Author: Anna Young, Photo credits: Hamideh Khanbareh
People sometimes ask me why I think we should bother about encouraging more women into engineering. I think the answer is simple: we need more engineers¹, and we need people with a wide range of thinking styles in order to solve ever more complex, inderdisciplinary problems². If half the population thinks engineering isn’t for them, then we lose out on half the ideas. For the same reason, we must keep working to make engineering an inclusive career option, not just for women, but for everyone.
International Women in Engineering Day is a chance to celebrate the contribution that women make to engineering, so I thought I’d ask a few of the women staff and students in the Department why they love their jobs so much. Their answers are in the images below, and I think they provide a glimpse of what a rewarding, varied career engineering can be. Repeated themes are the chance to ask questions and the creative side of problem solving, as well as having a lot of fun.
¹The STEM Skills Indicator study found that 89% of STEM businesses had found it difficult to hire staff with the required skills in the year to April 2018. The cost to UK businesses of this shortage is estimated to be £1.5bn.
²According to Cloverpop, diverse teams make better decisions 87% of the time.
