Business, Innovation and Skills CommitteeWritten evidence submitted by the Women’s Engineering Society
1. Executive Summary
1. The Women’s Engineering Society is a volunteer lead, small charity in existence for over 90 years. Our members represent all sectors, are qualified in subjects from maths, chemistry and biosciences through to PhD rocket scientists and all manner of engineering disciplines. They have entered technical professions through a variety of routes: art degrees, apprenticeships and engineering and or science degrees.
2. We find that more needs to be done to tackle gender stereotypes and greater emphasis placed on KS1 and 2. We are pleased with the greater emphasis in recent years and work done on gender inclusion.
3. Part-time work is available in a variety of creative ways offering 24/7 customer service across the globe in many cases helping our members to maintain their career and balance it with child or elder care, hobbies and volunteering. We see an increasing number of women setting up their own businesses. We do not see employers being celebrated enough for their support. We would like to see more encouragement by government of part-time working.
4. We also wish to see the inclusion of elements within engineering and technology degrees around unconscious bias and modules that inculcate greater respect between men and women students. Please refer to the HE STEM report Jobs for the Boys and its recommendations.
5. Further we would like to see a greater emphasis on mentoring of middle management women by more senior men and women.
6. WES and its members would like to see a tougher stance, better data collection and support to enable more and more effective uptake of part time working to support women engineers returning to the workplace.
Some observations from our members
7. As a female engineer, one is generally assumed to be incompetent, until one proves otherwise. For males, the initial assumption is that they are competent.
8. There are many more women (some engineers) working in the renewables sector than in the more conventional engineering sectors.
9. Women who succeed tend to have a male sponsor.
10. We see an increasing number of women setting up their own businesses and consultancies to manage their work and build a culture they enjoy working within.
11. There are still places women engineers cannot go eg submarines.
12. The engineering sectors are heavily segregated—for example in energy there are many women in the renewable side.
13. We still find that suitable personal protective equipment is not available—based on both anecdote and a substantial survey showing how women feel inadequate, unprofessional and putting them at risk. The high level survey results are attached to the submission and contains direct quotes.
Introduction
14. The Women’s Engineering Society was founded in 1919 and has a history of working closely with government on issues relating to women and work with particular relevance to science technology and engineering. The Society draws its members from a broad range of sectors including defence, manufacturing, banking and finance and all stages of education and policy making. Members also reflect all career and life stages.
15. Our submission is drawn from personal perspectives and information gathered from enquiries to our offices, recent surveys of members and a call for responses.
Facts
16. A recent survey for the HE STEM programme shows persistent low numbers of women entering STEM employment, but that figures for engineering graduates is better than for STEM subjects as a whole. 44% rather than 21% as reported.
17. In engineering subjects 63% of male bachelor degree graduates were in engineering and technology occupations compared to 44% of females. There is less difference among engineering graduates from enhanced first degree courses where both male and female graduates were more likely to be in engineering and technology occupations than bachelor degree course graduates: 78% of men and 71% of women. (HE STEM report Jobs for the Boys, HESA 2010)
18. The proportion of women in engineering employment persists below 10%. Achieving a critical mass of 30% of technical women on boards of engineering or manufacturing companies is therefore unlikely to happen in a generation.
19. Research by Carroll Seron published in 2012 shows persistent subtle bias against women even within undergraduate programmes.
2. Recommendations for Action
20. There is still a need to support the career advancement of women.
21. Subtle unconscious bias against women persists.
22. Stereotypes need to be addressed early in the pipeline to challenge gender schemas (images we hold in our heads, forged from experience and reinforcement of ideas).
23. Part-time working efforts need strengthening:
Incentives
Right to have
Promotion of good practice
Upskilling internships (paid).
3. Response
3.1 Do the Gender Equality Duty and the Equality Act go far enough in tackling inequalities, such as gender pay gap and job segregation, between men and women in the workplace?
24. Replacement of the gender equality duty with the Public Sector Equality duty causes some concern. The focus on gender may be lost with the requirement for only one equality objective.
25. Our concern extends to the fact that the duty only covers public sector organisations and excludes the private sector. Using influence within the procurement process has been adopted in some sectors, but this is patchy even in sectors as well structured as construction and worse in defence. Progress is too slow.
26. Positive action is still confused with positive discrimination. Implementation of positive action enablers has been too slow and we see little progress to enforce or monitor progress.
