When it comes to gender inequality in the workplace, firstly let’s look at the positives. It’s true that we are gradually seeing some encouraging signs.
Female employment within the engineering sector, traditionally a male-dominated field, has grown over the last ten years. Indeed, research last year showed that 16.5% of those working in engineering are female, compared to 10.5% as reported in 2010, rising from 562,000 to 936,000, along with an overall expansion of the engineering workforce from 5.3m to 5.6m over the same period.
And if we look at it in a larger context, women have (unsurprisingly) certainly staked a bigger claim in the workplace compared with 50 years ago. In the early 1970s, the male employment rate was 92.1 percent, and the female employment rate 52.8 percent. Fast forward to the first quarter of 2023, the employment rate for men aged between 16 and 64 in the UK was 79.5 percent, while for women it was 72.3 percent.
But this still falls short – not only is a supposedly ‘staggering’ increase still needed in girls studying maths or physics to close the engineering gender gap, this growth also needs to be reflected across all areas of work where women are underrepresented. It appears there’s still much work to be done for women within the industry to acquire the opportunities they deserve.
When it comes to gender equality, some are claiming that we are actually going backwards in the workplace. According to Shavanah Taj, Wales TUC general secretary, women “still have a long way to go before achieving equality in pay and terms and conditions of employment”, before saying that there “is a lot of talk about ethics, improvements and standard setting but now with a cost of living crisis, it feels like we have gone backwards . . . women still aren’t getting a fair deal in the workplace.”
In the last 12 months, here at Ford & Stanley we’ve placed 30 female employees in permanent roles across Engineering, IT, Bids, Sales, Procurement, Health & Safety, Accounts, Quality and HR, with a further 17 in contract work across Engineering, Design engineering, HR, Project Management, Administration, Accounts and Marketing.
We’re also actively championing more women working in the rail industry too, thanks to placements specifically with our partnership at CAF, and a global leader in train manufacturing. Since June 2022, we have successfully placed 12 female workers in Quality Engineering, Engineering, Admin & Stores, with a further 6 permanent placements in Procurement, payroll & Project Planning.
Ultimately, closing gender gaps in the labour force is not just good for women, but for the global economy as a whole.
#INWED #STEM
