International Women’s Day 2025

How do we ‘Accelerate Action’ and get more women into engineering roles? Algar Air’s Simone Kidd offers an invitation…

Recently, we posted a job ad for a skilled engineer to help manage our growing portfolio of work. We had plenty of applications but none from women. To be fair, I wasn’t expecting any. It’s the same for apprenticeships. We’ve had several apprentices work with us over the years. I’ve never seen an application from a woman.

When I was thinking about this year’s International Women’s Day (IWD) I reflected on that and asked myself ‘why not?’

Accelerating action

You don’t need me to tell you that engineering is a male dominated industry. The scary thing is the figures are actually getting worse. According to Engineering UK in a report published last year, “the number of women working in engineering and tech has dropped by 38,000 – from 16.5% of the 2022 workforce to 15.7% of the 2023 workforce.”

This year, the theme of IWD is ‘Accelerate Action’. It’s about, as IWD says, “taking swift and decisive steps to achieve gender equality. It calls for increased momentum and urgency in addressing the systemic barriers and biases that women face, both in personal and professional spheres”.

As a woman at the helm of a successful air compressor engineering business, this year’s theme has prompted me to look at what we’re doing and explore what more we can do to encourage women to join the sector. That really comes down to three things, things we’re already doing, but which we need to do more of:

Shout about it: They say you can’t be what you can’t see. As the number of women engineers drops, the chances of seeing a woman like you in an engineering role recedes. So it’s important that we talk about the opportunities out there. We’ve been hiring, but so is virtually every other engineering business of every type. It’s estimated there are more than 400,000 engineering vacancies in the UK. What a brilliant opportunity for the UK’s women – but we all need to be talking about it a lot more than we do.

Start early: Every year, I visit Newfield School in Sheffield to support their mock interview programme. And every year, at the start of the day, I stand up and tell the school who I am and what I do, and I bang the drum for careers in engineering.

They say that for a message to stick it needs to be heard seven times. So the girls who hear my message need to hear it again and again – from their school, from parents, from the media, and especially from women already in the industry. It’s only then that we’re likely to see more lightbulb moments as more women think, ‘you know what? Maybe I could do that’.

Offer opportunity: When you’re thinking about a career, there’s nothing more valuable than being able to give it a go. Last year, I wrote about Ellie, a budding engineer who did work experience with us, and I’m delighted to say she’ll be joining us for a second spell soon.

Ellie told us, “It is important [to see other women in leadership roles in industry] because I can see that women can be successful and there aren’t any barriers to block their path and they can inspire me to do the same.”

So this year, I want to extend an invitation to all young women thinking that maybe engineering might be a career for them. If you’d like some work experience in an engineering environment that isn’t all male – or if you know someone who might be interested – please get in touch. I can’t promise we’ll be able to offer an opportunity in every case, but we’ll do our best.

Get in touch with us here, and happy International Women’s Day.