From left: Smurfit Kappa’s Adriana Berges and Deirdre Cregan, UCD Newman fellow Dr Deirdre Brennan, UCD’s Prof Aoife Ahern and Dr Aideen Quilty. Image: UCD/Vincent Hoban
A two-year study will survey women engineers to help the industry attract and retain more women in the sector.
A new study at University College Dublin (UCD) has been launched to investigate the experiences of women working in engineering. The researchers aim to discover why women choose to leave careers in engineering in order to find ways the industry can help attract and retain women for these roles.
Reports by organisations such as Engineers Ireland show that there is a significant gender imbalance in engineering, as only 14pc of its members are women.
The Smurfit Kappa Newman Fellowship on Women in STEM will explore the barriers that women face in this industry through an anonymous five-minute survey. It is hoped that the results can help the industry find ways to retain more women and address ongoing engineering talent shortages.
The surveys are being collected by Smurfit Kappa Newman fellow Dr Deirdre Brennan, who hopes that the project will lead to “insightful results” that will suggest new ways to retain women in the sector.
“This survey plays a huge role in capturing quantitative data for the Irish female engineering workforce and I would encourage any woman who ever worked in the profession to take the time to fill it out and help contribute to a fairer, more equal engineering workforce,” Brennan said.
Prof Aoife Ahern – one of the supervisors of the study – said there have been some successes at encouraging more women to study engineering, as intake is “standing at approximately 30pc of our classes in UCD”.
“However, we also need to look at how women can be retained in the profession, and to examine what needs to be done to encourage women to be leaders in engineering – in business, the public sector and academia,” Ahern said.
“Engineers play an important role in solving the most pressing needs of the world – for example in designing solutions for climate change and the energy crisis, or provision of more sustainable infrastructure. However, if women do not enter into engineering and stay in the engineering profession, they are in danger of being left out of those solutions.”
Meanwhile, a recent LinkedIn report suggests flexible working options could be the key to attracting more women to the software engineering sector.
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