Women in Engineering - The UK Needs to Get Its Act Together

I was interested to read the comments from Nissan’s Executive Vice President recently about the lack of women engineers and how it was hurting the UK’s competitiveness in the automobile industry.  Andy Palmer, widely touted as one of Britain’s leading car executives, claimed that globally 50% of women were unhappy with their cars and 75% felt misunderstood by the car industry.  When you consider that women are now the key influencers in 7 out of 10 car purchases this is a serious failing for the industry.  Palmer' solution is to train more women engineers to design and create the female friendly cars of the future. 

But finding these women is a tall order. First we have to make engineering and STEM based careers attractive and accessible to women.  Sadly the UK’s track record in this area is very poor.  Only 9% of the engineers graduating from University in the UK are female.  China produces  30%,  Canada produces 18%, the USA 19% and Australia 14%.  Clearly the UK needs to get its act together and encourage more women into these fields, or it will be left behind.  At SolutionsPT we try to do our part.  We actively encourage female applicants across the full spectrum of our vacancies and out of the last 14 staff recruited, 8 were male and 6 female.  But when we advertise for a Technical Support or Senior Engineer, we are lucky to get any female applicants at all.

So what is the UK doing wrong?  Clearly there are a lot of cultural and historical factors at play that most countries have had to overcome, but why should the UK be worse than so many other countries?

WiSET(Women in Science, Engineering & Technology) is an organisation here in the UK who are committed to bringing more diversity to STEM based subjects and careers.  They claim that the number of girls choosing STEM subjects in schools is inadequate, particularly when you consider the important role these subjects play in our economic and cultural development.  

They assert that course selection in High School which forces specialisation at an early age is partly to blame. There also appears to be a misconception that an interest in science excludes an interest in “The Arts” and that you cannot be good at both or follow both in parallel.   Interestingly there is a high percentage of primarily schools girls who like science and take part in science based activities, but as they get older they fail to translate this interest into future career options.  Sadly, the attitude that “science is not for me” becomes very difficult to change after the age of 14.

Written by Sue Roche,
Software Business Unit Manager
SolutionsPT 

WiSET would like to see a sustained, long term programme to ensure STEM subjects are more inclusive.   More needs to be done with students, teachers, schools, families, universities and employees and clearly we all have a part of play in making STEM subjects and careers more accessible and appealing for all here in the UK.   In our industry, with its aging workforce and imminent skills crisis,  we are particularly obligant to lead the crusade and make a difference for women here in the UK.