On a day like today - International Women’s Day, reclaimed to empower and promote gender equality - it’s worth recognising just how much we owe to women. Sometimes women engineers in fact. This interesting article from Imperial College of London gives a quick summary of British female engineers you might have never heard of, yet their contributions to science and humanity have been invaluable.
Women in Engineering
It’s interesting to note that the proportion of female to male engineers differs a lot per country. At Corinthian we definitely think we could do so much more in Britain to promote engineering to young girls, to interest teenagers in the fascinating STEM industry. Showing women the scope of the industry, inviting high school students for work experience, communicating in schools better about the potential of science, or engineering. Showing young women how ideas can be transformed into concepts that can literally change the world should be a key part of the curriculum. When we look at the numbers, in 2021, in only a few countries, such as Norway and Latvia, over 50% of engineers were female.
However, in most other countries globally - including in the UK and the USA, considered world leaders in that field - the percentage was rather low. In 2022, the percentage of female engineers in the UK has increased from 13% to 14.5%, and a similar trend could be observed in the USA where the percentage of women engineers increased from 13% to 17% between 2019 and 2021. We can clearly see that there is still so much to be done.