100 Years of Women in Engineering - Celebrating the WES Centenary

In 2019 the Women’s Engineering Society celebrates its centenary, and is what we believe to be the oldest women’s engineering organisation in the world. The First World War had seen a significant number of women play an important role for the first time in engineering and technical roles, where they had served in their thousands as munitions workers, aircraft builders, and in many other specialist areas. In 1919, Katherine, Lady Parsons – founder of WES and wife of the industrialist Sir Charles Parsons - gave a speech on women’s work in engineering and shipbuilding at the victory meeting in Newcastle upon Tyne where she described the skilled work of women, and the money and resources that were spent on their training during the war. She described in the speech how a million and a half women received training in schools that cost the country over ￡30M – a staggering figure – but when the war ended these women were prevented from continuing in these roles by the Restoration of Pre-war Practices Act, which was intended to give jobs back to the men who had been away at war. Lady Parsons famously wrote that it has been a strange perversion of women’s sphere – to make them work at producing the implements of war and destruction, but to deny them the privilege of fashioning the munitions of peace.

So a group of seven women including Katharine and Rachel Parsons, wife and daughter of Sir Charles Parsons, Lady Shelley Rolls, the sister of Sir Charles Rolls, Laura Annie Willson – a lathe factory owner, housebuilder and engineer from Halifax, got together to set up the Women’s Engineering Society and support women to remain in these technical roles, and to help them to continue to train and work as engineers. The Society was managed by a young woman called Caroline Haslett who went on to be one of the most influential women of her era. Her achievements include being the sole female delegate to the World Power Conference in Berlin in 1930, the first woman to be elected a Companion of the Institution of Electrical Engineers (IEE) in 1932; the first female member of the British Electricity Authority (later the Central Electricity Authority) in 1947; and the President of the International Federation of Business and Professional Women in 1950.

In 1924 the Women’s Engineering Society formed a spin-off organisation, through the work of President Mable Matthews, called the Electrical Association for Women, to popularise the domestic use of electricity. This organisation, which continued its work until 1987, developed the All Electric House in Bristol in 1935, and was instrumental through its training, publications, booklets and teatowels in getting women to feel confident using electricity and labour-saving electrical appliances in their household chores, thus freeing them up to enter the labour market.

Another important role of WES was its work in lobbying for women to be allowed to become members of the Learned Societies. The engineer Hertha Ayrton, who had studied maths at the University of Cambridge was the first woman to be proposed as a Fellow of the Royal Society, but was refused admission because she was a woman – and married. The next approach to the Royal Society was made by WES in 1922 through Caroline Haslett, and in 1945 the first women fellows were elected - Kathleen Lonsdale (crystallographer), Marjory Stephenson (biochemist) and Edith Bülbring (pharmacologist).

Another interesting member of WES was a Miss C Griff, alternately known as Cleone de Heveningham Benest – an early member of the Iron and Steel Institute (1921) – who was a metallurgist and a keen car rally competitor. As a consultant engineer she offered expert advice on automobile, electrical, and mechanical engineering. Her garage workshop for lady motorists in Mayfair did mechanical repairs, and gave courses in motor mechanics and factory practice for women supervisors in munitions factories; and her Birmingham factory made domestic implements out of stainless steel, coloured by her own innovative system.

In 1937 WES got its most famous President in Amy Johnson. A record-breaking aviatrix who had completed a number of solo flights, including from England to Australia on a perilous journey, and others accompanied flights from London to Cape Town, and Wales to America – making her one of the most famous women of the time – she was also one of the first women to qualify as an aeroengineer. Her mysterious death in 1941 when she crash-landed into the River Thames, a long way off course, whilst delivering a plane as part of her Air Transport Auxiliary work - added to her fame. The ATA itself was established by prominent WES members, including its commandant, Pauline Glover.

After the Second World war the Women’s Engineering Society continued its work – hand in hand with the Electrical Association for Women – to inspire, train, support and promote the work of women in engineering. Its publication ‘The Woman Engineer’ – which has since been digitised and is available in its entirety online at the archive of the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) – documents not only how women have continued to struggle for recognition in this field, but also how times and society has changed over the past 100 years.

