Celebrating a century of action on addressing industry's gender gap

WES was founded in 1919 at a time of hope for women’s equality. In 1918, some women in the UK had won the right to vote for the first time and in the workplace, female engineers had made a huge contribution to the war effort during World War I, working in munitions factories while men served in the armed forces. However, at the end of the war, the government decided that women were surplus to requirement and they had to make way for men returning from war. “WES was founded to support those women engineers who had achieved so much but suddenly found themselves unable to continue their work,” explained Donnelly.

WES continues that support in 2019 because, although the world is now a very different place for women, it’s perhaps not quite so different for women engineers. Figures from Engineering UK in 2018 show that only just over 12% of the engineering workforce is women and only 7% of engineering apprentices are female. Donnelly believes there are some key areas where things need to change if, as a country, we are going to plug the engineering skills gap and attract more women into the sector.