Women wanted

The Diversity in Engineering Campaign is led by Professor Dame Wendy Hall and is backed by the Royal Academy of Engineering. It focuses on the need for more engineers and scientists to provide the innovation to overcome the current recession. Because of the changes in the country’s demographics, these ‘engineers of the future’ will need to be drawn from different, non traditional backgrounds. Women, for example, now make up more than 45% of the UK labour market, but make up less than 6% of engineering professionals. Dame Wendy Hall said: “It is vital for the UK that we recruit the brightest young people into engineering and science, including new talent from families and schools who might never have thought about engineering as a career. The financial turmoil and the recession actually give us a huge opportunity to entice people who have studied engineering and science away from the City and back into innovating for the future, which is where they are badly needed.”