Can an engineer be appealing?
24 June 2008
The European Commission has predicted that Europe will have 20million skilled SET vacancies by 2030, and over half the female workforce are leaving the profession before they reach the age of 40.
Engineers are thoroughly peed off. Their job is undervalued and underpaid. There is little career path progress, not many MDs are engineers, after all.
The Harvard Business Review reported that 52 per cent of women are leaving SET (science, engineering and technology) roles while they are in their mid to late 30s. Now this could be a reason for positive discrimination, although that goes against the grain for me, but it highlights some of the image problems we have in this industry.
I hope the fact that so many women are leaving their professions does not cloud the issue, that SET has to adapt to recruit, and keep, the calibre of employees it needs. One of the reasons cited by women leaving the profession is the long working day. Engineers regularly put in a 71-hour week, according to the report’s authors. The question is why are female employees torn between a family life outside the lab? Don’t male SET workers have that conundrum too? Even if their dilemma is between ‘Do I stay in the lab all Friday night or shall I go to the pub/cinema?’ Why is there a perception that to be taken seriously you have to be at work all hours God sends? When a colleague was ‘boasting’ that he had been in since 7am to get an article written, another turned to him and said ‘You can’t be very good then’. Perhaps that is what SET needs, the attitude that it is okay to do what you can in the hours you are paid and anything surplus suggests investment in more staff or equipment is needed.
There is also the ‘superhero mentality’ where it is dynamic and go-getting to hop on a plane to sort out the computer system that has crashed in another country or continent. One of the report’s author’s, Shirley Ann Hewlett, said that this mentality is alien to the female psyche. They prefer to design and construct a system that does not fail instead of being happy to rescue it at a moment’s notice. While the superhero-dash gains great plaudits, it is not something most mothers are able to do at short notice, as childcare mostly falls to them. Even though, on an engineer’s wages, not many families will rely only on one income, childcare still falls mostly to the mother to organise, whether she is working away from home or he is. Again, this is something that the whole industry should look at, carbon footprint and all that, apart from the industry adopting the old maxim: ‘If a job’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well’.
Women also cited the isolation that the job can entail, which is alien to the female psyche and the fact that there are no mentors for women in the industry. I am not sure what mentors there are in the industry for men either? Where are the role models and mentors for engineers? James Dyson, of course, but surely I should be able to name half a dozen without drawing breath.
In this year’s birthday honours list, the queen awarded CBEs to the Darling brothers, co-founders of Codemasters for services to computer games. Apart from that, there was a CBE for the managing director of BAE Systems for services to the defence industry, to Henry Tee, chair of the Electronics Leadership Council for services to the electronics industry and one to Professor Jim Al-Khalili for services to physics. There were nearly 1,000 ‘gongs’ in all, which makes services to technology very under-represented.
There are plenty of students that are fascinated by the idea of writing computer games. When did computing stop being geeky? When the renumeration package would turn Mario into Super Mario, that’s when.
Talking of well-known names, Professor Stephen Hawking (who has refused the offer of a knighthood it emerged this weekend) is so fed up at the prospect of several of the UK’s university physics departments closing that he plans to spend more time in California and at Ontario’s Perimeter Institute. It comes to something when Canada is a more exciting prospect than staying in Britain.
Why are physics departments closing when the world is crying out for science graduates? The government, in its zeal to merge the Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council with the Council for the Central Laboratory of the Research Councils to create the Science and Technology Facilities Council miscalculated the cost of running the new labs by not just a few pounds, but by £80million. Which shows what a glaring underestimate there is in Whitehall of the kind of resources needed to train young SET students.
If the biggest brain in Britain is jumping ship, shouldn’t that tell Ian Pearson, the science minister, something?
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