Campaign call to attract more females into the engineering sector

A study by the EEF manufacturers’ organisation found that the UK faced a “major challenge” increasing the number of women in industry in jobs such as engineers.

Of 29 manufacturing firms in the FTSE 100, women accounted for 19 per cent of board positions, slightly higher than the average of 17 per cent for all the companies, said the report.

GlaxoSmithKline topped a list of manufacturing firms, with five women on the board, a third of the total, followed by Diageo with four female directors out of 11. Nine out of 10 engineers are male and just 20 per cent of the manufacturing and engineering workforce is female, the research found.

The number of female engineers has increased by just 1 per cent to 6 per cent since 2008, compared with 26 per cent in Sweden, 20 per cent in Italy and 18 per cent in Spain.

The EEF partly blamed the failure to encourage young women to study science-related topics, which it said had left half of UK state schools having no girls studying A-level physics.

EEF CEO Terry Scuoler said: “There is no getting away from the fact that women are substantially under-represented in manufacturing at a time when industry needs to be tapping into every potential talent pool to access the skills it needs. We need a huge national effort to make this happen and government, education, and industry itself all have a major role to play.”