IET Young Woman Engineer of the Year winner, Jenni Sidey, is a lecturer in the Department of Engineering at the University of Cambridge, currently working on the development of the latest low emission combustion devices for use in the transportation and energy sectors.
IET Mary George Memorial Prize for Apprentices winner, Gemma Dalziel, is an Apprentice Network Consulting Engineer at Cisco, working on network technologies and network security.
Women’s Engineering Society (WES) Award winner, Bethan Murray, is a Manufacturing Systems Lead at Rolls-Royce, working on the systems that aid the manufacture of the latest aircraft components.
On winning, Sidey said: “I am enormously proud to be recognised and I hope that, through my receipt of this award and involvement in gender diversity initiatives, I can strengthen the IET’s sentiment: to reach our technological potential, the UK’s engineering workforce must be inclusive and diverse.”
As well as highlighting female engineering talent, the IET Young Woman Engineer of the Year Awards seek to find female role models who can help address the UK science and engineering skills crisis by promoting engineering careers to more girls and women. Women currently represent only 9% of the engineering workforce in the UK, the lowest percentage in Europe.
“These talented women are a real credit to the engineering profession and will help to encourage more girls to consider a career in engineering and technology,” said IET president Jeremy Watson CBE. “It is crucial that we get more young girls excited about the possibilities of engineering as a career. Our failure to attract enough women into engineering is also contributing to the national skills shortage. We need to see women accounting for far more than only 9% of engineers of the UK.”
