Team D21 - 30

Our design brief attempts to tackle the gender bias in engineering. We feel that through having more gender diversity in the engineering workforce, more products might be produced or designed that help tackle the issues faced by women all over the world, such as period poverty, for example. Through personal experience, we have noticed that there is a lot of drive to encourage women towards engineering, but that this drive is often only aimed at those in the process of university applications, and older. However, there is less groundwork done that helps women reach that university application stage. We propose a platform where schools across the UK can share ideas, host talks together, and collaborate with universities and companies to offer internships and summer schools, in order to raise female interest and confidence in their technical skills. This platform could host design challenges across schools, showcase inspiring female engineers, and offer courses in conjunction with companies such as girls who code. A widespread drive to increase female uptake of A-level physics, and maths, starting with building confidence and interest much earlier on, and changing the way that girls view engineering from a male-dominated and difficult subject to something that they may be interested in, could help women reach the stage where they are applying to study engineering, and thus shift the gender balance of engineers, helping to create more sustainable women’s products and a more diverse workforce, and thus make engineering more globally responsible.