Empowering Women in Structural Engineering: Celebrating Innovation and Diversity

As we commemorate International Women in Engineering Day (#INWED), we turn our spotlight to the remarkable women shaping the structural landscape. ?

Why Structural Engineering Matters?

Structural engineering is the backbone of our built environment. It bridges the gap between creativity and practicality, ensuring that our buildings, bridges, and iconic structures stand tall and resilient. Yet, despite its critical role, the representation of women in this field remains disproportionately low.?

Hear from Linda Ness (Director at NJV Consulting), Hélène Huang (Associate, Structural and Facade Engineer at T/E/S/S) and?Katherine Chimenes?(Structural Engineer at Price and Myers) as they share their successes, challenges and wisdom with us.?????

Linda Ness: Director at NJV Consulting

Defining Moments: With a devoted career in structural engineering of over 35 years there are many moments I remember. The art of engineering is impactful by definition, everything we do, it is a huge responsibility if you think about it for not very long.?

My colleagues persuaded me to digitize all the dead files a few years ago, I found it very difficult to chuck old sketches and notes, so I started a blog of these memoires on the Instagram platform called @abovethefish.and.chip.shop to inspire the youngsters and tell the stories. I invite you to visit it.?

An event that has stayed with me my whole career, was as a young graduate working on a 10-storey residential block squashed onto a site too small in a developed suburb. The basement was deep and the soil non-cohesive, before the days of contiguous piling solutions, where I was. The seniors capitulated. I had learnt the value of hand sketching from my first mentor, Rob Young. I took a sheet of A1 butcher paper and created a series of overlays on a single sheet which brought all the layers and the issues onto one plan, the excavated banks, the foundations, columns, the neighbors’ yards, everything. That dog-eared piece of paper was taken to all the meetings, asked for, referred to and built off – I stood proudly in the background, forgotten as the author, the junior.?

I do this to this day, there is nothing quite so engaging as unrolling a hand drawing overlay onto the table, where the professionals have gathered with small notebooks and crossed arms. It immediately breaks that ice and everyone leans in, and the pens emerge.?

On a recent project, the Client quietly asked me if he could have my drawing, the one with all the steel details on it, as crumpled as it had become. He framed it in his boardroom. That was nice!??

Overcoming Challenges: Don’t wear skirts to work, or you can’t climb the ladder…..….. tongue in cheek! I’m not particularly interested in addressing the obvious and overworn issues around women in engineering, they have never bothered me.?

Advice for Aspiring Engineers: Beware of the road ahead, it will entice you into a world of intrigue, you will need to be humbled to learn from the others, to have two ears and only one mouth. With time you will emerge, and small victories will pull you in some more. You will need to choose your mentors with care, and you will become single mindedly focused on tasks that will take you on journeys for days and weeks. There will be times of angst and sleeplessness and times of great satisfaction. You will feel the community of the built environment Professionals and admire and aspire to the work of others. You will delight in the possibilities of the digital world, and the victories won with your colleagues. You may find it hard to answer, “how was your day today?”???

And you will stand on that scaffold one day, and watch a massive piece of structure you designed, drop into place as it should, in a quiet moment of great personal pride.?It’s like I tell the students that I get invited to lecture once in a while: forget about the recycled Nikeys and bamboo straws. The decisions you will make, nearly daily, in your career will have a future collective consequence beyond your now remotest realization, make each one with the utmost care.?To exhibit this, I show how the unnecessary roundups that engineers regularly make with sizing concrete can collectively be enough concrete to build a medium sized shopping centre and the end of a career. Per engineer career. That’s a lot of waste.?

Hélène Huang: Associate, Structural and Facade Engineer at T/E/S/S

Defining Moments: There are a few defining moments in my career, but I would recall two events.??I worked on a retail project where my team was responsible for the new structures, while the local engineer oversaw the existing reinforced and prestressed concrete structures. I joined the project while the construction was underway. The project included the anchoring of 14m long cantilever beams onto an existing reinforced concrete structure. As we were finalizing our design and cross reviewing our construction documents, I double checked with both teams and realized that there was a misunderstanding as to the application of the reaction loads from our new structure to the existing structure, leading to a huge underestimation of the torsion forces in the concrete edge beam.?

We stopped the installation of the cantilever beams just a few days before they were meant to arrive on site, and both teams spent a few very intense weeks redesigning the concrete strengthening and the steel-to-concrete connection to make it work in a minimum time frame to mitigate the delay.??

Lesson learned: never assume anything, always double check, and never hesitate to go beyond your scope limit because our responsibility, as structural engineers, doesn’t stop at the contractual line !?

More recently, I led several projects related to the Paris 2024 Olympics. Our role extended beyond the structural engineering: the event and the context are so iconic that our team had to coordinate a large panel of tasks, from prototypes to construction methodology to site coordination and emergency action protocols. Working on the Olympics was an incredible learning experience, with an unforgettable impact on the international community of athletes and spectators.????

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Overcoming Challenges:??

My biggest challenge is, certainly, my own set of expectations, which is driven by a strong awareness of my responsibilities. As a structural engineer, I must ensure public safety. As an individual and a professional of the built environment, I must ensure that our work contributes to society without harming the environment and the community at large. As a woman, especially being from a minority ethnic background, I feel the responsibility to be a role model. And as an associate and team leader in my office, I am responsible for the wellbeing and development of my team and the long-term prospects for the company.?

Thankfully, I am lucky to have joined an office which encourages partnership. We lead in teams of twos and threes, and as a young associate, I was grateful that partnership and collaboration was the norm.?

