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Jon Excell
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Why aren't there more women engineers?
New figures suggesting that the number of women pursuing a career in engineering is in decline make worrying reading for the UK’s technology sector.
According to the Institution of Engineering and Technology’s (IET) annual workforce survey, despite a raft of initiatives designed to engage women (including the IET’s own young woman engineer of the year competition), progress in addressing industry’s gender imbalance appears to have stalled. Not only does the UK have the lowest proportion of female engineering professionals in the EU (just 8.7 per cent) but the IET points to decline in the number of female engineering technicians from five percent to three per cent since 2008.
Whatever the reasons for this, it certainly has little to do with any gender-based predisposition. In the world’s industrial superpower China, more than a third of the engineers are female, while here in the UK female students regularly outperform their male peers in STEM subjects at GCSE.
And yet in the UK, post GCSE, the gender imbalance starts to kick in. At A-Level STEM subjects are dominated by males: according to the latest figures from Engineering UK Just 22 percent of last year’s A -level physics students were female. In Higher education the gap widens further, with women making up just 12 per cent of those enrolling on engineering courses. While away from academia just four per cent of the UK engineering apprenticeships are female.
The reasons for this are complicated. It certainly seems that the pattern is set early and that the perception and engagement issues that industry continues to struggle with are at their most pronounced when it comes to young women. But it would also be naïve to suggest that misconceptions are the only problems and industry itself is completely free of sexism.
While the reasons for industry’s gender gap may be hard to fathom, one thing is certain: as the skills gap begins to bite, it’s vital that the UK capitalises on the skills of all of its available talent.
Failure to promote careers in engineering for women will mean that we will continue to miss out on 50 per cent of the available talent, an oversight which could have serious repercussions for society and the future strength of the economy.
What do you think could be done to encourage more women into engineering? Join the discussion and have your say on our new forums.
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Readers' comments (57)
Deus | 19 Jul 2011 11:35 pm
The reason for the gap in this industry is easy to explain:
Women don't have to succeed in careers the way men do because they can have babies.
That's it.
Why in the world would a woman who wants to stop working at age 30 to have two children want to spend years training for a difficult and poorly paid job with low (unfairly low) social recognition?
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Richard | 20 Jul 2011 8:57 am
Perhaps it is because they think that they will be fixing lifts, or photocopiers, or the telephones like most 'engineers' in this country do, as the IET makes no effort to protect the engineer title.
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Kate | 20 Jul 2011 10:37 am
Raising children is harder than going out to work! Or so I gather from the example of my parents, where when my dad couldn't find work (as an automobile engineer) he stayed home and looked after us. Couldn't WAIT to get back to work, where you can clock off.
Lack of women.. well, prospects and promotions are limited not only if you have kids (and I agree, that they'll take three or so years out is a valid reason to not want employ someone) but the assumption that any woman of about the right age MIGHT have kids.
One engineering researcher told me that women just get fed up with the unsupportive environment and would rather drop out and be happy than stay on and suffer. Whether men feel more supported or feel more obliged to stay on and suffer was not mentioned.
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Nigel | 20 Jul 2011 12:09 pm
Why aren't there more women engineers? - I don’t know mate.
Has anyone thought of asking young women why they don’t want to go into engineering?
Oh and if they do, could they make the results public, that would be helpful.
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Anonymous | 20 Jul 2011 12:15 pm
Engineering is run by people who are guilty of some of the lowest forms of sexism - whilst claiming and cheering equal opportunities and the 'best person for the job' recruitment policies, they hold in place the thickest of glass ceilings and champion male proteges leaving women to look elsewhere for careers.
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Pete | 20 Jul 2011 12:18 pm
Deus: Not all women stop work at 30 to have two children. My mum had two children and then went back to work - once her maternity period stopped - as she had a career she wanted to continue. That's why she went through college in the first place.
The reason I see it is it's more to do with the perception of engineering being a male dominated environment and the gender stereotype from birth of engineering is for boys who want to get their hands dirty - and not for little girls. Working in engineering recruitment for a large utilities company, I've spend the last few years at schools trying to change this perception with little success.
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Anonymous | 20 Jul 2011 12:19 pm
The pay/responsibility ratio in most engineering disciplines is relatively poor in comparision to other professions. We've all come back from the dentist or solicitor etc. thinking we studied the wrong subject when we've found out what they charge and, after subtracting reasonable overheads, what some of these other professions are left with.
If women choose to follow other careers with better pay/responsibility ratios than engineering then maybe this highlights a gender divide in business acumen. The root of this would be that engineering has a relatively low standing in this country and therefore anything we do to make engineering more attractive to everyone will increase the attraction of the profession to women.
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AllyB | 20 Jul 2011 12:20 pm
My experience is that engineers are not supported. Engineering and engineers are not viewed as 'sexy', (no, really!). As stated already the name engineer is not protected and it is a bit galling that you are in thsame classification as a photocopier fixer and a garage mechanic. I have recently graduated with a second degree funded by myself. MBA? How much do you need? Engineering in this country needs to be recognised as the thing that's responsible for everything we use in a modern society - infrastructure, products, services etc. I know that the engineering societies need to get their marketing sorted out to improve the image of an engineer. Perhaps then it might be seen as an attractive profession for women and men. Sex is not a prerequisite for an engineer - a brain is!
