Women in engineering: How universities can step in to help provide much-needed skilled engineers

The other gender divide in higher education which needs to be addressed

The UK currently produces the lowest proportion of female engineers in Europe, around 9 per cent

The growing gender gap at universities - and even during the admissions process - has been hitting headlines recently. The most recent and, perhaps, startling find to have emerged is the fact that girls start to show their interest in going into higher education aged just 13, while boys lag behind in their ambition.

Mary Curnock Cook, head of Ucas, highlighted how “the situation is getting worse,” and warned: “On current trends, the gap between rich and poor will be eclipsed by the gap between males and females within a decade.”

There has, however, been a type of gender divide which has been underreported: women in engineering. While the media focused on a Hepi report which said young women are more likely than men to go to university and that, if this trend continued, girls born in 2016 would be 75 per cent more likely to go to university than their male counterparts, women have been trailing behind males when it comes to the world of engineering.

In a subject area which is predominantly recruiting male students, Ucas statistics show females make up just 17.4 per cent of applicants to engineering courses over the last five years. Moreover, a third of women are ‘put off’ careers in STEM as they perceive them to be too ‘male-dominated’.

To tackle the issue, various national campaigns have been launched in recent months, one of the more notable ones by EDF Energy, aiming to inspire teenage girls to pursue science-based careers after new research revealed a third don’t think they are clever enough for such jobs.

The energy provider polled over 2,100 pupils aged between 11 and 16 to find 32 per cent of young girls don’t think they have the smarts to become a scientist, despite the subject being one of their most-enjoyed (28 per cent) and incurring the best performance rate in at school (38 per cent) in the last academic year.

Highlighting the of the importance of the campaign, EDF described how there is no area of life today that isn’t affected by science, meaning there’s a STEM subject and career available for everyone, be that analytical or creative.

The head of the initiative, Liz Bonnin, said: “It’s important we support today’s young people, nurturing their curiosity, encouraging them to pursue their passion, and find the right fit for them so that, in the future, they can embark on fulfilling and exciting careers and help shape the world around them.”

Society, today, it seems, needs more women engineers, as the market demands more skilled engineers to address the shortfall of one million over the next ten years.

The creation of a new portfolio of engineering degrees at the nation’s universities, recruiting staff to a new academic department, and construction of state-of -the-art facilities is one way of tackling this, with Royal Holloway, University of London one such institution stepping in to address and help tackle the issue.

By creating a new form of engineering with an absence of unconscious bias and built in male stereotypes, such courses can extend opportunities that deliberately appeal to women with the ingenious application of creativity acting as the starting point for invention.

Thus, creating gender-neutral departments where male and female students and staff can thrive equally in a balanced, intellectually stimulating environment, moves like this one can place a greater emphasis on the role of creativity and the opportunity for students to engage in the full - inception, design, and build - process to foster and encourage their creativity through ingenuity and application of scientific principles through invention during group projects throughout their degree.

Now that’s something to get excited about.