Amber Thomas: 
 

I think part of the reason that women aren't entering the profession starts such a young age. At school in the 90s, I was very interested in STEM topics and yet the career guidance I was given was to go into teaching, so I could teach STEM topics to others. It wasn't even suggested to me that I consider a STEM career myself! Until my late 20s, the only engineers I had heard of were people who came to fix the boiler or those who performed constant delays on train lines. I had no idea of the breadth of careers that engineering held. If I knew then what I know now, I'm sure I definitely would've considered engineering as a career path.

Absolutely. We have a major challenge in engineering that as children we simply do not come across professional engineers unless we happen to have one in the family. (The same must be an issue for, e.g., quantity surveyors!) I've run an exercise a few times now of asking engineers I work with whether one or both parents were engineers: almost universally the answer was yes, and where it wasn't there was some other STEM based background (the software developer who's parents were accountants, the engineer who came from a medical family but who had an aversion to the sight of blood!). With a bit of thought we shouldn't really be surprised at this - it's unlikely to be because of an engineering “gene”, much more likely that no-one else has a clue what an engineer is, so wouldn't even think of it as a career.

It's well known in genetics that incest is a really bad idea, what we end up with in engineering (and I guess quantity surveying etc) is career incest. 

P.S. Don't get me started on (UK) schools careers advice. It's not the schools fault, they have no budget these days to provide a wide range of effective careers advice - I've seen this collapse in the 20 years I've been voluntarily involved in STEM support activities. Personally I think it was a ridiculous decision to make schools responsible for delivering this, without funding to do so: teachers know about being a teacher, they don't know what they don't about any other profession (and there's no reason why they should).

That all said, I don't know, Amber, what your experience was, but I've found that Primary schools these days are fantastic at giving a huge range of experiences to all children, and generating real enthusiasm, irrespective of pretty much anything. (This is based on my STEM volunteering experience, which of course could have selective bias.) But sadly I agree that at Secondary schools the stereotypes all start cutting in. And it's not necessarily anything to do with the schools. I had a particularly stark example of this when I used to run an after school engineering club that bridged the primary / secondary years. For the primary children the club was often 50/50 boys/girls. As soon as they went up to secondary the girls would come for a couple of weeks and then disappear. Subtle enquiries showed that the girls were coming under peer pressure from their new friends from other schools: “you do what on a Wednesday night, why do you do that?” (I think I posted somewhere else on here about some really interesting recent research on this?)

In the end, as you say, it's going to just take a lot of work to interest any children (again irrespective of anything) in engineering (or indeed most other aspects of STEM, except medicine), just because what we do is invisible in day to day life, even to adults. As suggested above, personally I find the first huge task is to even convince schools that such a career as e.g. design engineering exists (i.e. something beyond car and boiler repairs). Once you can break through that and speak to individual children they're fine - some aren't interested, some are, and in my experience which are and which aren't has nothing to do with gender, race etc, except where peer pressure is over-ruling everything.

Personal note: My children are both interested in sciences and arts. However, my daughter followed her strongest passion and moved into the sciences, I'm delighted to say she's just been given a post-doc position, and there was a key point that helped her ace the interview (the question makes sense in context): “will you be comfortable developing this equipment?” “if it helps, I spent most of my childhood developing and programming robots!”. Meanwhile our son studied philosophy and music, and has just completed his training as a music teacher. The point is, if they had gone through the educational and social environment my wife and I did they would almost certainly have ended up in opposite roles, which would have been a waste of their talents and would have probably made them less happy (and therefore less good at their jobs).  Conversely, if my wife and I were our children's age, with the more relaxed expectations that are now present, I might still have followed the same career path (although I might have gone down a psychology path instead, who knows?), but my wife would definitely have studied more science if she had not been told by her teachers that girls didn't do that. (How do we know that? By a twisted route she ended up in science editing and writing, and realised that was where she wanted to be, but of course with the huge frustration that she has to rely on others for the science knowledge.)

Without positive intervention the self-fulfilling prophecies will continue.

