Wednesday 8 July 2020

The global lessons the UK can learn about the engineering gender divide

Razan al-Lawati is a piping engineer from Oman, which has one of the highest proportions of female engineers in the world. While the UK and many western nations have struggled to attract women into engineering, female representation is substantially higher in countries in eastern Europe and the global south. Just 12% of UK engineers are female. This compares with more than 50% in Oman and Malaysia and three in 10 in countries such as Costa Rica, Vietnam and Algeria, according to figures from Unesco.

Al-Lawati works on the graduate development programme for oilfield services company Petrofac and is based what jobs can you get with a computer science degree in the United Arab Emirates. She says that 40% of the 130 engineers on the graduate programme are women, hailing from countries such as Lebanon, the UAE, India, Oman and Jordan. She is not surprised that more than half of Oman’s engineers are women, as she says the country’s government has made strenuous efforts to promote the subject among women and she was encouraged to follow the profession by careers advisers. She says the eagerness to go into engineering is part of an awakening among Middle Eastern women. “Engineering has always been known as a man’s job and this has created a bit of eagerness and curiosity in females to prove that there is no such thing as a man’s job or a woman’s job and that we are all equal,” she says.

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