Women in engineering: Addressing the gender gap, exploring trust and our unconscious bias

Abstract

There is still a large gender gap across the technology, engineering and physical sciences disciplines despite a number of efforts over the past three decades to address this. Creating a more diverse workforce including a better gender balance is important in order to meet the skills need of the future. There is also increasing evidence that organizations with a more diverse workforce are more creative and innovative and ultimately perform better and are more successful. The aim of this paper is to explore how to address the gender gap by exploring our own notions of trust and unconscious bias. The paper draws on the perspectives of four women at different stages of their career and their lived experiences of being female in the engineering sector. Together they provide an insight into this important issue, and how we can work together as a collective community across the sector to address it and provide environments that are welcoming and value each and every one of us.