1646 – Issue 2

To encourage girls to take up engineering we need to educate them at the right age as to what engineering is and whether their skills are well suited. How did life at Blue Coat prepare you for life in the working world and the world of engineering? Being a girl at a predominantly boys school was certainly a start! At university there was roughly a 1:20 girl to boy ration in a year of 200 students, and that’s pretty consistent at industry level too. Although it seems trivial, having been in a single sex school since the age of 4, joining Blue Coat at Sixth Form was definitely a beneficial life experience. At A-Levels my Blue Coat teachers encouraged collaborative working. This was useful preparation for an engineering degree where a lot of assignments are done in groups and you have to learn to work with a variety of different characters to achieve a positive outcome. You worked in cycling. Are you into sports yourself? What co-curricular activities did you enjoy at school? My love of sports is what led me to seek my first job in Sports Engineering. I’ve always played sports since I was young and fondly remember being part of sports day, cross country, captaining the girls hockey team (and even making a couple of appearances in the boys hockey team!) at Blue Coat. The world of engineering tends to be more male dominated. Is this your experience? How have your dealt with this in your working life? I have yet to work with another female engineer and look forward to when I get the opportunity to. Having been in a male dominated environment since 16 I tend not to notice it and it doesn’t bother me. There has only been one experience when I was treated differently and it had a significant affect on my work and personal well-being as I endured it for longer than I should have. That experience taught me how resilient I could be but highlighted that the industry has a long way to go. Change needs to come from both directions; in order to have more females in industry we need to increase the ratios at degree level and for the exceptions where a culture shift is required in industry, it needs to come from top level management. Do you think there is more schools can do to encourage girls to get into engineering? This is something I am looking to get more involved in; I would hazard a guess that the main barrier to entry is a lack of understanding what engineering is, I certainly didn’t really know what it was or what to expect from my degree. I also think we need to work to break down the assumption that it’s a “male subject”. I remember thinking at university that the boys would be better than me because they’d have a stronger base understanding about mechanical things like cars. However a great example of this not being the case was during my first design module when we were learning how to do engineering drawings. We were tasked with drawing the interior of a gearbox after a very short brief on what a gearbox looked like. I was in a group with five other boys, I had never heard of a ‘layshaft’ and had no idea what it did; it turned out none of them did either! I was the only one brave enough to ask the lecturer, so after that everyone came to me for help with their drawings. To encourage girls to take up engineering we need to educate them at the right age as to what engineering is and whether their skills are well suited. A-Level choices should be more focused on what you think you might want to do at university as many students realise too late that their chosen degree requires an A-level they didn’t do. Engineering isn’t just about being good at maths, it’s involves a wider range of skills such as problem solving and thinking creatively. What advice would you give a young person who is interested in working in engineering? Engineering is such a versatile degree and you don’t have to tick every box to be an engineer. Different skills are tailored to different jobs; for example some of my friends are very creative and are in jobs at the conceptual stage of product design, whereas I’m a logical problem solver and more suited to product development where I design tests to quantify the performance of a product. In my opinion engineering is all about learning skills rather than learning equations. It teaches you problem solving methods, how to think analytically and innovatively; these transferable skills can be applied to many different disciplines. My career so far is a good example of this, I’ve gone from working as an aerodynamics engineer, designing fabrics for world class cycling skin suits, to designing and testing regulating valves for the utilities industry. Why is it important that women take up engineering in the future? In any industry it is really important to have diversity and not just across gender. Everyone thinks differently and certainly with engineering it’s really important to have lots of different ideas about how to solve a problem. If you have similar people in a team they won’t challenge each other to improve an idea or combine two different ideas to realise a better solution. 15