International Women's Day 2021: #ChooseToChallenge

International Women’s Day is a great time to celebrate all women, and it has been since its conception in 1975. However, the engineering industry and a lot of other STEM-based industries, are still largely male-dominated. In fact, only a mere 12.37% of all engineers in the UK are female, according to statistics published by the Women’s Engineering Society (WES). The theme of this year’s IWD is #ChooseToChallenge, because from challenge comes change. We’re proud to challenge the industry norm where the majority of engineers are male, as 50% of our engineers are female. We pride ourselves on having a diverse workforce, whether that be in relation to gender, religion, ethnicity or race. It was from working in other firms where there wasn’t an equal balance, that birthed some of the values of Dice and the need for a diversified team. In the experience of our directors, non-diverse teams do not provide the best working environment, and so the most important thing when starting the business was to create a positive place to work that is inclusive for everyone.

Not only do we pride ourselves in having a number of skilled female engineers on our team, but we also have women in senior positions, with both our civil engineering team and our structural engineering team being headed up by women. We don’t want to be the only ones in the industry with these values though. And since there are proportionally so few women in engineering, the key goal is to get more women interested in joining the profession. Working to develop the next generation of engineers, we have invested in our apprenticeship scheme, which provides an ‘earn while you learn’ incentive during a time when traditional university pathways have been made difficult as a result of the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. We currently have two apprentices (both of them women) and they are a valuable asset to the team. Our work with our apprentices has also recently seen us nominated for an award at this year’s Nottingham Trent University Apprenticeship Awards, which celebrates the hard work, success and achievements of the university’s apprentices and the employers who are engaged with their apprenticeship programmes.