A real place for women in engineering: Anict feature article

In the UK only one engineer in 500 is a woman. In the USA the ratio is one in 50 and in the USSR the ratio is one in three. Experience in other countries and the recent experience the EITB has gathered in the UK, has shown that women have a unique contribution to make. Until recently all attempts in the UK to raise the number of women engineers in industry have met with very little success despite the fact that many different attempts have been made by a variety of different bodies. The EITB addressed itself to this problem about five years ago and can already claim considerable success. For one thing their initiatives have disclosed that a large number of girls of very high potential is anxious to find out what engineering has to offer as a career. At one time the favourite ploy of the obstructionist was to ask the question ‘But do girls really want to become engineers?’ What the EITB initiative has demonstrated is that the answer to the question is that there exists a large reservoir of girls who do. Perhaps the best known of the initiatives is the GIRL TECHNICIAN scheme reported in our issue of March 1977. Some estimate of the pent‐up interest can be made from the fact that this particular article is the most successful ever published in this journal, being reproduced in many journals in this country and abroad. Now the Girl Technician Scheme has been remodelled. Besides this well‐publicised and unexpectedly‐successful scheme there are two others which are, as yet, less well‐known, making altogether three separate initiatives. The three initiatives have now been formalised into some ‘final’ shape and they represent the main spearhead in the field of women engineers for the early eighties. As we are engaged, at the moment, in a basic reappraisal of the national industrial training it is worth making the point that this breakthrough could not have been achieved without some interventionist body such as the EITB; the problem proved to be beyond the capacity of the voluntary organisations. The three initiatives are: Women technicians and technician engineers; the Engineering Awards for Women; and the INSIGHT programmes. Here is a summary of the three schemes, after which there follows a detailed description of INSIGHT 79, the first of the Insight programmes.