WES continued to struggle to promote engineering to women throughout the 50s and 60s but had very little support from industry or government, and women continued to be underpaid for their equal work. It was hoped that the Soviet space programme which employed many women in technical roles would help the case of promoting women in engineering roles here in the UK, but disappointingly the government shied away from backing the employment of women, preferring to suggest in the Social Survey of 1961 that they ‘teach’ instead of ‘do’.

This changed later in the same decade when Shirly Williams MP supported Women in Engineering year, which celebrated the 50th anniversary of WES in 1969, and women for the first time were actively encouraged into engineering careers. Networking groups within the Professional Institutions and within companies themselves began to become more common, and in 1984 WISE – Women in Science and Engineering – was established by the Engineering Council and the Equal Opportunities Commission as a result of the Finniston Report on the future of engineering.

Since this time the work of organisations such as WES and WISE have continued to build on an acceptance that more diversity in engineering is a desirable thing – not least because of the identified skills gap but because of the recognition that diverse teams create better outcomes – and activities to promote engineering to under-represented groups are now widespread.

WES continues to lead many campaigns to support and inspire women in engineering, including International Women in Engineering Day which was established in 2014 to mark the 95th anniversary of the Society, and is now an annual UNESCO sponsored International Awareness Day which takes place on 23 June. The WES mentoring scheme MentorSET which was established in 2002 continues to support many women engineers across all sectors, and the new Returners scheme addresses the difficulties of women returning to work after career breaks. In 2019 WES is planning a census of women in engineering to paint a full picture of the industry and determine where future work needs to focus.

Over its century WES has administered many grants and awards to support women engineers, including ￡100,000 given out from a legacy left by Doris Gray to support women in Scotland. WES celebrates the best newly qualified Chartered Engineer through the Karen Burt award, named after prominent physicist and Council Member Karen Burt, which was won in 2013 by IOM3 candidate Professor Molly Stevens. It awards The WES Prize annually to a Young Woman of the Year at the IET awards, and has its own annual Haslett Lecture and awards ceremony where awards include the Amy Johnson Award for inspiration, and the Men as Allies Award. In 2016 WES launched the first Top 50 Women in Engineering list in collaboration with the Daily Telegraph, and a number of IOM3 members were included in this inaugural list celebrating Influential Women, including Liv Carroll, Dame Sue Ion, Professor Helen Atkinson; and on the 2018 list is Katie Atkinson, a materials engineer from Jaguar Land Rover.

Today WES supports women engineering students through its annual student conference, now in its 10th year, and its recently established Apprentices conference, held for the first time in 2018. WES is supported today by very many industrial sponsors, who recognise the need for more diversity in their engineering workforce. The Centenary President, Dawn Childs, is a prominent woman engineer herself who knows only too well the struggles that we have in raising the percentage of women in engineering. Her advice is “if you are inspired by the remarkable accounts and intrigued by the promise of engineering and importantly the significant impact that women can have within engineering, then please pass the message on. If you are already an engineer please speak openly and often about your own remarkable and interesting story. If you know girls who are currently in education please suggest that they explore what a career in engineering could be for them. Progress has been very slow but we now have some momentum and with your help we can truly accelerate, what better tribute to the magnificent women of the past would there be!”

The centenary campaign seeks to celebrate the 100 year history of WES and the pioneering women who have worked as engineers and in technical roles since the end of the First World War. A Centenary Trail across the UK will pick out notable places and people, and populate a UK map of remarkable achievements. WES is calling on everybody in engineering to help us celebrate this centenary year, and to draw out the often hidden stories of women in our histories through the No More Hidden Figures campaign, and make these stories more widely accessible as inspiration to the next generation. Please join us in this celebration.

Article written by Dawn Bonfield for the journal 'Materials World', a publication of the Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining

To find out more about WES see the website www.wes.org.uk and contact by email at [email protected]