Semta boss hits out at lack of female engineers

Lynn Tomkins, operations director at Semta said: "Women are a great untapped resource at a time when we need a wealth of new talent and higher level skills to improve competitiveness. They comprise half of the working population yet only 21 per cent of the workforce in UK advanced manufacturing and engineering are women and only six per cent of engineers are women. That's not good enough." Only one in 20 of 49,000 apprenticeship starts in engineering and manufacturing were female and there were fewer women than men among successful undergraduate applicants for science subjects and fewer than one in five engineering applicants were female. Research by the Institute of Physics (IOP) published last week revealed that nearly half of all state schools in England did not have any girls sitting A-level Physics last year. Overall, only 20 per cent of students taking the exam were girls. And a report by Women into Science and Engineering (WISE), sponsored by BAE Systems, found girls were put off careers in the sector by lack of careers advice, female role models and fear of sexism in the workplace. The report also revealed that the UK compared badly with the rest of Europe in having women in STEM careers – nine per cent compared with a 17% average.