27. For women engineers positive action by employers is crucial to ensure that women have access to opportunities for promotion, career development opportunities, flexible working arrangements and a working environment free from macho politics.
28. Demand transparency of wages, including bonuses, promotion patterns, hours of work.
3.2 What steps should be taken to provide greater transparency on pay and other issues, such as workforce composition?
29. Workforce statistics in business are difficult to monitor and assess the participation rates of technical women when this is grouped and reported by business unit. This becomes more difficult as women become more senior and their technical contribution becomes blurred by managerial responsibilities.
30. In some sectors there are many companies who haven’t given pay rises over the past few years but look to reward staff in other ways, however this year this is now back on track, it has to be to keep people motivated, it doesn’t matter what industry you are in, if the people are not motivated the business won’t succeed, it will creak.
31. Reporting by area of qualifications may be one way to make more meaningful measurements. Data can be further skewed by showing a high % women in a technical field when majority of female workers are in low paid admin positions. Data must be transparent to show this.
32. Within engineering, pay grades are more easily measured by merit and in professions with very few women statistics can be skewed because the calibre of the women is so high and the numbers so low. The principles of fair pay and transparency must be embedded within engineering and technology areas.
33. Publish pay scales, show progression routes, publish % women in meaningful statistics.
3.3 What has been the impact of the current economic crisis on female employment and wage levels?
34. We do not have any information on this.
3.4 How should the gender stereotyping prevalent in particular occupations, for example in engineering, banking, construction, and the beauty industry, be tackled?
35. There continues to be a push to tackle the image of engineering. This needs to continue and to be accompanied in a many pronged approach using many methods that deliver reinforced messages to different target age groups. The community needs to be building on the finding of the reports produced over the last 15 years and not wasting the money spent by re-inventing or duplicating efforts. WES sees duplicated effort with its own community led mentoring scheme, MentorSET, as an example and other organisations creating their own rather than support or fund an existing scheme.
36. The key messages about stereotypes and associated messages of opportunity for all need to be targeted at the very young and in public places such as libraries and schools. Schools should be encouraged to deliver in a more positive way and transform their diversity policies into effective action plans.
37. The STEM Ambassador Programme should be looking at focusing its efforts on primary and nursery schools. WES provides materials for Ambassadors to take out and encourages its members to become STEM Ambassadors.
38. It is our view that the image of engineers and engineering will not be improved unless and until the “actuality” is improved. This can be tackled form two perspectives:
39. Improving the employment climate to one that is more flexible and inclusive.
40. Improving attitudes and expectations among employees based around respect. Embedding this within the education and training programmes in further end higher education is essential so students practice inclusion and respect while they are being trained.
41. Good engineering employers who succeed in retaining their women engineers are working to achieve this; however, they still suffer in recruitment terms from the fact that much of the industry has not yet recognised them for their good work.
42. Membership organisations such as the Women’s Engineering Society are in a good position to help employers identify and eliminate the cultural barriers within their organisations that can discourage women from staying in engineering. If the retention issue is resolved then we might be halfway to resolving the recruitment problem.
43. Working with girls in school is clearly important, and WES members do this, but it has been going on for a long time now and has not shifted the statistics much; in the last 20 years the proportion of working engineers who are women has gone up from 6% to 8%—not a good return on all the effort. Something else is needed and WES believes it lies in workplace culture or “climate” providing:
(a)
(b)
(c)
(d)
(e)
3.5 What more should be done to promote part-time work at all levels of the workplace and to ensure that both women and men have opportunities to gain senior positions within an organisation while working part time?
44. Many of our members have managed to work successfully in a range of part-time role combinations. These tend to be negotiated locally and when they work, are rarely mentioned. Disseminating examples of successes is important so that when part-time work is requested the benefits can be clearly seen and communicated with the request.
45. Gaining a measure of how much technical role, part-time working is in existence would be a help. The data should be gathered by gender so it can be seen that men enjoy flexible working too and that flexible working can be for wide range of reasons, for example, to enjoy sports, seasonal sports and follow teams, travelling, caring, hobbies, as well as the more obvious childcare role for example.
46. With improved dissemination and greater confidence among employers flexibility works for both employer and employee and “the right to request” part-time working could be changed to a “right to be given”—easily. It is our experience that there is no job which cannot be reorganised to be done flexibly. This will be a big help in helping women maintain their career trajectory.
