D1nz, Dawn Fitt, David Plummer and PeterRT have all brought up a major issue which has not been raised so far, namely the status of engineering as a career. I don't have a solution, but I do have a perspective, having worked in engineering (academic and industrial) in five European countries and California.

In the US, the engineer is the guy who drives the train. In the UK, there is the guy who oils the joints on the wheels at the terminus. Both of these are appropriate uses of the term, and they won't go away. But this stereotype is by no means the sole problem, because in the US engineers of our sort are more highly valued than they appear to be in the UK. Let me talk about the US and Germany.

When the Bay Bridge broke during the 1989 SF earthquake, and the elevated freeway collapsed in Oakland, the people called in to investigate and fix were the top engineering labs in the country, and they were all associated with universities. It is not as if anybody thought they didn't exist. The Bay Bridge shifted on its foundations - one tower structure was displaced. It was analysed, along with the earth movements, redesigned and replaced inside a month - this a two-story five-lane freeway. Front page news, nationwide (actually worldwide). That is MIT for you, plus all the companies who did it (including the designer-builder of the new mascot, mounted on the side to protect the bridge and its users from subsequent such misfortune :-) ). That is how engineers attain their status in the US. 

The Oakland freeway collapse was a different, and more subtle, matter. It was built on silt deposits in the usual raft-like manner, and encountered resonances that were not foreseen. Most of the freeway was very rapidly demolished and the ground turned into a wide grass strip (a process itself recognisably overseen by engineers), one pile structure was left standing for experiments, and the techies simply worked on it until they nailed the phenomena underlying the collapse. That involved months worth of operating and monitoring sophisticated equipment right in the middle of a poor neighbourhood of town. And of course regular pictures and stories in the local newspapers (and the nationals when the results became available). 

Whereas in Britain the only place you see electrical engineers, say, is in the pages of the E&T.

In the US, there is the qualification of “Professional Engineer” (PE), and you are actually legally barred from describing yourself as an engineer unless you are one. You can do engineering work as an engineering faculty member of a university. But most of them are not PEs. You do need a PE formally to sign off your work. PE is a qualification by examination of the engineering societies. You are also designated by state. You may be able to call yourself an engineer in Texas but not in Oregon.  

In Germany, the recognised qualification is an engineering degree from a tertiary education organisation (University and “Fachhochschul", now called “University of Applied Sciences”), namely Dipl.-Ing., M.-Ing. or Dr.-Ing. In most larger engineering companies, you generally can't get into management unless you have a doctoral degree. And engineers are indeed as highly valued as doctors, lawyers and other professionals whose career requires a tertiary-education qualification. There are special forms of company organisation for such professionals: doctors can individually open a Praxis, lawyers a Kanzlei and engineers an Ingenieursbüro. So there is significant social-structural support. There are Ingenieursbüro everywhere, for example, who perform road-accident analysis, for insurance companies and court proceedings; others who perform building damage assessments for similar purposes, and so on. They are different from the electrician companies who come in and wire your house. And there are different professional societies. The German electrical engineering professional society, VDE, is different from the electricians professional society, the ZVEI.

Britain is somewhere in between the US and Germany as regards professional qualification. Part academic (like Germany) but part guild-run (as in the US). 

Part of the reason, I suspect, for the higher status of engineering in the US is the US “can do” approach to technology. The Bay Bridge is a large structure, larger than any in Britain. It was fixed in a month. Also in Germany. During the recent floods in the Eifel, a key bridge in Bad Neuenahr-Ahrweiler was taken out on the evening of 2021-07-14. Despite major destruction of the approaches on both sides, the Technisches Hilfswerk had a new one up and usable inside a week. When I was in Scotland, a bridge near Gleneagles on the Stirling to Perth line, one of only three north-south routes in Scotland and the key part of the Glasgow-Inverness-Aberdeen connection, was taken out during a winter snowstorm. Small structure. Six months later, still broken.

I've said my bit on women in engineering, and won't repeat myself. But I will observe, contrary to the suggestion of one contributor, that supporting women and minorities in engineering or indeed any other profession has little to do with being “left”. Consider the talented chemist Margaret Thatcher, or the talented physicist Angela Merkel, both politicians of the right and both – obviously – highly supportive of women professionals, Frau Merkel in particular.

