Warwickshire celebrates International Women in Engineering Day 2025
This month women engineers have been celebrated around the world, especially on International Women in Engineering Day (INWED) on Monday June 23rd.
It is a key date of interest to our ‘Warwickshire Women in Engineering 2025’ awareness-raising series where we have been raising the profile of jobs and careers in STEM and STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art and Mathematics) roles, which underpin the activity of many of the businesses here in Warwickshire.
There is a gap in representation of women in the workplace that INWED and other programmes are keen to close. As part of our campaign this year we have spoken to women engineers from automotive and construction, and during the 200th anniversary year of rail in the UK, Rail 200, the rail industry. Warwickshire’s manufacturing and technology sectors provide a wide range of engineering roles, from shop floor assembly roles and machine operators to software roles in video games design and production engineering, to product design, test, prototyping and development. Then there are civil engineering roles in construction, from the highway engineers at Warwickshire County Council to the construction of HS2 and of new homes and industrial units across the county.
The Coventry & Warwickshire economy employs 50,000 people directly in automotive and future mobility, including aerospace. These are generally well-paid jobs with excellent progression through training and routes into leadership, with skills transferable across sectors.
The future demand for skills includes many in the electrification of industry, from electricians, heating engineers, garage service technicians and those working directly in design and manufacturing industry. These include the manufacture of battery cells in Sunderland and Somerset, as well as the Coventry & Warwick Giga Park, Green Power Park. If more women join the engineering workforce, it will help to close the skills gaps we see in multiple industries.
Our campaign 'Warwickshire Women in Engineering 2025' seeks to celebrate the achievement of some of our local engineers, share their varied routes into their current roles and help everyone better understand the range of roles and what is done across engineering and technology. This year we’ve already marked National Careers Week, National Apprenticeships Week, Rail 200 and the Autocar Great Women in Automotive, held this year at MIRA Technology Park near Nuneaton, for the first time.
We hope that readers find these stories helpful to guide their own career paths, or those around them at home or work who are considering a career change or who are making choices around study and career paths.
Nicola Van der Hoven, Head of Engineering Design Services at Warwickshire County Council, said: "Engineering is not necessarily the first thing that girls and young women think about as a potential career, so, in the last few years myself and others at the county council have been involved in celebrating International Women in Engineering Day. That’s about providing opportunities for women across the built environment, creating connections and allowing people to see what the opportunities exist.”