FACULTY FOCUS
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Students from the UNSW Women in Engineering Camp visit Qantas in Sydney. Photo: UNSW
particularly confronting because they haven’t
got the numbers of female engineers to
choose from in their pools,” he says.
Alexandra Bannigan, manager of UNSW’s
Women in Engineering program, says
if engineering wants gender equity, its
image must change. This begins in school,
Bannigan explains, with encouraging
female students to take the subjects
that give the foundation for a degree in
engineering. Hoffman says outreach groups
such as Robogals also a play a role, as
they show girls what can be accomplished
in engineering.
Parents’ perceptions of engineering also
need tweaking, Bannigan adds. “Parents
talk them out of it because they have
a misconception of what engineering
actually is,” she explains. “They picture a
construction site or a mechanic and say,
‘Oh I don’t want my daughter doing that.’
In reality, that’s not what engineers do. The
better informed we can make the girls and
the better we can support them, the better
they’ll be able to convince the people
around them that it’s a good idea.
“General awareness amongst parents and
teachers can really help. That awareness
needs to be about just how diverse
engineering is and how it affects every
aspect of our lives. People don’t appreciate
that it’s all around us.”
Bannigan says that, despite girls’ initial
scepticism, once she starts talking to them
about the actual work engineers do, the
problems they solve and the people they
help, the majority become interested.
“So I think just generally increasing
awareness of what engineering is and
what it allows you to do will play a big
role in getting more girls [on the path to
engineering careers],” she says.
Universities are also working to fix the
gender imbalance. A total of 80 girls from
NSW and the ACT attended the Women
in Engineering Summit – hosted by the
University of Wollongong. The students
networked with industry leaders, academics
and women in engineering to get a taste of
what it’s all about.
At the same time, UNSW ran its annual
Women in Engineering Camp. There
were 90 girls from years 11 and 12 in the
five-day program. They visited major
industry players such as Google, ResMed,
Transurban and Sydney Water.
Bannigan says that because many
participants are the only female in their
physics class at school, the opportunity to
meet other girls their age who share similar
interests and aspirations can be extremely
empowering. It also provides inspiration to
keep going despite the limited amount of
encouragement they may otherwise receive.
“Also, just by showing the mix of jobs
that [exist], you can [demonstrate] that
the number of engineering jobs in the
traditional, male non-family friendly
professions, such as mining, is very small,”
Hoffman says. “Most of the jobs are in areas
that are [primarily] design work. Even if it
involves being out on sites, it’s work that
can be [done in flexible situations].
“A lot of it is now, shall we say,
telecommuting, so the people can work
anywhere and be flexible. It’s also generally
working in teams and helping people,
which are all things that females can do as
well as males.
[“At the university level], we have
Women in Engineering groups, so the
current students have their own societies
of female students. They can meet and
develop social and peer groups.”
Hoffman adds that UNSW is actively
working to recruit female staff to act as
leaders while also demonstrating that the
engineering profession “is not intrinsically a
male-dominated profession”.
“Engineering work [of all kinds] can be done
equally well by females as males,” he says.
“The other thing that we’re doing,
which is more immediate, is refocusing
our scholarship programs towards highperforming women, and industry has
been very supportive of this, providing
scholarships, etc.”
Hoffman is also working to boost female
representation within his own faculty. His
goal is to have female representation in
UNSW engineering – among students, staff
and researchers – to 30 per cent by 2020.
Currently, 21 per cent of UNSW engineering
students are women, versus the Australian
average of 16 per cent. ■
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