News analysis with BESA
Changing times for women E
A more gender diverse building engineering sector will be crucial to delivering the economic recovery, according to the Building Engineering Services Association (BESA)
ngineering employers were already reporting a serious shortfall in recruits before the COVID- 19 crisis and the Association says the sector’s failure to improve its appeal to women and girls could further hamper growth.
BESA supported the seventh annual International Women in Engineering Day (INWED20) in June. This global awareness campaign is supported by UNESCO and organised by the Women’s Engineering Society (WES). It raises the profile of women engineers focusing attention on the “amazing career opportunities available to girls in this exciting industry”.
This year’s theme was ‘Shape the World’, which highlighted how engineering can deliver social and sustainability goals – something that will be a crucial part of the global recovery, according to the Association. WES chief executive Elizabeth Donnelly said the theme tied in with “the challenges facing us in an uncertain future and invites engineers to share how they are tackling such topics as the climate emergency”. She thanked BESA for supporting the campaign and said that men would be just as important as women in solving engineering’s diversity problem. BESA challenged its members and the wider built environment sector to use this time of renewal and change to build on the INWED campaign.
Career
Just 12% of UK engineers are female – although that is up from the 9% recorded in 2015 – and just 25% of girls aged 16-18 would consider a career in engineering compared with more than 50% of boys, according to the latest statistics gathered by EngineeringUK.
Engineering is crucial to the overall economic success of the country generating 23% of the country’s annual turnover (including most of its
exports) and employing 5.6 million people, but employers in the sector reported around 59,000 unfilled vacancies last year.
“Engineering professions will be crucial to the economic recovery in the wake of the pandemic,” said BESA president John Norfolk. “We need to power up the sector with the widest possible range of skills; yet we continue to miss a major recruitment opportunity with half of the population.
“It is telling that 46% of girls would consider engineering as a career at age 11-14, but that falls to just 25% aged 16-18,” he added. “We must all do more as employers to showcase the wonderful opportunities this industry offers to all young adults.” The Prime Minister has also made apprenticeships one of his key priorities for rebuilding the economy, but currently girls and women account for less than 18% of higher apprentices in engineering and manufacturing – and for just 7.4% of all engineering apprentices. Just 22% of students starting A-level physics last year were female.
Yet, studies show that they outperform their male counterparts in all STEM A-level subjects apart from chemistry, according to EngineeringUK, which is a not- for-profit body working with the sector to encourage more young people to take up engineering careers. “Unless we can recruit more female engineers, our firms will find it increasingly hard to deliver the social, economic and environmental challenges we all face,” said Mr Norfolk.
More positive messages about the success of women in engineering would encourage greater numbers of recruits, according to BESA board member Claire Curran. She said there was too much emphasis put on the barriers to women in engineering professions and not enough celebration of their successes. “We need to stop giving ourselves such a bad rep,” said Ms Curran, who is
managing director of Linaker FM. “This industry is amazing and delivers some brilliant projects – let’s focus on the exciting stuff.”
She also urged women to have more confidence in their ability to lead engineering projects and organisations.
“We need more female role models, but it is hard to get women to put themselves forward because they don’t want to be seen as pushy or aggressive. Women need to feel able to be themselves and not try to fit in with the ‘blokey’ culture.”
Emotional intelligence
Reanna Taylor, senior project engineer at NG Bailey, said women’s greater “emotional intelligence” also made them well suited to taking leadership roles. “We are also good at finding new solutions to old problems and bringing people together,” she said. “We do tend to focus on the ‘barriers’ created by gender when, in fact, we should be concentrating on the difficulties all engineers have in common – such as the technical challenges we all face,” added Ms Taylor, who was the first chair of the BESA Future Leaders’ group. Ms Donnelly agreed pointing out that men “tend to go straight at problems and try to solve them by brute force” whereas a woman will try to work around an issue and come at it from a new angle. Last year’s winner of the BESA Apprentice of the Year Award Melissa Lee said it was important to make sure young women felt supported when they came into the industry.
“Female apprentices often feel intimidated because they think they are on their own, but they are not and we need to make them feel supported on their journey,” said Ms Lee, who is an apprentice welder/fabricator at Premium Fabrications. “There are lots of opportunities, but you
!" July 2020
www.heatingandventilating.net
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