The human aspect of our work is crucial: creating a building or any type of construction is not only a matter of the mind, but also a matter of the people and the emotional and manual labour that makes the final project.??

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Advice for Aspiring Engineers: Never be afraid to ask. You have nothing to lose by asking.??

We have such a big responsibility, as structural engineers, to ensure the safety of people, and as actors of the built environment, to provide the best service to the community and to society. We must remember that we are all humans, and that everyone has blind spots and makes mistakes. No piece of information or decision is forever set in stone. It’s never too late to question fundamental project constraints, be it a loading assumption or the relevance of a complicated architectural detail and its benefits for the project.??

And as a consequence, because no one has all the answers, it is the sum of all individual contributions, and the collective will that great projects are made.?

Katherine Chimenes: Structural Engineer at Price and Myers

Defining Moments: As a structural engineer I can recall projects and contributions where my set of skills helped shift the way we delivered work and solved problems that would have been challenging to solve otherwise. Looking back, about seven years ago, I had the chance to work on a once-in-a-lifetime project, the Sagrada Familia, on which I helped design the four Evangelist Spires which completed late last year. The project required computational skills in order to fine-tune the position of post-tensioned tendons and their amount of prestress force. This exercise required scripting to exchange information between geometry, calculations, and analytical results, and to visually communicate them effectively. Since then, I have been able to implement this approach on other projects, including a square rolling bridge, suspended artworks, kinetic structures, but also timber workshops, commercial refurbishments, and more.?

On a project I am currently working on, I enabled the entire design team to work in 3D on geometrically complex roofs by introducing digital tools that were easily adopted and embraced by everyone on the team. Being able to lead that change and facilitate the design development through an integrated approach was the result of many years of experimenting with the adoption of digital tools. Making that impact beyond structural engineering has been very rewarding, and I’m really looking forward to seeing the structures our design team will have achieved.?

Overcoming Challenges: When I worked on Sagrada, I tried to go beyond what was expected from a typical graduate structural engineer and, I must admit, I relished in it. I felt like my work mattered and was valued. Sadly, it also backfired, because carrying out specialist work that not all engineers undertake meant that I was left with less time to do more “traditional” engineering work. It affected my confidence as an engineer. What I didn’t realise was that I was losing out on one key thing: valuable core experience. Instead, I started to feel insecure about my technical abilities, and I had to find my own ways to push myself outside of my comfort zone, to get the projects I needed to get to develop those skills. In a system that’s very set in its old ways, I wasn’t able to find the support and guidance to enable me to develop fully as an engineer, and if I didn’t search for that challenge, I would have ended up following a very different career path and would have missed out on developing as a structural engineer.??

It can be very daunting to progress as a structural engineer with digital skills. There is generally a sense of not belonging, and it’s not unusual to get push-back from above, and sometimes from peers. Most of the industry still doesn’t offer a clear path for development or progression for people with computational skills, and very often, proficiency in computational skills and structural engineering technical skills are regarded to be mutually exclusive. In an industry where margins are being constantly reduced and programmes shortened, it leaves us, engineers, with very little capacity to innovate. It can feel like everything is up against us, but I have experienced little victories that still give me hope. It also helps to know that other structural engineers share the same views.?

One clear obstacle seems to be cultural instead of technical. For example, the AEC industry fosters a culture of excessive competition instead of collaboration. It’s maybe time to move towards more sharing, fostering, and communication. It is not uncommon to experience microaggressions in meetings, in the workplaces, and usually the people behaving that way aren’t aware of the impact it has on the people receiving it. Witnesses either are so numbed by it or remain unaware that they fail to react. It requires a lot of courage for women to speak up, and it demands empathy from the perpetrator to understand how others might perceive their actions. I would even less expect men to speak up in those situations in defense of women. Unfortunately, just like being a computational structural engineer, being a woman in structural? engineering often puts you as a minority. You end up having to fight to be heard, when your male counterparts would not be aware of the experiences you go through. You have to go the extra mile to have that visibility, and people are too quick to dismiss you, because they cannot relate and lack empathy. I try to speak up, it’s not always easy, but I try. I urge you to speak up for yourself and for those around you too!?

Advice for Aspiring Engineers: A few years ago, I decided to find an environment where I could spend more time doing more “typical” engineering work, which was daunting at first, but really helped me develop as the structural engineer I had always aspired to be. It took me a few years to build up the courage to take the leap. To my younger self, I would have allowed myself to make more mistakes. It’s in those early years when it’s the best time to try as much as you can, fail sometimes, but learn even more. There’s no need to shy away from anything. Ask more questions, don’t be scared to be vulnerable, don’t let people’s comments and behaviours get to you, keep on trying, learning, and exploring. You’ve just started your career, you are where you are for a reason, there shouldn’t be any judgement whether that’s coming from you or from others.?

Other thoughts: Something I have learned about engineering is that the best work is carried out by a team, and for a team to work well, empathy and communication are two of the most important skills. Having empathy makes us better tutors and mentors and makes the team stronger. Being aware of someone’s strengths and weaknesses means you can help them thrive at what they are best at and grow where they need it. It’s important to remember that everyone starts somewhere, and everybody still has things they can learn. It’s not that some people aren’t capable of performing, sometimes it’s because they weren’t being given the chance to feel like they were able to, and that needs to happen through communication, without being disparaging, but by being supportive and by listening.?

Additionally, empathy helps with inclusion. We don’t hear enough men’s voices on International Women’s Day. It’s not a day only about women, it is a day about women in a world still dominated by men. And if we aren’t able to have a conversation with or to get the men in the room, we won’t be able to make any change and head anywhere.?