Today we have a guest post from Helena, reporting on the Women's Engineering Society Annual Conference and International Women's Day...
As a lot of people will know, March 8th is
International Women’s Day. At UKAEA, we marked the day with a small celebration
at lunch organised by our Inclusion Ambassadors that all staff were invited to.
We started with a bit of networking; chatting to different people from across
site and learning about what they do. Following this, we gathered to watch a
TED talk by renowned feminist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie called ‘We should all be
feminists.’ The talk can be found here.
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| The graduates celebrate International Women's Day |
I also attended the Women’s Engineering Society’s (WES)
Annual Conference on 15th March. This year marks the 100th
anniversary for WES and the theme for the conference was ‘Celebrating the Past,
Transforming the Future.’ There were a variety of interesting talks throughout
the day; Mandy Hickson started the day with a keynote speech on her experience as
a fighter pilot in the RAF. She gave an engaging and frank recount of her time
in an incredibly male dominated profession. This was followed by a talk from John
Edmonds, one of the authors of ‘The Stalled Revolution: Is Equality for Women
an Impossible Dream.’ He gave a fascinating talk on how women’s rights had
developed over the past 100 or so years. He made parallels to how liberties had
been won then and how we’re going about it now.
Just before lunch, I took part in the poster session. I presented
on the design of tools for pipe cutting and welding in ITER as I have just
completed a project on the subject. I spoke to engineers from many different
backgrounds and explained the work we were doing at UKAEA to make fusion a
reality.
At lunch I was able to network with some of the attendees. There
were engineers from all stages of their careers; I spoke to undergraduates and
early career people as well as senior and retired engineers. It was great to
get advice from the engineers at later career stages and to chat to those at a
similar stage to me, sharing stories and getting inspired to achieve my goals.
A panel session of women at different career stages kicked
of the afternoon. The chat centred around their experiences and advice to
others. A standout bit of advice for me came from Rachel Higham, Manging
Director of IT at BT; she recommended everyone work on their ‘personal brand.’
Make sure you know where you want to be and that you are visible. If no one
knows who you are, you won’t be considered for new opportunities.
The day was wrapped up with a series of workshops (I
attended ‘breaking the mould’ which helped us figure out what we wanted from
our careers) and a talk on the vision for the next 100 years of WES. There was
a joke that ideally, we’d hope there’s no need for WES in another 100 years’
time but given that the proportion of female engineers has only increased by
10.5% in the last 100 years, it seems WES will be needed for a few more
centuries. One of the messages of the day was that change won’t happen on its
own. We need to drive the change and it is not just a problem for women. Better
diversity in the work place improves men’s lives as well and if only women are
trying to change culture, you’ve only got the backing of 50% of the population.
Change will be much more successful with 100% of the population and then maybe
we might be able to make WES redundant.
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