Today we are celebrating women in engineering day, and it is therefore timely to reflect on gender diversity (or lack of) in the electronics sector.

Our recent training course highlighted to us that we still have a lot of work to do when it comes to attracting female participants on our training courses and into electronics. The statistics on female participation on our course was disappointing, 12% which equates to the number of female engineers and technicians in the workplace at the moment, and that is just not good enough!

Following completion of our first cohort in April we started work with Lancaster University Management School. The purpose of our collaboration is to analyse our marketing campaign, and to see if there is anything we can do to reach potential female participants, and how we can best demonstrate the amazing variety of roles in our sector. Our research will be available in September this year and we are looking forward to publishing the results.

Nicola from Tech Lancaster strongly believes that it’s vital for our industry to come together and demonstrate that a career in electronics is incredibly rewarding. We need to increase the number of females working within the industry, to attract people who are considering a career change, and to encourage younger generations to consider these careers from the outset. It’s our job to showcase the wide variety of roles in our sector and demonstrate the art of the possible.”  

We recognise that gender participation in electronics is not something that can be fixed overnight and that we can single handedly tackle, therefore as part of these women in engineering day celebrations, we are really excited to announce that Tech Lancaster has joined the Tech Talent Charter. This is a commitment by organisations to a set of undertakings that aim to deliver greater inclusion and diversity in the tech workforce of the UK

We have signed up to the Tech Talent Charter because we want to develop as an organisation and lead the electronic engineering sector into a more diverse working environment. We feel very strongly about this because:

– We want to represent modern Britain.

– Different thoughts and approaches from diverse cultures lead to new ideas and new ways of doing things.

– We want to continue attracting and retaining the best talent, and we want to become even better at this.

A lack of diversity, and a diverse talent pipeline, is a real blow to future innovation.    

The Tech Talent Charter exists to address ‘inequality in the UK tech sector and drive inclusion and diversity in a practical and uniquely measurable way.’ We encourage you to sign up too!