Source: Atkins Brochure, Page 4


Atkin's report also highlights the viewpoints of over 300 professional female engineers and we were able to share this research directly with the school girls. We highlighted how over 98% believed it was a rewarding career choice for women and over 80% were happy with their career choice. These are fantastic statistics that show how satisfying and rewarding a career in Engineering can be.





Source: Atkins Brochure, Page 32


From starting the presentation with the old "stereotype" of an engineer and then broadening it out to a more realistic image covering the broad spectrum of engineering using Atkin's research and my own recruitment experience and observations, more school girls at the end of the hour were interested in learning about engineering than at the begining of the day. Solar power, renewal energy and saving the "world problems" were typically well received by the audience.

We are keen to make simliar presentations to other schools on our corporate social responsibility programme.  Please do contact us if you would like us to undertake a simliar presentation to your interest group and hopefully we can get more people interested in STEM education. 

To view the whole Atkins brochure, click here: http://www.atkinsglobal.co.uk/en-GB/about-the-group/our-publications

Here are some great websites for more information on "Women in Engineering":

https://www.wisecampaign.org.uk 
http://www.ieee.org/membership_services/membership/women/index.html
http://www.wes.org.uk
http://www.nwed.org.uk