• Question: do you think its important that women should be engineers, why?

    Asked by India is da bestest to Fran, Peppe, Greg, Petros, Pooja on 15 Nov 2017.
    • Photo: Greg Chance

      Greg Chance answered on 15 Nov 2017:

      I think it is a fantastic time for women to get into engineering at the moment. There is a real change in the demographic and I think it is really important that women are more represented in these traditionally male dominated professions. Both of my managers (yes I have 2!) are women and many of my colleagues are too. It is the way it should be!

    • Photo: Petros Papapanagiotou

      Petros Papapanagiotou answered on 16 Nov 2017:

      I think it is important that everyone, regardless of whether they are men or women, has the same good chance of becoming an engineer if they want to. I believe the UK is getting better at that and women have better chances of succeeding as an engineer than they used to. I think it is also important to get good women engineers that become role models for your girls so that they can be inspired. There are some already, but not as many as famous men engineers.

    • Photo: Giuseppe Cotugno

      Giuseppe Cotugno answered on 16 Nov 2017:

      I think it is very important for women to be engineers. In my view, women tend to be quite practical people and engineering is all about being practical as you often need to ask the question “what do I need to give up from this big theory to make this thing functional?”, so I think women can be excellent engineers.

      Despite this, very few women are engineers (I think everywhere, not just in UK), maybe because mathematics pushes them away (this is what they say in Italy) or maybe because engineering is seen as something that “makes you and your hands very dirty” (this is what I heard in this country) or maybe because two centuries ago engineers were interacting a lot with low-skilled workforce which were used to be men and interacting with them might have been seen as “inappropriate”.

      Dirty work is not required anymore as much as it was used to be a century ago and low-skilled workforce is now composed by members of both sexes. Sometimes even software engineers have to go to work in a dusty room or next to a noisy engine, but there are plenty of laws to ensure safety and protection now. Today most of the work is done on a computer in an office and you visit the engineering site only when needed. I find the point on mathematics ungrounded to reality, as mathematics is a way of reasoning innate to everyone and it is not gender-dependent.

      I personally think that a work place with an gender imbalance is not a healthy one, as men and women have different and complementary ways of thinking which will only benefit the final result. That said, this doesn’t mean that all women should became engineers and all men should work on the front-line of nurseries, it only means that you should not be constrained by your gender or the public opinion if you wish to do a job you like a lot. Having more women in engineering would also be very useful in resizing the ego of some colleagues (worldwide and in academia too) as few of them seem to be unaware that different points of view can improve the general picture (if handled correctly)

    • Photo: Fran Zuch

      Fran Zuch answered on 16 Nov 2017:

      I think we need engineers and the more diverse they are the better the solutions will be. Having a very tiny spectrum of humans working on the important things for the future can cause problems, for example, voice recognition – if only the same people from the same background test the system, it might work for them, but then it might not understand people with strong accents or dialects or women. And that can also be very costly to a company. The same is true about testing medication mostly only on men or not considering the full range of humans when building an algorithm that classifies pictures (that one was very embarrassing for Google). Women need to be engineers and all the other world citizens as well. We need to make this area as inclusive as possible as with so many other areas as well.

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