Last week's poll: Women in Engineering day

Schools should shoulder the largest responsibility for addressing the gender imbalance in engineering, according to the largest group of respondents to our poll last week. Of the 352 respomdents, 43 per cent thopught thaty schools sdhould be making more efforts to interest girls of all ages in STEM subjects; just 8 per cent thought that efforts should be focused on prospective A-level students. Almost a quarter thought the onus shopuld bde on engineering employers to attract and retain female employees, while 5 per cent thpught universities should do more to make enginering courses welcoming to women. Just over 14 per cent thought that there was no need to attract more women into engineering — which is considerably more than the 5 per cent proportion of women in the discipline, according to our recent salary survey. However, 23 per cent of the 4500 respondents to the salary survey thought there should be moe women, so the weekly survey result is probably more related to the nature of the self-selected sample of these surveys (in other words, more people who thought there was no need for a more equal gender balance responded).