Every year on the 23rd of June, the world focuses on and celebrates the outstanding achievements of female engineers with the lead of INWED. From debates and competitions to webinars and open days.
A notable female engineer is the famous Hedy Lamarr, who without our favourite technology LoRa and others such as Bluetooth would not be possible. As well as being a Hollywood film star, Hedy was an inventor and self confessed “tinkerer” and amongst other things co-invented frequency hopping spread spectrum modulation, which she also co-patented during World War Two. The proposed method would allow radio controlled torpedoes to resist jamming signals by the enemy as the radio channel used would continually “hop”.
Statistics gathered in 2019 by Engineering UK, shows that there is still room for improvement.
Women comprised 47.1% of the overall UK workforce in 2018, only 12.0% of workers in engineering occupations were female.
Although the gender pay gap across all industries has narrowed over the past decade, from 27.5% in 1997 to 18.4% in 2017, in engineering the pay difference is still stark. The median salary in annual gross pay for full time employees across all professional engineering occupations was 18.7% higher for men.
Milliamp is very much an inclusive employer, with over a third of its workforce female. We are active supporters of the IET, the sister organisation of WES, who strive to promote diversity and inclusion in the UK technology workforce. Milliamp are also the founders of Tech Lancaster who are currently collaborating with Lancaster University Management School to research gender diversity in electronics.
Some good articles to read more about this day, and about notable female engineers can be found here: Article, Article, Article, Article
