Addressing the gender imbalance in engineering

At the Group’s first face-to-face meeting in Birmingham last month, the four current members also discussed some of the broader issues around women in engineering, and the importance of sparking the interest of potential female healthcare engineers at an early age.

In a President’s address given last November at IHEEM’s ‘Heritage, Innovation & the Membership Balance’ event in Westminster, Pete Sellars alluded to the low percentage of women both in UK engineering as whole, and in healthcare engineering particularly. To ensure that IHEEM plays its part in redressing the balance, he announced that three women – Dr Manju Patel PhD, FIHEEM, MSc, MBA, BSc., Programme manager / Project director, Physical Infrastructure Projects, at NHS Grampian (who is also chair of IHEEM’s ADBE Technical Platform), Annabelle Morgan FMAAT, IHEEM’s executive manager, and Claire Hennessy, BEng Hons FIHEEM, head of Operational Estates and Facilities Services at Oxford University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust – had kindly agreed to come together ‘to look at what the Institute needed to do to promote healthcare engineering and health estate management careers to women’. The IHEEM Diversity & Inclusion Working Group was duly formed late in 2017, with the three initial members soon joined by a fourth, Kim Shelley (formerly Kim Phillips; see also pages 26-29) CIPD, AMIHEEM, a director at London-headquartered consulting engineers, Eta Projects. 

First face-to-face meeting