More Women Wanted As Engineers

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31121, 26 July 1966, Page 2

More Women Wanted As Engineers

Engineering as a career is not considered by nearly enough intelligent, educated girls and women today, according to Miss Cicely Thompson, senior engineer in the Nuclear Power Group—a consortia established in Britain 10 years ago to design and build power stations.

She is chairman of a committee which is organising an international conference of women engineers for 1967. The subject of the conference, “enough for everyone—the application of technology to world food problems”, is of interest to women throughout the world.

Because so many of the! problems which could be solved by technological advance are of particular importance to women and children. Miss Thompson would like to see many more women working as technologists, especially in the engineering industry. She started her own career in engineering almost by accident. After taking a degree tn mathematics at the University of Cambridge, she took a job with the electricity undertaking at Leicester, her home town.

“Whatever you do, you must learn fundamentals,” Miss Thompson says; and this is just what she did. The Leicester technical staff was small and co-operative, and taught

her to design coal-sidings, to test turbo-alternators, and to work on extensions to the Leicester generating station.

specification for plant myself, but collect everyone else’s specifications, comment and criticise if I have to, and make sure they fit together. I see that all the design work fits the concept as a whole,” she says. Miss Thompson has earned a reputation today for her clear-headedness, and for technical authority and matter-of-fact explanations which make her a highly convincing advertisement for women engineers. Out of the office, she works for women. She is immediate past president of the Women’s Engineering Society which was established in Britain just after the First World War “to promote the study and practice of engineering among women.” In those days, women engineers were undeniable curiosities. Today there are about 500 women engineers in Britain. Recruitment is one of the society’s main aims, and Miss Thompson has told many girls' schools about careers in engineering, and has led discussions with the Engineering Institutions Joint Council and the Ministry of Technology about the problems of increasing the number of girls training for careers in technology. Wastage of talents is one of her great concerns. She agrees that, after marriage, engineering and young children often will not mix. But

She moved from there to the power station at Fulham, a district of London, and then, after the Second World War, to the British Electricity Authority and the headquarters of what later became the Generating Board. In 1956, she applied to join what is now the Nuclear Power Group. Since those early days the group has built two power stations in England and work is in progress on two more, and another in Italy at Latina. Miss Thompson's energies are turned to miscellaneous problems. "As co-ordinating engineer, I do not write a

as long as a mother’s mind is kept awake—with part-time science teaching, perhaps, or technical journalism, or home work on computers—there is no reason why a married woman should not go back to a career in engineering as her children grow. “The situation is more promising now than it has been for many years,” she says. “There are signs of greater recognition that engineering is as much a job for women as for men.”

These signs are not confined to Britain. In the developing countries, particularly, she says, “great efforts are made to make the best use of any women trained in technology.” In 1964, in the United States, she attended the first international women's engineering conference, at which 500 delegates discussed how technology could be used for the betterment of life throughout the world and how to increase women's contribution to it. At the next conference, delegates will be concerned with practical possibilities. Miss Thompson and her committee are concerned that the subjects discussed should be really down-to-earth—such as increasing food supplies with land and weather controls, systematic fish farming and new types of food. Other subjects include lowering the cost of food by improving the power and speed of production; delivering food to the consumer specially processed and packaged, and transporting it efficiently; purity control to offset chemical and radiation hazards; and, the world population explosion.