Sisters are doing it for themselves…
WJ Groundwater included an article by two of its engineers, Ula Markowicz and Revathy S. Nair, in Issue 27 of The Wet End to highlight its interest in the lack of female engineers in the trade.
The article was an interesting, insightful and sometimes frank look at the challenges that face women in our industry, be they culturally based or just role enforced through gender profiling.
At WJ Groundwater, we encourage our female engineers to work onsite if they see their career path as less office based, and the article reflects that outlook.
Not wanting the article to be a feint gesture we got in touch with the organisers of National Women In Engineering Day, 2015 to add our support to their enterprise. They kindly published excerpts from our article on their website here.
The day of events has been devised to promote equality across the engineering sector. In decades past women had been told that the industry is a ‘career no-go area’ but this is a sentiment of the past. To raise awareness and highlight the issue, companies, schools, universities and communities have been celebrating the day with a mind-boggling range of events including; a record breaking number of women performing a mid-air high five at the same time; the heritage minister for London re-listing Waterloo Bridge (aka the Ladies’ Bridge) to honour the female engineers that worked on its construction during the Second World War; and SAGE Publications have put together an exclusive web page featuring 11 inspirational women engineers. This is just the tip of the iceberg too.
The need for more diversity when staffing for the future is growing increasingly important and raising the profile of a whole raft of career choices for women is paramount. There has been a lot of coverage in the national press about the dearth of females in the UK taking up careers in engineering. It was also the subject of a talk at this year’s Ground Engineering and Piling Conference by Martin Blower, Chairman of the FPS. Here’s a link to a short film promoting the benefits of staff diversification and equality.
WJ plan to get behind the next National Women in Engineering Day in 2016 wholeheartedly with its own event (to be announced) so if anyone has any inspiring ideas please email us and we’ll see what we can do to raise awareness.