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Jason | 20 Jul 2011 12:23 pm
Men and Women are, generally, different. Typically, If you want to attract a male to something you need a different approach than to attract a woman. This is sexism (I checked the definition). I have worked with many male and female engineers and the experience I have had is that there are fundamental differences in the way the sexes operate and think. Society has been trying to ignore this for the last few decades but it is futile. I believe that there are many roles in engineering that are better suited to women than to men but the best way to recruit for them is not to refer to them as engineering jobs. At the end of the day engineering is percieved as a male role. How many domestic engineers are there? Millions but they don't like to be called that.
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Karen | 20 Jul 2011 12:23 pm
Is there enough being done at grass roots level to attract women to engineering from an early age?
To be an engineer, you probably need to have made the right subject choices when you choose GCSE options at the age of 13. If you are not interested in the subjects required for a career in engineering then (and know you need to be good at them), it would be very difficult to make up for it later if you decided engineering was your choice of career.
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Anonymous | 20 Jul 2011 12:24 pm
I take issue with the phrasing of Deus's comment. "Women don't HAVE to succeed.....they CAN have babies"
While it is obviously true that women can have babies and men cannot, has it not occurred to him that it because women DO have babies that they CANNOT succeed in the same way as men. But fundamentally I agree with his point.
Let's not pretend that this is just a STEM problem, although it might be worse in that sector.
For women, having both a career and children is hard and if both parents have careers then childcare becomes an issue, which only certain careers can afford to pay for (engineering not often being one of them). The fact that it is relatively much easier for men to have both a career and children is never going to change - withstanding some weird anatomical miracles.
What needs to change is pay (women are still paid less across the board) and employers' reluctance to employ women who are of "child bearing age" and the lack of support given to women coming back after a break having children.
As a 29 year old female engineer, if I decide to have children in the future, I don't want the last 6 years or so of hard work building my career to go down the pan, but I am not so naive to think it will be really easy to come back to work after a break.
Hopefully the government's promise to split maternity leave between both mother and father will come to fruition and will go some way to helping this problem.
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Anonymous | 20 Jul 2011 12:25 pm
Perhaps our poor showing in the European tables has more than a little to do with the fact that a new graduate engineer in Switzerland can earn €5k per month (yes, per month). If our engineers (not lift or washing machine mechanics) were recompensed at this level, employers might just look after their assets better and women (and more men) would see some benefit in becoming engineers. . . .
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Graham Daniels | 20 Jul 2011 12:26 pm
Women have more sense than to take up engineering when they can work in professions that are better paid, have more recognition and higher status.
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Billy | 20 Jul 2011 12:29 pm
In this country there are jobs perceived as men's jobs and jobs perceived as women's jobs. An engineer is perceived as a man's job and a nursery school teacher for example is perceived as a woman's job. This is why these roles are predominately filled their respective genders. This is not right or wrong, it just is!
This cannot be corrected overnight with a few initiatives but will take a few generations to change.
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Anonymous | 20 Jul 2011 12:32 pm
After 25 + years as female engineer (technical university degree) in an 90% + male environment I have to agree with Kate: the technical content of my job is fabulous and I love it. The working in an all male environment: not so. Daily interaction is different, and there is a very real situation of male management only recognising workers that are most like them i.e. male.
I do have children, and I believe that that has been a great barrier to furthering my career.
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Scott | 20 Jul 2011 12:33 pm
The easy answer is that women just don't want to do it.
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Anonymous | 20 Jul 2011 12:33 pm
My daughter was put off an engineering degree because a taster course at university left her with the impression it would all be about sitting in front of a computer screen all day. She is now doing pharmacology.
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Ken R | 20 Jul 2011 12:37 pm
I think the reason that women do not go in for engineering is that they are indoctrinated into the role their gender plays at a very early age. Granddaughter has a kitchen set, a pram and a shop till. Grandson has cars trains and a work bench with a plastic screw driver. The gender role is the further reinforced by the predominance of female teachers trying to perpetuate their kind. Parents are also at fault, Dad does the DIY, fiddles with the car while mum cooks and cleans. We then have the male prejudice where females are good at knitting and kittens and understanding anything mechanical will overheat their little brains. Sounds a bit Mr Chumley-Warnerish but still rife in many fields of engineering.
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Simon | 20 Jul 2011 12:37 pm
My daughter is a high performing second year Civil Engineering student who has had no luck this year finding a company to provide some work experience. If she becomes disillusioned with the engineering Industry I, for one, will know where to lay some of the blame.
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Lyn | 20 Jul 2011 12:45 pm
I qualified as an elctro-mechanical engineer after courses through my tech college in the mid 80s. Believe me sexism is nothing in the industry compared to what it is. When I first worked on-site there were no female toilets or changing facilities or anything like that. The problem is with education. Those like me who were not academic enough to get A levels and degrees could go via HNC, C&G and apprenticeships. Now schools steer those medium pupils toward "soft " degrees. Once the uni fee thing takes hold more girls will realise it's not worth being saddled with debt for a soft degree and move back towards real careers. I was heavily involved in various initiatives to speak to girls about careers options and sadly those of the middle order of capability are not being offered support to go into engineering.
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