It’s the women, stupid.

Last week’s blog elicited more responses than any other I’ve posted in the last six months. In hindsight, I suppose this shouldn’t have surprised me – after all, skill shortages are genuinely seen to be the biggest problem facing the engineering industry today. Most of the responses focused on just one of the reasons I laid out for the skills gap – women.

My favorite response was a one line e-mail, which I’ve used as this week’s title.

11% of engineers are women. 

After much thought and some vibrant discussion with some of the respondents, I’m ready to call it: The key to the global engineering skill crisis is women.

Statistics vary but let’s agree that the true proportion of women in engineering roles in the United States is 11%.

What would be the impact if everybody in the industry from top to bottom agreed to make every effort available to them to move this figure to 40% by the year 2030. That gives us 18 years to transform the fortunes of our weakened skill pool. One solution – with total focus – that would give the world the engineering skill and experience it needs.

This is a challenge I’m leveling at all of us, not just the college admissions guys, not just the corporate recruiters attending college job fairs (although they are both key to the objective.) I’m calling out everyone from the agency recruiters to the project managers. From the CEO of multinational E&C companies to the guy on the drawing board. You can solve the entire engineering skills crisis – we know how, we have the answer – what are we going to do about it?

We have some really obvious places to start: We have to encourage entrance to the industry from schools and colleges; we have to create awareness of a supportive environment that recognizes the need for flexibility and can provide it (how many other professions are there where it's completely normal to finish a project and take a few months off - then start something else when you're ready? Without losing a drop of career equity.); above all, we have to remove the perception that engineering projects are male dominated environments – when they really aren’t. The last major project I worked on was about 50% female in the main project office. Women were well represented as a whole, including the project lawyer and most of her team, the PR and HR department, finance, procurement and administration – just not engineering disciplines themselves.

This perception that it’s a boys club has to change. Only then can we grow the numbers we need. The money grabbing lawyers of the world have worked out how to accomplish this – they’re already at 40% - surely we can do it if they can?




Richard Spragg writes on various subjects including global engineering staffing and global engineering jobs.