Sunday, June 25, 2017

TradeMachines examines the lack of women in engineering

TradeMachines is a search engine for used industrial machinery. Although we personally never see or have contact with the machines listed on our website, machines of all sorts define our everyday tasks. We talk about, look at, and think about machines every single day.

Given our company profile, our international customer base consists of professionals working with heavy equipment, countless of them being engineers just like one of our company founders. It makes sense: who would build a business model around industrial machines if not someone who has a deep knowledge of them? The longer we have been in business, though, the more we see that we work with a large number of engineers and, interestingly, our clients are mostly men. And looking at the statistics, our observation was valid: within the United States, only 13 percent of engineers are women, while in Germany it's 17 percent and France 21 percent, as just a few examples.

Our company is keen on equality, as our  people come from all over the world. Some of our colleagues are German, some are from the United States, and others are from Poland or Uzbekistan, and the ratio of men to women is currently about 60:40. For us, being given the same chance no matter your background is a main value. Considering that engineering has great prospects and guarantees a stable income almost anywhere in the world, we became curious why women are so severely under-represented in this field. Are they just not interested in what engineering has to offer?

We started researching and realized that the answer is a definite “no” and found the reasoning very intriguing and concerning. We decided that the least we can do as a company is summarize our findings in an infographic to underline the difficulties women face when entering the male-dominated field of engineering, hoping we can also trigger further support from others.

Take a look at our infographic yourself, you might be surprised...



No comments:

Post a Comment