Making a Difference in AD – Celebrating National Women in Engineering Day

Today is National Women in Engineering Day, an international awareness campaign to raise the profile of women in engineering and focus attention on the amazing career opportunities available to girls in this exciting industry. In an industry like AD we cover Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths subjects, which means there are many opportunities for girls to get involved and start their Engineering (or STEM) career. We have decided to celebrate women across Science, technology, Engineering and Math as the AD industry covers all of these areas. You can support the campaign on twitter by using the hashtag #NWED2016 and #RaisingProfiles.

At ADBA we are in a fortunate position to have a number of members and work with many different organisations across the UK and internationally. We have been in touch with a few women in the sector to find out what has drawn them to their STEM careers; you can find their profiles here. 

Diversity is important for the team, businesses, the nation and the global economy. Astar-Fanshawe[1], an organisation who conduct thought-leading analysis of diversity state that: a well-managed and diverse team, perform more highly than non-diverse ones. It’s about the right combination of people, identities, personalities and hard skills to achieve the teams vision. Companies with higher gender diversity outperform those in the bottom quartile by 15% and by 33% with better ethnically diverse companies.

In the UK, there is a lot of focus on diversity in the workplace and to encourage young girls to consider a career in STEM and to enable women taking a career break return to a career in STEM. In Europe, the UK has the lowest percentage of female engineering professionals at less than 10%. Latvia, Bulgaria and Cyprus are the leaders in Europe and have almost 30% female engineering professionals[4]. The UK workforce has a shortfall of 55,000 engineers, this number has increased from 40,000 in the UK. This highlights that there needs to be a focus on tackling this shortfall of Engineers and encouraging for women into the sector, to bring up our numbers.

There is a lot of work to do by business and society to change these statistics. If you would like to find out more about national campaigns who work tirelessly to encourage school children to consider a career in STEM or support women throughout their careers, please look at the list below (it is not comprehensive):

• WISE
• WES
• Engineers without Borders – Outreach programme
• STEMettes
• Robogals