On June 23rd 2025, we will celebrate International Women in Engineering Day…
…a day to celebrate the achievements of women in engineering and encourage more young women to study engineering, as less than 1 in 5 engineers in the UK are women today.
This year, INWED has “Together We Engineer” as the main theme, and the main activities include presenting the profiles of women engineers around the world and empower women engineers. Over the years, INWED has grown, and in 2024 #InternationalWomenInEngineering Day received 1.1 Billion impressions, and #INWED24 received 124.5M impressions on social media. INWED events were organized all over the world, from Canada to New Zealand.
Current status and future outlook
The low representation of women in engineering is attributed to a number of persistent challenges, including gender bias and lack of inclusion in workplace cultures, isolation due to underrepresentation (especially in leadership and on-site roles), and retention issues, especially for women between 35 and 64. While we may know a handful of success stories in our workplace and collegial network as engineers, these successes are often still considered the exception and not the norm. In addition, there are few female engineering students, partially due to a lack of role models, both as women faculty and women in university leadership.
However, there is good news as well! More and more girls are getting interested in engineering, reflected by a 31% increase in girls taking STEM A-levels in the UK between 2010 and 2019, and a 93.51% increase in applications of female students in engineering over the past 10 years. At the corporate level, leading firms are targeting gender equality in early career recruitment and management. And, of course, INWED is raising awareness and providing support for women in engineering globally.
Slowly, we are seeing a cultural shift as well. Younger women in engineering are openly challenging traditional norms and pushing for inclusion in the workplace. Organizations are starting to see DEI initiatives as a way to attract the best and brightest, and have started to focus on progress through mentorship, policy change, and visible female leadership.
New opportunities for women in engineering
Besides traditional tasks and profiles in engineering, we will need a broader range of profiles and skills in engineering to address the challenges of the future. For girls and young women who may think that traditional engineering profiles do not align with their interests and values, these new profiles can open new opportunities:
- Artificial intelligence: Beyond traditional programming, prompt engineering, and data science roles lies a breadth of new opportunities. These new profiles include roles related to AI ethics, fairness and human-centered design, which requires a merging of engineering and social sciences. At the same time, AI applications combine engineering with a variety of fields, such as healthcare, finance, and more, which allows for profiles combining various interests.
- Green transition: To achieve our climate goals, new engineering profiles dedicated to the green transition are needed. These profiles include engineering positions in the renewable energy sector, climate adaptation and resilience roles within infrastructure operators, and roles dedicated to circular economy (innovation in materials and processes, waste reduction, and life cycle analysis).
- Modernizing our built environment: As a civil engineering, I have to point out the need for roles related to infrastructure modernization and the development of smart cities. these new roles include the integration of sensors, data analytics and the Internet of Things into infrastructure systems an cities, as well as the use of digital twins and simulations.
- Health tech engineering: Merging medicine and engineering brings us to the growing market of wearable medical devices, personalized medicine solutions, and the design of prosthetics. These advances are nowadays supported by AI, 3D printing, and robotics.
- Digital infrastructure protection: As more of our data is in the cloud, entire countries depend on the safety of our digital infrastructure against cyberattacks and other malicious intents. There is a high demand for engineers who both understand secure systems, infrastructure safety, and merge these skills with knowledge of law, ethics, and social systems.
- Entrepreneurship and leadership: There is a growing ecosystem of accelerators that focus on funding STEM start-ups led by women, as well as support for women engineers to grow into executive and boardroom positions.
Conclusion
Women engineers may still be underrepresented today, but with INWED, we are raising attention to the situation and highlighting success stories from trailblazers in our field. In today’s post, I highlighted how the combination of engineering and other fields, combined with the green and digital transition, is resulting in new profiles for engineers that can attract more girls and young women to work in engineering. As I like to say, “as engineers, we are trained to solve problems” and depending on our interests and values, there is a very broad range of problems we can address using our engineering tools.
Leave a Reply