21st June 2024

Eleana Savvidi on gender equity in engineering

Following her piece in The Structural Engineer, our Eleana Savvidi marks International Women in Engineering Day with some thoughts on the gender imbalance in engineering:

“There’s no doubt progress has been made, with the number of female engineers in the UK modestly increasing since I entered the profession in 2013. However, the devil’s in the details. While official statistics suggest the percentage of women in engineering is higher than it was years ago, according to Engineering UK, it has fallen from 16.5% in 2022 to 15.7% in 2023, a drop of 38,000 women. What’s more, the long-term increase doesn’t represent all engineering and certainly doesn’t appear to be the case for civil engineers and structural engineers.

The data available for the structural engineering profession is scarce and unclear, and whilst available stats imply similar numbers of men and women obtain university degrees and enter the engineering workforce, few of the latter stay long-term.

Furthermore, the percentage of chartered structural engineers who are women is still in the single digits, and the professional community remains heavily male-dominated; so we’re still a far cry from gender parity. The most recently publicised numbers don’t reflect this, and as a result, we risk fostering the false perception that the job’s been done and equity has been achieved.

Even looking at the optimistic trends about engineering overall, according to Engineering UK, “if the proportion of women in engineering continues to increase at its current rate, there will not be gender equality until after 2050”. This isn’t good enough.

This is where professional bodies like the IStructE and ICE can play an active role, by gathering, and publicising, more data on their membership. With a clearer view of the bigger picture, we can really raise awareness of the problem’s scale and will be better placed to develop a strategy to confront it. In an age where data is the new oil, having an accurate insight into the state-of-play will ultimately empower us to rectify this persistent imbalance.”

– Eleana Savvidi, Associate, Perega