International Women in Engineering Day (#INWED) celebrated its 9th anniversary last month.  Started by a good friend of the UKESF Dawn Bonfield MBE, #INWED gives female engineers around the world a profile when they are still hugely under-represented in their professions.

This year for #INWED, the Women’s Engineering Society (WES) showcased the top 50 women in engineering Inventors and Innovators. These are the brightest and bravest women in engineering, who identify an unmet need, then create the solution, or improve existing products and processes to make our lives easier.  Our Chair, Neil Dickins, has written a blog post highlighting some of the exceptional and inspirational females working in the Electronics sector.

At the UKESF, our focus is on the future. We are working to address the gender imbalance in the Electronics sector. This year, with support from the CSA Catapult, we have massively scaled-up our Girls into Electronics programme. This is a series of ‘taster’ days hosted by the Electronics departments at some of our partner universities. Well over 200 female pupils will be taking part in these events, which is a really encouraging number. For our prestigious UKESF Scholarship Scheme, we had a record number of awards to female students this year, which is again very encouraging. Last month, we also celebrated three of our female scholars who have gone onto achieve recognition as future BrightSparks.  Therefore, although there is much work to be done, there is some hope that progress is being made.

If you would like to learn more about how our Scholarship Scheme could help your company or you would like to support our work, then please just get in touch with me: [email protected]