Is it beneficial to have a Women's Network?

Thank you John, for the kind and inspiring words :)

I think the network is a great idea, but not because I have ever felt "lonely" in my career.  I worked in the defence industry for 20 years, most of the time as the only female amongst a large group of male colleagues, but I came across no discrimination at all on these grounds and made a lot of close friends within the team, who I still keep in touch with, 12 years after our factory closed.  I now work in academia, which has a much higher proportion of female staff, but I don't have as many friends here as I did whilst a designer.

I have been a member for 30 years and now both my sons are MEng students (though they have chosen Mechanical not the electronics I took). I have not seen an increase in the likelihood of a UK state educated woman taking an engineering degree,entering industry, having a family and continuing her career to achieve the level of responsibility that women in other professions take for granted. The number of british female techies in industry is still tiny.



If the IET; IMechE etc were truly honest about the situation they would admit how many female CEng have registered in the past decade. The IMechE President has a press release claiming 2300 newly registered members last year -last I checked only 100 were women. All the schools talks have achieved nothing -heck with the state of GCSE ICT and Double Science under the last government it is amazing my sons got to good universities from state schools.



None of the institutions have supported the Women's Engineering Society; a mentoring; Returners; Leadership program etc. All they do for female members is some superfluous annual awards event to a young member who is only being recognised for being female - her male peers wouldn't win anything for what they have done.

 

There has been no attempt to make RETAINING women important.

Other sectors have recruited many of the best and brightest as the profession has ignored issues such as the fact that only 6% of UK HE students are taking E&T degrees cf 15% in EU and >30% in Asia. Though lets not forget how many electronics jobs have been lost -which company hasn't laid off in the past 5 years? Now it seems it matters. Finally, the IT companies are saying having a ITEC qualification might help too after only caring about IT users. But who are the role model employers? Who do young people aspire to work for now? Who has a great development program and supportive senior women rather than 'Queen Bees'? Where are the women speaking so that early career professionals can speak to a woman who has faced some challenges and can say how things have changed? I do this through IEEE and US groups instead. 



It is time the institutions did something serious about women so we can simply be treated as 'normal', Allow the women who have faced challenges to be heard. Too often the women commenting on 'women in technology' have dismissed our comments about issues such as gender stereotyping or gender paygap because we said things like 'we aren't taken seriously' or 'we've pushed into the 'girly jobs' as they didn't beieve us from the HR whitewashing towers. And yes some of the worst are other women (not engineers). Those with no qualifications nor working experience of being proud to be a professional engineer working in high tech industry -have no right to drown us out anymore. Those like me who tried to inform the debate were dismissed by female scientists/academics who have a very different experience or women in IT services who are not technical. Female students are only asked to give school talks not offered encouragement by their institutions. We should act now!



When you can easily name a handful of senior female 'techies' with children and responsible technical jobs working in Cambridge companies or real engineering systems (outside defence) then we may be getting somewhere. btw I watched a live Cisco webinar today with 6500 people attending an event in London where the female CTO spoke -I bet the audience was 95% male. DO men have 95% of all the good ideas. Women can do engineering they just aren't recruited, retained or advanced so leave. 

Happy to provide more statistics and info offline if interested. But tell your wife to hang on in there Sheryl sandberg of Facebook said 'the reason women don't become engineers if that women don't become engineers' - women need to be seen as mothers so boys will be inspired by their mother's profession too!

On balance yes!



I wish that the distinction between 'Female Engineer' and 'Engineer' wasn't required; but it is!  We are still a minority group and until that changes a network like this provides access to a wider number of people from which to pool experience.  Of the ~80 engineers where I work, 6 are female.  Only 2 of those have a family (including me) and so the experience in resolving some family based issues is limited!



Whilst I have never experienced any overt discrimination, indeed my company were flexible in allowing me to work a 4 day week on my return from maternity leave, I believe that I have lost out on some career progression opportunities as it was assumed I wouldn't be interested with a baby at home...



I don't want to gain recognition purely as a result of some form of positive discrimination initiative, but I do love my career (and my family) and I want to open the eyes of more girls (and boys) to the wonderful world of Engineering!



So yes, a Women's Network within the IET is a good thing.