• Question: what percentage would you say there is female engineers than male engineers?

    Asked by Amy.R15 to Sylwia, Steve, Phil, Matt, Hollie, Helen on 13 Mar 2018.
    • Photo: Hollie Heard

      Hollie Heard answered on 13 Mar 2018:

      The number that people always quote is 9% of the workforce in STEM subjects are women. As I said in out chat, that number is constantly increasing and hopefully one day if all of you decide to be engineers we can get it nearer 50-50! One of the important things is we are seeing more female engineer role models and have events like international women in engineering day, (23rd June every year), that highlight the work that female engineers do and can inspire people into engineering careers. Is engineering a career you think you might want in the future?

    • Photo: Sylwia Nikel

      Sylwia Nikel answered on 13 Mar 2018:

      “2017 surveys indicate 11% of the engineering workforce is female.(1) This is a positive change from the 9% in 2015. On the other hand, the number of women registered engineers and technicians (i.e. CEng, IEng, EngTech has dropped from 6% to 5% of the total.” – source: http://www.wes.org.uk/content/wesstatistics
      It would depend on the country as well. For example, in Poland, after the war government encouraged females to enrol into engineering, mainly because lots of men died during war and Poland was destroyed and someone had to rebuild the country. Still, this initiative has allowed for that gap to be lessened. I believe the similar situation was/is in Russia, women are encouraged to take engineering and scientist positions.

    • Photo: Helen O'Brien

      Helen O'Brien answered on 14 Mar 2018:

      I work in a team of 12 and 4 are women. So that is 33%. I hope we will get up to 50% like the overall population of the planet …

    • Photo: Steve Williams

      Steve Williams answered on 21 Mar 2018:

      All I know about is where I work and here it seems to depend on which department. For example in the Space Operations department it is nearly all females with just on male. In my department, Flight Software, there is just one female. In System Engineering there is probably nearly 50/50 and their group leader is female. In HR its all female. In addition our Managing Director is female so while we could do better because it isn’t 50/50 yet, taken as a whole we are going in the right direction. In all honesty I don’t think gender makes any difference in my company, its all about who’s best for the job. To employ the second best person just because he is a he doesn’t make any sense and isn’t good for the future of the company.

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