Women in Engineering Q&A with Jo Kirkbride, ABB Product Manager UK & Ireland for ABB

International Women in Engineering Day is an opportunity to celebrate the amazing work of women in STEM careers. Jo Kirkbride, Product Manager UK & Ireland for ABB, shares her experiences, hopes for the future, and the advice she would offer to women starting out in engineering.?

Can you tell me a bit about what you do?

I work in product management, across families of products. I look after the actuators and positioners and the force measurement, so it's everything around those product ranges. That includes everything from sales and marketing, pricing, any negotiations with the factories, customer technical support and training of our partners, sales & service engineers.?

Did you always want to go into engineering??

My earliest ambition was to be a vet, but from secondary school onwards I was more focused on engineering because I used to help my father in his work as an electrician. At school I had a careers interview with a local supplier and their recommendation to me was, instead of going for an apprenticeship, that I go to college.

So I went straight to college and did electrical engineering and microprocessors. My expectation really after that was I would just go into the local employer at a different level.

Before I left college, I wrote letters to all the engineering companies, outlining what I’d studied and asking for a job.

The best response I got was from a company called Tunstall Telecom. Although they didn’t have any open positions at that time, they invited me for an interview as they were impressed that somebody had actually written to them when they didn't have a position. As a result of that, they created not only a job for me, but another five people, creating what they called their own in-house modern apprenticeship.

I worked at Tunstall Telecom for a few years and did an HND in Electrical Engineering while I was there.

How did you end up working for ABB?

After the work at Tunstall Telecom, I went into commissioning. I was working originally for Davy McKee, commissioning the Thermal Oxide Reprocessing Plant, THORP, down the road at Sellafield, then moved from there to Drax Power station, commissioning the FGD unit.

My son was about to get to school age, so I thought I needed to have a permanent job or a long contract somewhere.

My mother sent me the local paper every week, and there was a job at Fisher and Porter for a sales engineer. I thought, I can't do sales, I have no background in it, but it was instrumentation sales and I did know the kit.

By the time I saw the advert, the closing date had already gone, but they looked at my CV and I became the last ever employee of Fisher and Porter Limited. That was September 1995 - Fisher and Porter then became Elsag Bailey and it was then acquired by ABB.?

What is it about working in engineering that you enjoy the most?

enjoy that every day is different and that I have the opportunity to interact with different people. I spend most of my life with customers and engineers either on site or in the workshop, getting hands on with the instruments and solving customer problems.

I tend to keep out of the limelight, and I've always stayed away from the campaign to get more women in engineering – to me, if you're good enough, you're good enough and gender shouldn't matter at all.

That being said though, I have had difficulties in my early career, mainly practical ones like getting appropriate safety shoes.

When I first started, it was virtually impossible to find size 4 steel toe cap boots - the first safety boots I had needed to be sourced from the British Army as they weren’t widely available anywhere else!

I’ve also struggled with getting boiler suits that fit properly but things have come on a lot since those early days.

How important do you think it is that we participate in International Women in Engineering Day?

Well, it shouldn’t need to be ‘a thing’, but if you can't see it, you can't be it – if you don’t see any women in engineering, it’s difficult to have that goal yourself.

So, it does need to be promoted based around skills. An example is my daughter, whose school didn't want to let her do maths, physics and chemistry. All she wanted to do was chemical engineering at the time, so she changed schools - she has just completed a master's in physics and is about to start a PhD.

So, the school told us she couldn't, and she took the view, I'm going to do it anyway.

Having that attitude is important but people also need support from educational establishments and employers. My home area is designated Britain’s Energy Coast, the biggest employer is Sellafield and a lot of the companies around here are geared to feed into them, but we also have the specialist Energy Coast University Technical College.

Local employers are heavily involved in students’ studies, and they do projects for employers as part of their course – they really do push that it’s engineering based and there's no gender bias whatsoever.

In 2021 figures indicated that in the UK only 16.5% of engineers are women, do you think women are underrepresented in engineering?

The numbers are there but based on my own personal experience, it's difficult to see that. I spend my time with customers who have female engineers and there are noticeably a lot more these days then when I first started.

Where I'm working, it doesn't matter which customer it is, there's always female engineers and it's good to see.

I will say though you see the younger ones doing an apprenticeship, but they tend to get a degree and then move more into management, so you'll find a lot of women are the operations manager, the production manager, or environmental managers.?

How do you think as a society we can encourage more women into engineering and more generally STEM?

I would say it's simply to promote it, particularly make sure that it's covered in schools from a young age and have it always there as an option rather than suddenly being sprung upon people at the end of their time at school.

We need to also let people know that it's not a gender specific role. This would help with misunderstandings and people expecting an engineer to be a man.

In my career, I have sometimes found that the first reaction of customers to dealing with a female engineer is a little bit of shock, but as soon as you can prove you know what you're doing, it’s gone.

What are your hopes for the future of the industry?

With more representation of engineering in schools and colleges, I hope that there will be more women joining the industry. Especially in my locality, with the number of girls that are doing engineering apprenticeships, I do think it's going to happen.

Hopefully in the next 10 years or 15, we might start to see that statistic of 16.5% of women in engineering rise dramatically.?

Do you have any advice for women looking to start a career in engineering?

Just that if it’s what you want to do, just do it. There aren't any barriers to what you can do.

I do think apprenticeships are the way to go – although theoretical studies have their place, you can't replace real experience. You've got to get out and live it and so I think an apprenticeship is ideal.

It's not just the exposure to the industries and everything else, it's also the mentoring you get, collaboration and drawing on the experience of others and the building of networks that will help you in the future as well.