When I went to Bath University to read mechanical engineering in the early 90s I was one of very few girls on the course. In fact the statistics of the day demonstrated that females made up only 7% of the students reading engineering. I fully expected that this statistic would creep up over the course of my career but more than 20 years later the cover of the February 2014 edition of Professional Engineering has a massive 7% on the front and states ‘Damning statistic – Only seven in every one hundred engineers are women. How do we solve the gender imbalance?’
Is it that the prospect of a career in engineering simply isn’t appealing to girls? Or maybe the failing is earlier than that and the girls don’t select the vital STEM subjects at GCSE or A level and then are not able to go on to read engineering…
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The Unstable Nucleus 