Cheers,

Andy

Amber Thomas: 
 

I think part of the reason that women aren't entering the profession starts such a young age. At school in the 90s, I was very interested in STEM topics and yet the career guidance I was given was to go into teaching, so I could teach STEM topics to others. It wasn't even suggested to me that I consider a STEM career myself! Until my late 20s, the only engineers I had heard of were people who came to fix the boiler or those who performed constant delays on train lines. I had no idea of the breadth of careers that engineering held. If I knew then what I know now, I'm sure I definitely would've considered engineering as a career path.

Absolutely. We have a major challenge in engineering that as children we simply do not come across professional engineers unless we happen to have one in the family. (The same must be an issue for, e.g., quantity surveyors!) I've run an exercise a few times now of asking engineers I work with whether one or both parents were engineers: almost universally the answer was yes, and where it wasn't there was some other STEM based background (the software developer who's parents were accountants, the engineer who came from a medical family but who had an aversion to the sight of blood!). With a bit of thought we shouldn't really be surprised at this - it's unlikely to be because of an engineering “gene”, much more likely that no-one else has a clue what an engineer is, so wouldn't even think of it as a career.

It's well known in genetics that incest is a really bad idea, what we end up with in engineering (and I guess quantity surveying etc) is career incest. 

P.S. Don't get me started on (UK) schools careers advice. It's not the schools fault, they have no budget these days to provide a wide range of effective careers advice - I've seen this collapse in the 20 years I've been voluntarily involved in STEM support activities. Personally I think it was a ridiculous decision to make schools responsible for delivering this, without funding to do so: teachers know about being a teacher, they don't know what they don't about any other profession (and there's no reason why they should).

That all said, I don't know, Amber, what your experience was, but I've found that Primary schools these days are fantastic at giving a huge range of experiences to all children, and generating real enthusiasm, irrespective of pretty much anything. (This is based on my STEM volunteering experience, which of course could have selective bias.) But sadly I agree that at Secondary schools the stereotypes all start cutting in. And it's not necessarily anything to do with the schools. I had a particularly stark example of this when I used to run an after school engineering club that bridged the primary / secondary years. For the primary children the club was often 50/50 boys/girls. As soon as they went up to secondary the girls would come for a couple of weeks and then disappear. Subtle enquiries showed that the girls were coming under peer pressure from their new friends from other schools: “you do what on a Wednesday night, why do you do that?” (I think I posted somewhere else on here about some really interesting recent research on this?)

In the end, as you say, it's going to just take a lot of work to interest any children (again irrespective of anything) in engineering (or indeed most other aspects of STEM, except medicine), just because what we do is invisible in day to day life, even to adults. As suggested above, personally I find the first huge task is to even convince schools that such a career as e.g. design engineering exists (i.e. something beyond car and boiler repairs). Once you can break through that and speak to individual children they're fine - some aren't interested, some are, and in my experience which are and which aren't has nothing to do with gender, race etc, except where peer pressure is over-ruling everything.

Personal note: My children are both interested in sciences and arts. However, my daughter followed her strongest passion and moved into the sciences, I'm delighted to say she's just been given a post-doc position, and there was a key point that helped her ace the interview (the question makes sense in context): “will you be comfortable developing this equipment?” “if it helps, I spent most of my childhood developing and programming robots!”. Meanwhile our son studied philosophy and music, and has just completed his training as a music teacher. The point is, if they had gone through the educational and social environment my wife and I did they would almost certainly have ended up in opposite roles, which would have been a waste of their talents and would have probably made them less happy (and therefore less good at their jobs).  Conversely, if my wife and I were our children's age, with the more relaxed expectations that are now present, I might still have followed the same career path (although I might have gone down a psychology path instead, who knows?), but my wife would definitely have studied more science if she had not been told by her teachers that girls didn't do that. (How do we know that? By a twisted route she ended up in science editing and writing, and realised that was where she wanted to be, but of course with the huge frustration that she has to rely on others for the science knowledge.)

Without positive intervention the self-fulfilling prophecies will continue.

Cheers,

Andy