The awards celebrate the best female engineering talent in the country, while also looking to promote the career path for women and girls. Currently only 9% of engineers working in the UK are female, according to the IET Skills and Demand in Industry Survey, 2015.
Nominations have been opened today to coincide with International Women’s Day and will close on 30 June. Previous winners include Orla Murphy, an audio engineer at Jaguar Land Rover, Naomi Mitchison, a senior hardware engineer at Selex ES and Abbie Hutty, a spacecraft engineer currently working on Europe’s first Rover mission to Mars.
Current IET Young Woman Engineer of the Year Murphy said that engineering allowed her to combine her favourite academic subjects to choose a degree and subsequently “a job that I absolutely love”.
“By winning the IET Young Woman Engineer of the Year Award, I have been given the opportunity to be an ambassador for women in engineering and to showcase the capability of women in the sector, as well as raise the profile for women in the industry,” she continued.
Naomi Climer, president of the Institution of Engineering and Technology, added that women are “woefully underrepresented in engineering”.
“In a profession with a serious skills shortage, this represents a problem for the economy as well as for diversity,” she said. “The Young Woman Engineer of the Year Awards showcase some of the best female engineering talent in this country, hopefully encouraging girls – and boys – to get excited about the possibilities of an engineering career.”
Find out about the awards and how to nominate here
