Comment: Supporting more women to return to engineering

While we should absolutely spend time highlighting and praising these contributions, it’s also a time to have serious conversations about the industry’s gender gap.

According to WES, only 15.8 per cent of engineers in the UK are women. This demonstrates a significant underutilisation of highly qualified women in the UK engineering sector and significant barriers that prevent them from pursuing a career in science and engineering. Chief among them is the career-break curse - bias within the recruitment system against a recent lack of experience, gender, age and race.

What the STEM Returners Index tells us
For the past five years, we have been monitoring and assessing the returner landscape within engineering through our annual survey – the STEM Returners Index. There have been shoots of positivity over that time, but last year’s results painted a subdued picture and even showed that backwards steps had been taken.

Recruitment bias remains a barrier
With such a low number of women taking engineering roles, you’d be forgiven for thinking organisations would be bending over backwards to actively encourage women to return to the sector. But sadly, this is not the case, and recruitment bias remains widespread and is getting worse.

More than a quarter (26 per cent) of women who responded to our 2024 survey, which had over 1000 respondents, said they felt they had personally experienced bias in the recruitment process due to their gender, compared to eight per cent of men. More than half (58 per cent) of women said they experienced bias because of a lack of experience, a stark increase from 2023’s survey, when 10 per cent of women reported this. 

The need for returner programmes with real roles
This INWED, we are imploring engineering organisations to not only do more to combat recruitment bias within recruitment processes to help people return to work, but to offer something more tangible at the same time. Returner programmes that place people into real roles are desperately needed to ensure people return to work and are retained. There are many mentoring and career coaching programmes available but few that result in a job for the individual. Instead, they rely on that individual to take the learnings and keep applying for positions on their own and after you’ve done that a hundred times, it’s safe to say the enthusiasm understandably wavers. 

Structured support leads to success
But a programme that allows a candidate to reintegrate back into the industry, with an option to become permanent, provides a route to return to work for the candidate and allows the organisation to gain a skilled employee looking to prove themselves. These programmes are proving popular with returners themselves. In the 2024 Index, 54 per cent of successful returners expressed a preference for these programmes, a significant increase from 40 per cent in 2023. This shift indicates that more professionals are benefiting from structured support in easing their return.

Working together to close the skills gap
We are also urging returners to help us continue to monitor experiences by completing the 2025 Index (closing date 30 June). This year’s INWED theme is Together we engineer. This can be applied directly to returner programmes – if we work together and provide more roles for returners, we can improve the female representation in engineering and address the skills gap, which is as considerable as it always has been. Earlier this year, experts warned that engineering could face a workforce crisis similar to that in the NHS if skills and training are not prioritised.

Creating a place where returners are valued
If we are truly committed to fostering diversity and inclusion across engineering, then we must work together to create a place where returners are seen and valued. By actively supporting returners through structured employment pathways, we can help break down the barriers that keep skilled professionals, particularly women, from re-entering the workforce.

Natalie Desty, Founder and Director of STEM Returners