What's our industry like today?

As a recruiter, it is my job to help find the best person for the role, the person with the right skills, experience, personality, drive and ambition. Short term fit is as important as long term fit. Whilst engineering is a male dominated industry, there are sometimes occasions when I am asked to find a female for a specific role.

I have noticed a few patterns:

• Women are sought after now, more than ever.
• Despite this demand, there is still a noticeable shortage of talented women in engineering.
• Whilst the ratio of male to female engineering under-graduates is not equal, the gap in numbers is becoming smaller.
• The gaps are at two marked points: Entry, and Post Becoming a Parent.  

It follows then that there are two solutions, the first being to encourage more newly qualified female engineers into the industry. The second is to retain female engineers and make sure they have the chance at senior roles as they also move back and forth from work into parenting and through that period of natural change.

How to make the hiring process more attractive to women

This article is about hiring and retaining women. So here’s the hiring part.

There’s no brain science here. There’s no difference in the attraction techniques. Building rapport, spelling out why the role exists, making clear the job expectations and all-importantly, ensuring that the person gets on with their immediate manager, making sure he or she has a mentor, explaining what the career path looks like for this person is critical – the same as hiring anyone who doesn’t identify as female. (I’d suggest that ‘finding’ women to interview is a harder task than hiring). I’d also be selling what WFH initiatives there are, who else is in the business, what the company’s future looks like, what values the company holds.. we know this – and it won’t be the same conversation with everyone. There’s little point selling Beer On Tap if the interviewee doesn’t drink beer.

Now, for retention ..

It is easy to see why many previously successful women do not feel that they can effortlessly return to an engineering career after having a child. It is also understandable that the high-pressured environment of engineering firms, with tight schedules of deliverables, is not conducive to hiring part-time staff. It is no good when work is due, and half a team is waiting for a parent who must leave for the school run.

As a woman with a somewhat unique view of the engineering industry (I am also a parent), here are a few things that I have learned.  

1. Career breaks are a positive thing and because of them, you can bring valuable skills to the table – such as time management, networking, communication, and patience.
2. Being a woman and/or a mother also need not define who you are in the workplace.
3. Diversity makes business great; diverse ideas, diverse experience and a team which has the balance of youth and experience, male and female, doers, and thinkers, strategic and creatives.

So how DO we retain women in the consulting engineering sector?

It begins with a supportive employer and one who can demonstrate empathy for the constraints that being a parent brings. Part time jobs, flexible hours, offices close to childcare centres and financial assistance for childcare would all pave the way to keeping women in the workplace. Many larger employers already offer good parental leave programmes and flexible working, but it’s not yet visible across the industry or industry norm just yet. Furthermore, it’s not talked about or advertised as a reason to join a company. It’s hardly the kind of question that is appropriate to ask at an interview – what the parental leave policy looks like and what the options are for returning to work in terms of flexibility. However, it should be wholly visible and wholly accessible so that a company’s policies and practices attract female engineers back to work, before they have even signed a contract to start..

The tricky part of parenting is navigating the journey post ‘leave’, as the child or children grow from pre-schoolers (where it is a juggle, but long day care helps), to primary school (where before, and after school care helps, but still requires hard drop off and pick-up times) and then into the teenage years, where quite frankly, children need their parents to be present, perhaps more than we know. Again, flexibility needs to be norm and the options for flexibility need to be clearly seen and talked about so that any parents (or any one for that matter) needing flexible work options, can access them without feeling like The Outsider.

2020 and 2021 taught us many things, especially how important it is to be flexible and how everyone must juggle to achieve. I hope that it has taught employers to be more empathetic, to value how hard their employees work, especially in the face of adversity. It is time to value the multitasking skills of parents and their benefits to the engineering industry.

To become a Company of Choice for bright young women:

1. Make clear that at every stage of their career, they will be supported in their choices and treated equally.
2. Have role models within the company, male and female.
3. Support pregnant women on their pregnancy (how can you make work more comfortable for them)
4. Make policies on flexibility accessible, known, clear to everyone, always.
5. Fully support a return to work – bearing in mind some women may feel different about work, particularly when they first return in the first weeks and months and may want to start on reduced hours, or flexible hours, or something else..
6. Support parenting choices later too – it’s not only Returning To Work that’s challenging .. it’s the on-going pressures as children grow and their needs change that make the need for flexibility so critical to parents.

Where to from here?

Two things spring to mind:

1. Check in regularly with staff on parental leave and make sure they know how they will be supported when they return to work.
2. If you’d like more women in your company, make visible your flexible work practises at all times – make it known companywide so that no one has to ask.

SONDA are here to help. Please do not hesitate to reach out for more confidential discussions. Fill the form on the Contact Us page here and wait for a call back.