47. Employers find job sharing to be a burden to implement, with increased management overheads and perceived difficulties. A financial incentive should be given to induce an increase in part-time working, especially among smaller businesses.
48. A challenge for job sharing in engineering is there is not a big enough pool of women (or men) on a career break or wanting to work part-time to provide a strong pool of the right candidates.
49. WES believes in part-time working and knows of many organisations offering it at more junior levels, however it is difficult at senior management level to promote part-time working when you could be required at any time of the week. In technical roles people tend to work to their deadlines and have time off to reflect, this could be an advantage.
50. Case study examples of where part-time working has worked need to be better promulgated. For the most part good part-time working experiences are a case of project management and scheduling of resources. Some employers such as MBDA should be applauded and celebrated for the efforts to which they go to retain talent.
51. A key issue: “part-time” is often interpreted as “not committed”. This thinking has to change to improve conditions for all at work, to reduce underemployment as well as over-working. The reality is that part-time means greater commitment.
52. Also part-timers often work for longer hours than those they are contracted for. This has a hidden impact on the real gender pay gap, as women are three times as likely to be working on a part-time basis for their main job (http://homeoffice.gov.uk/equalities/women/women-work/gender-equality-reporting/), often at lower hourly rates than the equivalent fulltime rate, and in addition work more hours.
53. Reporting requirements could be applied to all companies to identify the number of part-time workers, at different levels of seniority and for different functions, and broken down by contracted hours and actual hours of work. There would be good reasons to require large companies to provide data broken down by gender, race, disabilities.
54. Taking the quota argument further these reports could provide a background to setting “proportional quotas”: so if in some functional area, 30% of staff are part-time, then it should not be unreasonable (assuming that “part-time =not committed” is a fallacy) to expect around 30% of senior staff in that functional area to be part-time.
55. Part-time working is often undertaken by people managing a family or caring. Career breaks can make re-entering the workplace difficult. WES would like to see employers offering short term paid internships to enable women to up-skill, such as undertaken by ThoughtWorks for the Portia led Equalitec project.
3.6 To what extent have the recommendations in Lord Mervyn Davies’ Report “Women on Board” (published in February 2011) been acted upon?
56. With regards to the recommendations in Lord Mervyn Davies’ Report “Women on Board” women can add a lot to the decision making in a team/Board as they are socialised differently throughout childhood and hence have been seen to use different parts of their brain and may bring a more rounded discussion than ones involving mainly men.
57. WES does not approve of tokenism, but meritocracy. Our members do not wish to be promoted “because they are women” but because they are excellent engineers. We have seen some evidence of boards supporting women in senior positions to encourage them towards a board role through mentoring (Skanska). We wish to see more of this proactive effort. We would like to see more coaching and mentoring across companies and a more formal requirement and commitment on companies to support technical women staff in this way.
58. Our members are split on the issue of quotas but the number in favour of implementing them is increasing.
59. To what extent should investors take into account the percentage of women on boards, when considering company reporting and appointments to the board?
60. Board diversity is seen to be a good thing and to bring different perspectives to decision making. We would want to see better reporting and requirements for strongly diverse talent pools for key appointments. We would like companies being seen to reporting on efforts to increase their diversity and growing talent.
3.7 Why are there still so few women in senior positions on boards, and what are the benefits of having a greater number?
61. Engineering and technology companies face critical bottle necks and an ageing workforce in addition to glass ceilings and sticky floors. Yet, people still like to recruit in their own image. WES and its members see that diversity leads to robustness of decision-making and with a wider perspective on the world women bring a different perspective and new business opportunities.
62. When the customer base is increasingly diverse, clients are more likely to demand to deal with someone in their own image or with whom they can build a bond. Understanding a customer base is critical in the world of manufacturing, design and construction. A diverse board will therefore broaden a business’s horizons.
3.8 How successful is the voluntary code of conduct (a recommendation of the Davies Report) which addresses gender diversity and best practice, covering relevant search criteria and processes relating to FTSE board level appointments?
63. Again our membership is split on the issue of legislation, understanding the potential business costs and wanting to avoid tokenism. However there is frustration that progress is slow. The voluntary code seems too soft and greater impending threats may bring greater clarity to actions. Progress in many engineering companies is low.
18 December 2012