It’s time to step up our efforts to encourage young people from underrepresented groups to consider a career in engineering, writes Engineering UK chief executive Dr Hilary Leevers.
Following hot on the heels of National Apprenticeships Week and International Women’s Day earlier this month, I’ve been thinking about what the engineering community can do to improve the balance between male and female apprentices across the UK and the urgency of doing so.
We know from our 2019 research report ‘Gender disparity in engineering’ that female under-representation in the engineering workforce is largely due to girls dropping out of educational pathways at every decision point, despite generally performing at least as well as boys in STEM subjects at school.
The pattern is even more pronounced for apprenticeships with just 1 in 10 of those on engineering-related apprenticeships being female.
In an industry that already has a gender imbalance issue, with only 12% of the workforce identifying as female, it seems the pandemic has deepened gender differences in career aspirations in engineering or technology for young people.
Our recent survey, Young people and Covid-19 suggests that existing gender differences in career aspirations are becoming more entrenched, with a higher proportion of female than male respondents saying they would be more likely to work in healthcare because of the pandemic (29% v 18%) and a higher proportion of male than female young people saying they’d be more likely to work in engineering (17% v 12%) or technology (23% v 18%).
We did not have a large enough sample to see if other stereotyped career aspirations were also accentuated, but I’m concerned that this is a risk, that young people may be reverting to perceived norms as a safer career choice at a time of crisis, and that there have been fewer opportunities to meet diverse role models or have inclusive careers experiences that could have disrupted stereotypical thinking.
We’ve created platforms to help the engineering community and educators reach young people with effective careers engagement as we know that young people who have taken part in a STEM careers activity are three times more likely to consider a career in engineering. The research mentioned earlier also helps us see what they are prioritising – job availability and security alongside careers with enormous societal value – to help frame the careers messages.
The new Tomorrow’s Engineers website is packed with careers resources and advice to help organisations planning or delivering engineering engagement activities. We’ve drawn together content from across the sector to help us all improve our practice.
To help teachers and educators navigate the various offers, we launched Neon, a digital platform that gives them easy access to quality online and offline engineering outreach activities, bringing brilliant STEM careers to life. With the support of the engineering community, Neon empowers teachers with the tools they need to engage young people in a career in the engineering sector, which makes up nearly 20% of the workforce.
Neon offers a growing list of over 80 in-class, online and external experiences. Everything from tackling real-world engineering problems in class, or live online sessions to create a future city, to creating virtual racing cars. There’s even a collection of lessons for challenging perceptions to help teachers demystify engineering and enable young people from all walks of life to defy stereotypical views of who can become an engineer – just in time for International Women’s Day.
We also have a range of careers resources designed to be easily accessed online including useful content about apprenticeships. It’s important that young people understand that there are multiple pathways to a successful, satisfying engineering and technology career. One way to communicate this is for young people to hear from young apprentices – who better than Allanah or Imogen to explain why earning while learning was a better option for them, and could be for others too?
The engineering community alongside other influencers like parents, carers, teachers and other educators is an important player in achieving the collective impact that’s necessary to see more and more diverse young people entering engineering.
Occasions like International Women’s Day and National Apprenticeships Week provide perfect opportunities for us to celebrate our current role models and create new ones.
Why not spend more time and energy researching ways to improve teaching? The sheer amount of effort that is spent on these useless ‘studies’ trying to find out why there are not so many female engineers – it’s fried air. The time could be better spent highlighting the failings of our current secondary curriculum. Your diversity blog is just skirting around the real problem.
Improving secondary and post 16 education, teaching and curriculum, will create better engineers irrespective of gender or class.
I’ve been an Engineer now for about 30 years, and this sort of article has been published over and over again in that time.
So whatever it is you’re doing, doesn’t work. This needs looking at a completely different way.
Getting young people to build racing cars in a class room doesn’t work. They’re young, not stupid, and know that most engineers don’t make toy racing cars. And so on.
Aside from that, the challenge is to get ANY young people interested. In my thirty years working I’ve nearly always been the youngest person in the room. I still mostly am.
The root cause of the gender imbalance goes back to boy / girl conditioning. For some reason this has led girls to reject physics very early and only about 20% of A-level physics entries were girls. This is barely altering over the years although Chemistry is now well over 50% female now. 85% of Engineering undergraduates were male.
I believe that the solution is conversion courses for people whose maths and physics fell short at A-level. This was practiced successfully after the war when there was a massive shortage of engineers. Several very good engineers that I worked for had been converted into engineers (from chemists in most cases).
I agree with the comments about how the teachers impart the role of engineers both to male and female pupils. As a Chartered Engineer with over 40 years experience in the real world of wealth creation by engineers, and going into schools as Science Ambassador, I find it most lacking in teachers knowledge of real engineering projects that would get the students excited. They talk to pupils about the environment without explaining the need for engineers to produce the cure for this major problem. Two examples I relate to that will put over the importance to everyone and it is the engineers to solve.
1.How are we to quickly reduce the emissions of transport, cars heavy goods vehicles, air transport and rail. Techers should make contact with organisations that are heavily involved in this work.
2.How are we going to change our reliance on gas and oil for our heating, Pupils should see for themselves the work ongoing for the hydrogen economy. Work that is underway in the north of the country.
These are just two real projects in engineering that will benefit people in general, and the exciting role Engineers both male and female are playing an important part.
Of importance how engineers and scientist are playing in find solutions about the current virus. Certain subjects that are currently on the school’s syllabus will not help in these problems that the country faces. The profession of teaching must get up to date.
The possibility of divers routes into engineering is worthy of a lot more attention. Since the 1990s the only route has been degree followed by institution membership. There are many excellent technicians who do not hold degrees for varied reasons. Many of these could be given CPD assistance to becoming chartered engineers if the institutions were not so bogged down with snobbish fuddy-duddies. The schools will not be the route to change, as shown by many years of trying with little change other than increases in chemistry and biosciences.