Introduction and context
Growth is the number one mission of the current government with the new Industrial Strategy will be central to that Growth Mission. The Green Paper published in October 2024 set out their vision for a modern Industrial Strategy based on a credible, 10-year plan to deliver the certainty and stability businesses need to invest in the high growth sectors that will drive this growth mission.
However, the engineering sector is facing a significant skills gap, with a growing demand for skilled engineers and employers struggling to fill roles due to a shortage of qualified professionals. As of 2024, women make up approximately only 15.7% of the engineering workforce in the UK – a decline from 16.5% in 2022. Despite efforts to increase diversity, the representation of women in engineering remains significantly lower than in other occupations and targeted efforts are needed to recruit and retain women in engineering roles. Diversity, including but not limited to gender, will be critical to achieve the innovation and growth goals by 2035.
Our ask is that the strategy and complementary instruments are developed and delivered with under-represented voices in the engineering industry, including those of women. These voices are crucial to unlocking the innovation and growth needed to achieve the strategy’s ambitions.
Including views of women in engineering in the UK’s Industrial Strategy is essential to achieving the strategy’s goals: fostering inclusive growth and addressing gender-specific challenges, ultimately leading to a more equitable and resilient UK economy.
The industrial strategy and its objectives
The UK Government’s Industrial Strategy: Invest 2035 aims to be a comprehensive 10-year plan aimed at driving economic growth, fostering innovation, and enhancing global competitiveness. The strategy focuses on:
Economic Growth: Positioning the UK as a leader in high-growth sectors and ensuring long-term economic stability.
Innovation: Encouraging research and development and supporting the adoption of new technologies.
Global Competitiveness: Enhancing the UK’s position in the global market by leveraging its strengths in services and manufacturing.
Job Creation: Supporting the creation of high-quality, well-paid jobs across the country.
Infrastructure Development: Improving infrastructure to support economic growth and innovation.
Inclusive Growth: Ensuring that growth benefits all regions and communities, promoting social mobility and reducing regional disparities.
The strategy also emphasises the importance of a stable and predictable policy environment to inspire business confidence and investment. It aims to address barriers to investment, including skills shortages, access to finance, and regulatory challenges.
Proposed Solutions and Recommendations
The following summarises our responses as themes within the consultation process,
To address the career barriers faced by women, including a lack of equal access to professional development opportunities, inflexible working arrangements, and a lack of visible female role models there is a clear need for a mix of mindsets and perspectives including those of women, to support the delivery of growth and innovation. Significant number of women leave their roles after the age of 35 due to feeling undervalued, experiences of unmanageable work-life balance, and encountering toxic work culture, leaving an engineering industry without the diverse leadership essential for growth and innovation. Support for people returning from career breaks (overwhelmingly women) is crucial.
Our ask is for government to ensure that the right policy and regulations are in place and governed effectively to ensure that businesses and organisations demonstrate inclusive leadership in practice, establish cultures aligned to building sustainable businesses and establish the right support networks for all employees including, but not limited to, women. Our ask is for holistic plans for investment, which strike the right balance between ensuring resources are not diluted thinly across a wide range of duplicative interventions but rather are used to create space for newness whilst scaling up established impactful initiatives.
To address skills shortages, particularly in engineering and digital technologies, significant investment in training within growth-driving sectors is essential, and employers will need to step up to this challenge. Focusing on training for the underrepresented group of women in engineering can improve gender diversity, retention, but this must be done in conjunction with creating inclusive work environments or the newly skilled talent will not stay.
Our ask of government to achieve a step change in employer investment in training within the engineering sector is to consider reform of the existing levies into include other forms of accredited training aligned to engineering priorities, to consider tax incentives that allow employers to deduct a higher percentage of training costs from their tax bills, provide public funding for qualifications and skills programs that reduce the financial burden on SMEs, Start Ups and Scale Ups and create inclusive access and engagement of the public to establish a broad range of up-skilling and re- skilling schemes that meet the needs of all groups in society to ensure access for all.
To address barriers to participation in the economy from members of society with caring and childcaring duties, which disproportionately affects women, high cost of care and childcare in the UK is crucial.
Our ask is to support women (or any carers) through the introduction of affordable, high-quality care programmes for all children through the expansion of childcare facilities especially in underserved areas, the strengthening of care-related policy and regulation such as flexible work arrangements, provision of paid carers leave to support gender equity in caregiving without financial hardship, and the provision of substantial subsidies for childcare costs to low-income families, making it affordable for them to access quality childcare services.
To address under-investment in women-owned SMEs, Start-Ups and Scale-Ups which will provide much needed innovation, review of the application and take up of types of financial instruments must be reviewed. With documented variations between businesses owned by women than those owned by men, traditional sources of finance do not always support the risk appetite of women, and a broader range of instruments must be considered to support diversity (innovation) and growth.
Our ask is for proper consideration to be made to the application of certain financial instruments to attract the diverse sources of the engineering Start-ups and Scale-ups that will certainly be needed to deliver the scale of growth and innovation needed to deliver the industrial strategy goals by 2035. These may include access to blended finance, loan guarantee schemes, alternative credit scoring, gender lens investing and flexible financial products. This will increase access to finance for women-owned engineering businesses through improved access to loans, credit and capital in order to bridge the gender finance gap and support women’s economic engagement in industry.
Call to Action
To ensure that the strategy effectively drives long-term economic growth, stability, and investment across key sectors including engineering, the Women’s Engineering Society call to action is for the Council to work with diverse groups of engaged experts who can guide development and delivery to create an inclusive pro-business environment, promote innovation, and support high-quality job creation across the UK to fulfil “Invest 2035” goals.
Conclusion
Our evidentially backed claims provide a well-justified narrative for the importance of including women in engineering’s views in the industrial strategy, specifically to develop policies that actively seek and incorporate the views of women in engineering, ensure data biases are mitigated and provide targeted support and funding to initiatives that promote gender diversity in engineering.