International Women in Engineering Day

A day to emphasise the huge waves women are making in a predominately male field and changing the narrative to make this the norm.     

This post is dedicated to the incredible women engineers at UCell- who unambiguously prove that equality and diversity reap huge benefits.

History of INWED

During WW1, women found themselves having to take on traditionally male roles in the engineering sector. Once the war was over, many of these women wanted to continue their work in the ‘non-traditional’ sector. However, the government, employers and trade unions were all against this and the country reverted to its pre-war status quo and women were unable to keep their engineering and technical jobs.

From this injustice, the Women’s Engineering Society was borne.

Led by women, for women. Their aim was to ensure that women received training, jobs and acceptance in this male-dominated sector. Essentially, they lobbied for female engineers!

This society still exists today and for their 95th Anniversary in 2014, they launched the National Women in Engineering Day in the UK.

In 2017, the Day became international and INWED was born.

It has grown exponentially since then to become a global awareness campaign which raises the profile of women in engineering and encourages girls to join the STEM fields.

Female Engineers at UCell

For the past few years, UCell has had an even split of male:female volunteers and at many of our outreach events, there are often more female engineers than male engineers! We hope the outreach we do establishes visible female role models and destroys some of the preconceptions around what many perceive to be a typical engineer.

Currently, only 13% of the overall STEM workforce in the UK is female, let’s work together to make women better represented by educating, encouraging and introducing girls to the myriad prospective careers out there!