Women Engineers Reinforcing Success

Strategic Importance of Engineering: The engineering sector, being closely associated with the manufacturing and infrastructure sectors, possesses a huge strategic importance to India’s economy. The sector has witnessed a remarkable growth over the last few years, driven by increased investment in infrastructure and industrial production. Today, it is the largest of all the industrial sectors, accounts for 27 percent of the total factories in industrial sector and represents 63 percent of the overall foreign collaborations. The exponential demand for this sector is highly driven by expansion of industries such as infrastructure, electricity, mining, oil and gas, refinery, steel, automobiles, and consumer durables. Owing to the dynamic entrepreneurial spirit, robust technological infrastructure and a highly skilled human workforce the engineering industry is now skyrocketing. Female Representation: Being a male-dominated industry traditionally, the women representation in the sector accounts for 20 percent according to the Society of Women Engineers. Though there have been improvements in recent years, unfortunately female representation falls short when it comes to engineering, manufacturing and information technology services. Researches reflect 80 percent of engineering employees are men, making it a high-time for women to jump into something new and work with latest innovation and tools.

Breaking the Gender Stereotypes: Gender stereotypes, low rates of female engineering students, and engineering culture are the factors that contribute to the current situation, where men dominates in fields relating to engineering science. In India, women do take up science for degrees, but few of them go on to pursue careers in the field of engineering. The reason hasn’t been performance, but the societal expectation. Because of the default role of a woman as a homemaker and society’s perception that only women are responsible for rearing a child, marriage and not career is perceived to the primary goal of a woman. However there is a paradigm shift in the industries and mankind today and everything started to fall in place. Thanks to the equal rights and access to education in the 21st century, by the virtue of which women are equipped with a willingness to take up tasks that were considered the men’s business before and breaking gender stereotypes. Now they are openly venturing in any field they want to operate on and thriving in their career path, on their own terms.

In this issue, the Women Entrepreneur magazine brings a list of ‘Top 10 Women Leaders in Engineering – 2023’, who are domineers of change in the corporate realm of the country. This list of ten leading and inspiring women is crafted by a team of CEOs, VCs, and the editorial board, delivering inspiring stories of their journey and the contributions & roles played by them in the creation and empowerment of an economically powerful nation.