Amiosec Celebrate International Women in Engineering Day.
Date
23rd June, 2019
Location
Worldwide
Description
Sunday 23rd June 2019 marked International Women in Engineering Day and we could not let the event pass without celebrating the success of female engineers of past and present.
Set up in 2014 by the Women’s Engineering Society (WES) to celebrate its 95th anniversary, this international awareness day raises the profile of women in engineering, celebrates their success and focuses attention on the amazing career opportunities available to girls and women in this exciting industry.
What better way to celebrate this event than to showcase the work our own female engineers have been involved in here at Amiosec…
Lauren is one of our female engineers who has a Master’s degree in Computing and Electronic Systems. She has been working at Amiosec for over two years and in that time she has worked on several different projects, including research projects and developing our advanced mobile and secure remote access products. She has been involved with systems engineering such as requirements gathering and design, through to software engineering in C, C# and Python, and she is also a certified Scrum Master. She enjoys a challenging project and is always looking to further her knowledge and skills by getting involved in new technologies.
Not only has Lauren made an impact working on projects at Amiosec, but she has been heavily involved with starting a STEM outreach programme at Amiosec, engaging with schools and students in order to hopefully inspire future generations and promote engineering as a career option. As a passionate STEM ambassador, she has represented Amiosec at STEM events over the past couple of years, including the Gretton Science Festival, Do Cyber in Bristol, where she hosted cyber workshops and CyberUK 2019, where she presented a discussion on the history of cryptography. Lauren is currently working on establishing Amiosec in the NCSC’s Cyber School Hubs project.
Another of our engineers is Jo, a Software Engineer. Jo completed a degree in Computing at the University of Gloucestershire whilst working full time with her previous employer and subsequently completed an Electronics apprenticeship with Smiths Aerospace, which resulted in an Electronics HNC. Jo has been with Amiosec for just under three years and, like Lauren, has worked on several research projects as well as assisting with the development of the advanced mobile and secure remote access products. Jo has also helped to develop our software engineering practices and tool selection, ensuring that we apply quality to what we do. For the past six months Jo has been given the opportunity of a secondment with one of our partners, which has given her the opportunity to work in new areas and broaden her experience.
With women making up around 12% of the engineering sector in the UK, we feel extremely lucky to have such passionate and ambitious female engineers on board. With a large skills gap and the need for a more diverse workforce, it has never been more important to inspire and encourage more people, especially women, to choose a career in engineering. Here at Amiosec we would love the opportunity to welcome other suitably skilled and ambitious female engineers to the company.
This year, the Women’s Engineering Society (WES) celebrated its Centenary and chose the theme ‘Remembering the Past, Celebrating the Present and Transforming the Future’. What better way to celebrate than by looking at some of the great women in engineering history courtesy of Ivey Engineering (2013), 8 Famous Female Engineers in History.
- Emily Roebling (1803-1903)
Emily Roebling stepped in as the first woman field engineer and technical leader of the Brooklyn Bridge when her husband, Washington Roebling, became paralyzed and could no longer work without the help of his wife. Emily became responsible for much of the chief engineer’s duties, including day-to-day supervision and project management. The Brooklyn Bridge was completed in 1883 and holds a plaque honouring Emily and her husband.
- Beulah Louise Henry (1887-1973)
Beulah Henry was known as “the lady Edison” in the 1920s and 1930s for the many inventions she patented, including a bobbin-free lockstitch sewing machine, a doll with flexible arms, a vacuum ice cream freezer, a doll with a radio inside and a typewriter that made multiple copies without carbon paper. Henry made a large fortune during her career by capitalizing on her inventions through manufacturing companies to produce her creations.
- Hedy Lamarr (1913-2000)
Hedy Lamarr might be recalled as a sexy movie star of the 1930s and 1940s, however, few know that she invented a remote-controlled communications system for the U.S military during World War II. Lamarr’s frequency hopping theory now serves as a basis for modern communication technology, such as Bluetooth and Wi-Fi network connections.
- Stephanie Louise Kwolek (1923-2014)
While working for DuPont, Stephanie Louise Kwolek discovered liquid crystalline polymers, which resulted in the product Kevlar. Containing fibers that are stronger than steel, Kevlar is used to make bulletproof vests, radial tires, airplane fuselages and fiber optic cables. For her accomplishments as a research scientist she received the National Medal of Technology in 1996 and was named to the National Women’s Hall of Fame in 2003. The American Chemical Society awarded her the Perkin Medal in 1997.
- Martha J. Coston (1826-1904)
Another famous female engineer in history, Martha Coston is credited with developing a signalling flare system that’s used by the U.S. military and known as Coston flares. Coston needed a way to support herself and her children after the death of her husband and discovered a design he had left behind in a notebook. She worked for nearly 10 years revising the designs to include pyrotechnic components to create a long-lasting and multi-coloured system of flares.
- Lillian Gilbreth (1878-1972)
Lillian Gilbreth contributed to industrial engineering by studying workplace patterns and ergonomics. She became the first female member of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers in 1926. Laying the foundation for work in what is now known as human factors engineering and ergonomic design, Gilbreth is known as the “mother of modern management”. The book Cheaper by the Dozen is the story of the Gilbreth family, which included Lillian, her husband Frank Bunker Gilbreth and their 12 children.
- Edith Clarke (1883-1959)
This female engineering pioneer was at the forefront in bringing sophisticated electrical engineering concepts to dam building in the western United States. Much of Edith Clarke’s career (about 26 years) was spent at GE. She had the distinction of becoming a salaried engineer after two years of being hired, which was quite uncommon for a woman at that time. Clarke also won awards for her papers and a patent for a specialised calculator.
- Mary Anderson (1866–1953)
Mary Anderson invented the windshield wiper after a winter trip to New York in 1903 where she observed a driver leaving his front window open to clear falling sleet from the windshield. In November 1903 Anderson was granted her first patent for the invention of the windshield wiper. After the patent to her wiper expired in 1920 and with the growth of the automobile market, auto manufacturers adopted Anderson’s basic design of the wiper into their standard equipment.
