Women In Leadership

I have been pondering a question along the lines of "what is a successful engineer?" Most inspirational posts are more often than not on the lines of, "women heads this business", "woman in tech takes her invention to the market", thus tying success to business management and brand leadership. Why are we not encouraging women to go to the top? These days, it is not in fact down to engineering or technical skills but management skills and other capabilities that are required to head a large corporation. Yes, of course STEM careers opens those doors, and certainly has for me, but is that enough? Could we be encouraging women to do so much as to delve into Phds only to land them in small rooms with much less earning capacity and influence than one who was bold enough to vie to get to the top of Virgin's technology department? Richard Branson's daughter left her medical career, which pleased Sir Richard as he thought she would learn a lot more about the world through business tha n she would have as a doctor. The Wall Street Journal article on Holly Branson is here: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324354704578636380817533430.html



I have been pondering along those lines. Getting very near the end of my masters in construction economics and management to complement my engineering skills, and much of the management text I have read by the likes of Harvard business review etc, actually put technical people in the "innovation dampers" box, always getting bogged down with the detail. Managers view some of them as not willing to try new things, and as a young manager of projects, I agree with this view. I see it all the time. It is easier to promote a new way of thinking to a younger, less technically experienced person, than to someone with 30 years of engineering doctorates and experience. I am not saying engineering is not valuable, but rather that it needs management. Why aren't we encouraging women engineers into management roles? They do not have to wait 20 years to do it either.



I would be very interested to see what the community thinks about this.