Career takes off after aviation adventure

Having spent around 17 years in engineering roles working for BAA, her career took a different turn subsequently when she was employed in a number of senior healthcare estates, healthcare engineering, and non-executive director roles in housing associations and NHS Trusts. Her most recent role was as director of Property and PMO at Surrey and Borders Partnership NHS Foundation Trust. Having left the job in mid-May this year to focus more on her personal life, she remains a committed and determined campaigner for women engineers, and is currently President of the Women’s Engineering Society (WES). 

When I began my discussion with Benita Mehra, who took on the WES Presidency in October 2015, I began by asking her how, and why, she first entered the engineering profession. “In 1986,” she explained, “at the height of Margaret Thatcher’s prime ministerial period, I recognised that, having studied A Levels in Physics, Maths, and Chemistry at a single-sex ‘comprehensive’, Ricards Lodge High School in Wimbledon, I was unsure on which direction to go in –  in terms of further study and then a career. However, based on my grades, I decided to study for an Electrical and Electronic Engineering degree at London’s City University. I think I chose that branch of engineering for two reasons – firstly because it was very much up and coming as a subject at the time, and, secondly, because, knowing that I would need to get a job on completing the degree, and that there was a demand for such engineering skills, it seemed a prudent choice. I was lucky that I did not have to cover the costs of my fees.” One immediate culture shock, she recalls, was ‘going from an all-girls school to a course where there were 100 male undergraduates and less than five girls’. 

Tough economic climate