D1nz, Dawn Fitt, David Plummer and PeterRT have all brought up a major issue which has not been raised so far, namely the status of engineering as a career. I don't have a solution, but I do have a perspective, having worked in engineering (academic and industrial) in five European countries and California.

In the US, the engineer is the guy who drives the train. In the UK, there is the guy who oils the joints on the wheels at the terminus. Both of these are appropriate uses of the term, and they won't go away. But this stereotype is by no means the sole problem, because in the US engineers of our sort are more highly valued than they appear to be in the UK. Let me talk about the US and Germany.

When the Bay Bridge broke during the 1989 SF earthquake, and the elevated freeway collapsed in Oakland, the people called in to investigate and fix were the top engineering labs in the country, and they were all associated with universities. It is not as if anybody thought they didn't exist. The Bay Bridge shifted on its foundations - one tower structure was displaced. It was analysed, along with the earth movements, redesigned and replaced inside a month - this a two-story five-lane freeway. Front page news, nationwide (actually worldwide). That is MIT for you, plus all the companies who did it (including the designer-builder of the new mascot, mounted on the side to protect the bridge and its users from subsequent such misfortune :-) ). That is how engineers attain their status in the US. 

The Oakland freeway collapse was a different, and more subtle, matter. It was built on silt deposits in the usual raft-like manner, and encountered resonances that were not foreseen. Most of the freeway was very rapidly demolished and the ground turned into a wide grass strip (a process itself recognisably overseen by engineers), one pile structure was left standing for experiments, and the techies simply worked on it until they nailed the phenomena underlying the collapse. That involved months worth of operating and monitoring sophisticated equipment right in the middle of a poor neighbourhood of town. And of course regular pictures and stories in the local newspapers (and the nationals when the results became available). 

Whereas in Britain the only place you see electrical engineers, say, is in the pages of the E&T.

In the US, there is the qualification of “Professional Engineer” (PE), and you are actually legally barred from describing yourself as an engineer unless you are one. You can do engineering work as an engineering faculty member of a university. But most of them are not PEs. You do need a PE formally to sign off your work. PE is a qualification by examination of the engineering societies. You are also designated by state. You may be able to call yourself an engineer in Texas but not in Oregon.  

In Germany, the recognised qualification is an engineering degree from a tertiary education organisation (University and “Fachhochschul", now called “University of Applied Sciences”), namely Dipl.-Ing., M.-Ing. or Dr.-Ing. In most larger engineering companies, you generally can't get into management unless you have a doctoral degree. And engineers are indeed as highly valued as doctors, lawyers and other professionals whose career requires a tertiary-education qualification. There are special forms of company organisation for such professionals: doctors can individually open a Praxis, lawyers a Kanzlei and engineers an Ingenieursbüro. So there is significant social-structural support. There are Ingenieursbüro everywhere, for example, who perform road-accident analysis, for insurance companies and court proceedings; others who perform building damage assessments for similar purposes, and so on. They are different from the electrician companies who come in and wire your house. And there are different professional societies. The German electrical engineering professional society, VDE, is different from the electricians professional society, the ZVEI.

Britain is somewhere in between the US and Germany as regards professional qualification. Part academic (like Germany) but part guild-run (as in the US). 

Part of the reason, I suspect, for the higher status of engineering in the US is the US “can do” approach to technology. The Bay Bridge is a large structure, larger than any in Britain. It was fixed in a month. Also in Germany. During the recent floods in the Eifel, a key bridge in Bad Neuenahr-Ahrweiler was taken out on the evening of 2021-07-14. Despite major destruction of the approaches on both sides, the Technisches Hilfswerk had a new one up and usable inside a week. When I was in Scotland, a bridge near Gleneagles on the Stirling to Perth line, one of only three north-south routes in Scotland and the key part of the Glasgow-Inverness-Aberdeen connection, was taken out during a winter snowstorm. Small structure. Six months later, still broken.

I've said my bit on women in engineering, and won't repeat myself. But I will observe, contrary to the suggestion of one contributor, that supporting women and minorities in engineering or indeed any other profession has little to do with being “left”. Consider the talented chemist Margaret Thatcher, or the talented physicist Angela Merkel, both politicians of the right and both – obviously – highly supportive of women professionals, Frau Merkel in particular.