Imagining a future with more women in engineering

“Close your eyes and imagine an engineer. What do you see?”

That was the opening question posed by my colleague Somaya El Marrakchi during a fantastic Women in Technology event I participated in last week.

So, what do you see when you think of an engineer? Somaya’s question was to get us considering established stereotypes and unconscious bias. 

I’m grateful to my colleague María Luz García de Castro Pérez-Gayé who led a thought provoking and engaging event in our Madrid office. 30 people attended the panel discussion on women’s roles in the technology sector. It was aptly held in ‘The Imagine Zone,’ a brand new space designed for collaboration and connection. 

Changing the narrative

One eye-opening discussion involved the findings of the 2022 McKinsey report ‘Women in tech: The best bet to solve Europe’s talent shortage'. The report reveals that women occupy only 22% of all tech roles across European companies. 

Why is the number so low? It seems that STEM subjects have become more popular with girls at school. But a problem arises as the young women go through the education system and into the workforce: the numbers significantly reduce at each stage. It seems that girls and young women can’t see a vision of the future that they fit into. I believe we have to do more to highlight the engineering career opportunities available to women and at Ericsson to actively hire into such roles.  

Across the board

Women thriving in traditionally male environments remains an ongoing challenge across the working world. 

Martha Lane Fox, who was co-founder of lastminute.com in the early 2000s and is now chair of the tech company WeTransfer, said in her column in The Sunday Times at the weekend that it shouldn’t still be necessary to write about how hard it is for women to get ahead in business — but that it still is. 

Leadership plays a big role in shifting the status quo. As Martha writes, you’re at a disadvantage when you have no women on your board or your executive team. It’s one of the reasons why I’m delighted Jenny Lindqvist was appointed senior vice president, head of market area Europe & Latin America at Ericsson this month. Not only is Jenny such a brilliant leader, she’s an inspiring role model, showing other women starting out at Ericsson just how far you can go. 67% of my own team is female, but we need to do more across the organisation and industry at large.

Martha also notes that tech is one of the fastest growing and most powerful forces globally. And yet a paltry two percent of venture capital funding goes to women in the UK. I’ve been avidly following two women flying the flag for female entrepreneurship. Sarah King and Claire Dunn are co-founders of ‘we are radikl’. They’ve harnessed all their energy and passion to address this gender investment gap to get more female-focused business funded.

Women powering success

Diversity isn’t just a ‘nice to have’ or a box tick. As Susana Fernández explained at our Women in Technology panel, greater diversity in engineering roles leads to better ideas and innovation. Susana has been part of the Ericsson family for over 25 years and in 2021 she received the company’s Inventor of the Year award. She really knows her stuff.

There’s a commercial benefit for companies who have more women workers: they’re more successful. And I personally feel strongly about women in the tech industry because of the unconscious bias I myself have had to overcome. What’s more, I’m passionate about creating a more inclusive future for our daughters and future generations too. 

Hope for the future

I was so heartened by our Women in Technology event. It was brilliant soaking up the energy of the group, and hearing all the ideas provided by the talent in the room. There was such a buzz and I left with a great sense of hope that we can create the change we crave.

I feel positive that we can all get behind changing the perceptions of what an engineer looks like and encouraging more women into the tech industry. I echo the call for leaders to step up that Martha Lane Fox makes and for greater numbers of women to be promoted into senior roles. 

And a plea to the men among us! We need our male colleagues to be part of the conversation too. No change will come without a collective effort.

So let’s keep the momentum going and put our joint efforts into practice. After all, there are signs the tide is beginning to turn. Take our panel expert Somaya. In answer to her question, when she asked her husband, daughter and friends what they imagined when they thought of an engineer - they all said they thought of her!