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Survey Results are out: What is it like for Women in the Engineering Industry Today?

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Women in Engineering Day
Women in Electronics Survey Results | About the Survey | Return to Members Page image

 

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As today marks International Women in Engineering Day, Farnell in partnership with element14.com, an Avnet community, has released the results of its Women in Engineering 2021 survey to help shed light on women’s experiences and career paths as well as the wider challenges and opportunities in the engineering/electronics industry. Results showed positive support for women in engineering from all genders and a great similarity between the opinions of men and women about the need to address gender equality. While women remain underrepresented in the engineering/electronics industry, the latest research from Farnell highlighted that people believe the most important thing to achieve is the equal treatment of all genders.

 

This year’s survey of more than 370 people globally showed that all genders have similar views about the benefits women bring to the engineering industry and believe that inequality needs to be addressed. A key step to addressing inequality is introduce more women into leadership positions where they can act as role models and mentors to other women in the industry. While women clearly experience sexism in engineering, and all genders were united in their belief that this should not happen, respondents of other genders were more in favour of implementing stronger and more strictly enforced equality policies to prevent sexism in the workplace.

 

Although research showed strong agreement on many issues, there were some key differences uncovered. Research revealed that women were more likely to cite good pay as a benefit of working in engineering, however, they believe that the gender pay gap is still an issue. Women were also less worried about the need to travel for work than other genders think. Only 15% of women surveyed suggested reduced travel would be helpful, in comparison to 25% of all other respondents believing this to be important for women.

 

The survey was open to all genders and ran for three months between March and May 2021. Most respondents were aged between 25 to 54 and just over half cited they had more than 10 years’ experience in the industry.

 

The survey unearthed many anecdotal success stories showcasing how women are contributing to the electronics industry, including:

  • “During my time as an intern…I have worked on/taken charge of projects for some bigger companies. Some of those projects were worth more than $1 million. This was all done while attending school full time and working full-time.”
  • “My proudest achievement is taking a failing electronics manufacturing business unit and completely turning it around. My second would be stepping into a leadership role and setting a record for highest employee engagement and satisfaction in the manufacturing organisation.”
  • “Taking over a project that was failing which included the creation of a new API with a third party and turning it around to the point where the company I was working for in the past won an award for its successful delivery.”
  • “Writing an oscilloscope display program to display the results of data gathered from tests on a monitor back when oscilloscopes were only analogue and did not have any way to accept any sort of external data source.”

 

There was an overwhelming response from all genders encouraging women to be more confident, trust in their abilities, and take on the challenge of working in engineering. Some of the top drivers leading women to enjoy a career in engineering included the opportunity to work on diverse projects (23%), getting a preview of what’s coming next in technology and seeing that come to life (15%), flexibility and work/life balance (12%). 

 

Please note, we are working on the detailed analysis of the survey, and, will share it next month.  Meanwhile if you'd like to see more press releases from Farnell you can do so here.

  • It's sadly still a popular belief that x/y/z people etc are just not interested in certain types of jobs, and that's just nature.

    However they fail to realize that certain things are so ingrained into the way organizations and people operate, that even jobs and work practices are designed around men, albeit sometimes unconsciously. For instance, chats by the coffee machine, are a great way to keep up with new technology and what different teams are working on inside an organization. But when groups of guys are crowded around, they will talk amongst themselves, leaving women left out, so they don't gain that insight, nor contribute their insight, leaving everyone worse off for it.

    Another example, there was an article in the news yesterday about how come it took until the latter part of the 20th century before wheels were attached to luggage. One plausible explanation (although there are other possible conflicting explanations too - it's unclear) is that it was expected for men to carry the luggage because it was not the woman's job, and she didn't travel without a man. In other words, there is an argument that that 'technology' was not available in the past, because of the ingrained idea that men always accompanied women. It's one simple example, but in reality we are all losing out without the contributions and ideas that are currently lost due to overt and unconscious bias, sexism, xenophobia, in the past and today. We are all going to have to at least try to look at people, try to walk in their shoes to learn a little, and think outside the box to re-engineer even established practices and habits, to make the best, meaningful use of those we have wrongly written off as just not interested, and gain maximum innovation from everyone.

    It's awesome hearing about those success stories, it provides hope that more and more people will start recognizing what can be achieved, if people are allowed to thrive in the workplace.

  • in reply to cstanton

    I look forward to reviewing the results.

     

    As a male in tech, I recognize my bias and that I need to listen, understand and provide assistance to balance the environments. I am concerned when I don't see the data. Working with data and bean counters I have witnessed some of the negatives associated with data interpretation. 

  • in reply to colporteur

    There'll be a deeper dive of results when we have the whitepaper available image We wanted to release something for Women in Engineering Day.

  • The title of the post is misleading. This is more of a positive summary than survey results.

     

    I suspect there are more negatives than the "gender pay gap" identified, if the Me-To movement has exposed anything.

     

    As much as the analysis of data by others can be helpful, I rather looks at the results, discuss them and then make my own interruptions.