• Question: Is there more men or women in engineering?

    Asked by Amy to Chris, Paul, Priyanka, Ryan, Sarah on 15 Mar 2016.
    • Photo: Christine Coonick

      Christine Coonick answered on 15 Mar 2016:

      Hi Amy,

      In my experience there are more men in engineering, and I am often mistaken for being a man due to being called Chris.

      However I have found that there is also a bit of positive-discrimination going on these days, and if you are a good engineer you may well be chosen for being female.

      In fact me & my husband went for the same job once, and I got it. The reason they gave was I had more transferable skills and would fit better with the team. Either they were talking about my epic brownie making, or they genuinely saw more value in having a girl engineer 🙂

    • Photo: Priyanka Dhopade

      Priyanka Dhopade answered on 15 Mar 2016:

      As you may have guessed, traditionally, engineers have mostly been men, so there are very few women engineers even today (they add up to around 7% of the total number of engineers).

      Lots of young girls don’t know that engineering can actually be a cool job and a normal job for women.

      I volunteer with the Women in Engineering group at Oxford University, where we try to show that engineering can be a successful career for women too, as well as organise talks by other inspiring women engineers around the UK who can be our role models.

      You can check out our video that we made ourselves for last year’s National Women in Engineering Day: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kCPElCsD780

    • Photo: Paul Duff

      Paul Duff answered on 15 Mar 2016:

      I share much the same experience as the Christine and Priyanka, the engineers within the company I work for are mainly men however recently we are seeing more and more female engineers which is great as it really does help the dynamic of a team.
      In fact I was reading a company memo this morning supporting National Apprenticeship Week where one of our process engineering apprentices (Jess) has recently sat on the panel for National Women Into Engineering Day 2015.

      In fact if you notice, 3 out of 5 of the engineers in the Fuel Zone are women all excelling in their fields.

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