Welcome to our new campaign to share best practice for organisations making sure recruitment and retention is helping them to attract more women engineers.
Only 6% of the engineers in the UK are women, which means that engineering companies are not accessing half of their potential talent pool. Given the impending skills crisis in engineering and technology, this makes poor business sense – and yet 43% of organisation are taking no action to tackle this lack of gender diversity in their workforce.
The IET wants to help address this issue by showcasing organisations who are taking action to make their recruitment and retention more female friendly.
Championing the campaign is IET Deputy President, Naomi Climer, who is also President of Sony Media Cloud Services. Naomi led a 50:50 campaign (add link to PDF attached) for Sony Europe designed to “create an inclusive and diverse culture that promotes gender balance and a fulfilling working environment to achieve a greater business result”. She is now keen to encourage her fellow engineers to do the same.
“There is a lot of talk about diversity and getting more women into engineering, but it’s my firm belief that we need to take real action if we want to make a difference. The 50:50 campaign was not about making lots of noise, but more about encouraging people within the organisation to take small, practical steps that could start to bring about positive change.”
If your organisation’s approach to recruitment and retention is helping you to attract more women engineers, please support our campaign by contacting womensnetwork@theiet.org with a brief outline of what you have done and the results it has achieved.
