In January’s HEJ, editor, Jonathan Baillie, reported on the first half of a ‘Diversity and Equality’ roundtable in early November in London, at which topics ranged from encouraging more people from diverse genders and ethnic minorities into the sector, to some of the more challenging experiences for women engineers, such as around sexism, being passed over for promotion/training, and misconceptions over their professional abilities.
Here he reports on the second half of a discussion where participants both described some of their own, sometimes difficult experiences, and the many highlights of their engineering careers.
The first half of the roundtable, which was held at Eta Projects’ London offices on 8 November, had ended with the participants talking on a very positive note about the considerable impact that enthusiastic female engineers can make in attracting new recruits to the profession, particularly through sharing their own positive experiences in schools, colleges, and other educational establishments, and speaking at events such as IHEEM’s annual Healthcare Estates show. Those taking part were:
Having heard previously about the positive experiences of young engineer, Lizzie Gibbons, as a STEM Ambassador, the roundtable’s second half began with the participants acknowledging that – despite recent years’ increasingly committed efforts to recruit more women engineers, including via close liaison with schools – female engineers are still present in fewer numbers in the UK, especially in ‘niche’ sectors like healthcare engineering, than their male counterparts, and certainly make up a significantly lower percentage of the engineering workforce than would have been hoped by now. Trish Marchant recalled of her early career: “When I first entered engineering in the early 1980s, I went to a polytechnic in Coventry to do production engineering. I was the only female on the course, and had to deal with a lot of difficult students; some male students, and a couple of tutors that were discriminatory against me – because they just didn’t know how to cope with a female in the class. At that time there was no encouragement, there was no ‘It’s great that we’ve got a female involved and interested in doing this’.” I asked if she had felt ‘sidelined’. She replied: “Even when I first started engineering, I knew I was always going to have to ‘fight my corner’, which is what we were talking about earlier – about just moving rather than putting up; why waste your energy when your company clearly doesn’t value you, because they promote people over you?”
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