INNOVATION November-December 2012

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Increasing the Number of Women in Engineering Time to Act

Marg Latham PEng

ThIs Is shk

W hen I was in elementary school I remember going on a field trip to the local fire department. I don’t remember how old I was or what grade I was in, but I vividly remember a thought that I had. I looked at that shiny pole in the fire hall and thought “I want to come down that pole someday.” No sooner had I had that thought when another thought quickly followed: “But, I can’t; I’m a girl.” Of course, this isn’t surprising. It was, after all, the 1950s and women weren’t fire fighters or firemen, as they were called then. I was a product of my time and already seeing limitations in what I could become. Later in my last year of high school, I was fortunate to have a guidance counsellor, Mrs Scott, a woman ahead of her time, who told us that women could be almost anything they wanted to be, including architects and engineers. My brother was in engineering and he too encouraged me to consider it. I was good in math, physics and chemistry. It seemed like an easy choice. I looked at engineering disciplines and decided I wanted to be a civil engineer.

At that time, my high school arranged career days when people came in to talk about their occupations. I went to the session about engineering. As you can imagine, there were no women at the front of the room back then. I asked the civil engineer who attended about women in civil engineering. He said civil engineering was too rough and tough, and a woman wouldn’t be able to handle it. Whether I chose naively or not, I’m glad that I decided to follow my heart and not his advice. Oh, how I wish I had gone back to find him 12 years later when I had not only graduated as a civil engineer, I had become a construction superintendent managing one of the largest residential projects built in Canada that year. Maybe I could have convinced him that women can be civil engineers and should be encouraged to choose engineering as a career. How many other young women took the advice they heard back then and chose other careers? What message are young women hearing today?

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