WORLD NEWS
The Kuala Lumpur – Singapore High-Speed Rail( HSR) project and others are under threat.
The newly elected Malaysian government will review all foreign contracts and projects, including the Kuala Lumpur – Singapore High-Speed Rail( HSR) project and those under China’ s Belt and Road Initiative. This was announced in late May by new Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad.
Mothership
He announced that the government would review them all to see how they favour the country. This came after the unexpected election victory of the opposition coalition. Since then, there has been uncertainty over mega infrastructure projects like the HSR. The latter project deal was only signed in December 2016 with the previous administration, and the 350km rail link was expected to begin operations in 2026. Mahathir had previously opposed the HSR deal, citing the debt Malaysia would have to take on.“ We have to know whether we really need this HSR or not,” he told Malaysia’ s Sunday Times newspaper in January last year. Reiterating this viewpoint, he pledged during the 2018 election campaign to review all mega projects sanctioned by political party Barisan Nasional under former Prime Minister Najib Razak, saying some of them might be cancelled if they were found to be wasteful and unnecessary. The fate of the HSR is therefore now uncertain— the deadline for the primary tender was pushed back from June to December following requests from bidders, but the election results may delay this further. However, it is still early days to assess what the Mahathir government will mean for major projects.
Royal Academy of Engineering CEO Hayaatun Sillem describes Britain’ s record on employing female engineers as“ embarrassing” and the worst in Europe. The proportion of women employed by British engineering companies has not increased above 10 %. Britain’ s record on employing female engineers is the worst in Europe, well behind countries such as Latvia, Cyprus, and Bulgaria, where about 30 % of their engineering workforces is women, and also behind Sweden( 26 %) and Italy( 20 %). In countries like Malaysia and Oman, the engineering workforce is 50 % female, debunking the myth that engineering is a‘ white man in a hard hat’ profession. Less than 10 % of professional engineers in Britain are women, as well as only about 15 % of engineering students. This exacerbates the shortfall in the number of engineers needed by industry. Sillem said the gender imbalance was particularly frustrating given the significant progress made by other countries and in professions such as medicine and law.“ I feel almost ashamed that I have to go there and talk about the statistics that we have on women in engineering after decades of effort,” she said in an article published in the UK’ s Guardian newspaper.“ Engineers have a huge role in designing the infrastructure of the world around us and designing algorithms embedded in the world around us. It cannot be healthy that they do not reflect the broader society that those algorithms and infrastructure serves,” said Sillem. While other countries have moved on in Britain, the profession’ s image remains“ incredibly highly gendered”, she says in the article. This positions Britain at the extreme end of the spectrum, making it hard to attract people who would not envisage themselves as engineers.
South West Business
Women are an endangered species in British engineering.
The stereotype of engineering being about working on industrialscale construction projects is no longer true, with the engineering profession today contributing to medical technologies, artificial intelligence, and building efforts in the developing world. A recent report by Engineering UK quantified the UK demand for engineers at about 124 000 each year, while the number being appointed each year is 37 000 – 59 000 lower than this. Sillem, who was appointed in January, says the lack of diversity in some parts of industry might be attributed to old-boy networks or work culture. She says it was encouraging that fewer people today argue that there are so few women in engineering because girls have less interest or ability in the subject.“ There’ s a growing body of evidence that debunks that myth. The evidence just does not support the idea that there’ s something inherent,” Sillem says.
10- CEC August 2018