The professionals network Women in Transport partnered with the Women’s Engineering Society – founder of the International Women in Engineering Day campaign – to hold the event. The theme of this year’s campaign is ‘raising the bar’. Those gathered heard about the contributions of female engineers to transport and the importance of encouraging more women to consider engineering as a career.

The event was hosted by Ruth Cadbury MP who chairs the All Party Parliamentary Group for Women in Transport. “We need to break down the barriers that are preventing more women from bringing their talents and experience to working in transport,” she said. “The opportunities for more women with science, technology, engineering and maths skills are enormous. We need to be doing all we can with the transport and engineering sectors to shift this gender imbalance.”

Nusrat Ghani, Parliamentary Under Secretary of State at the Department for Transport said: “An important way of empowering women and tackling issues like the gender pay gap is encouraging more girls to consider well paid, influential careers like engineering. As we see rapid developments in new technology and major investment in infrastructure, it’s also vital that the transport industry and wider engineering profession is attracting a diverse workforce that truly represents the society we live in.”

Advancing women in transport is seen as crucial to improve the talent of the sector’s workforce and to address the expected skills gap of more than 55,000 people needed to deliver and manage transport infrastructure by 2020.

Companies supporting the event included TXM Recruit, Engie and Hitachi Rail Europe who shared examples  of their efforts to encourage more women to work in transport and engineering. These include supporting STEM events in schools, apprenticeship programmes and redesigning recruitment processes to make them more inclusive.

Katie Hulland. President, Women in Transport president said: “Through our events in Parliament, we will continue to both celebrate best practice in working with women and male allies to improve diversity and challenging the pace of how we ensure the transport sector is a more inclusive place to work for everyone.”

Sharon Duffy, Head of Transport Infrastructure Engineering, Transport for London added: “International Women in Engineering Day is a great catalyst to get the conversation going about why more women should be getting into the engineering and transport professions.”

Skilled people are in demand in areas such as civil and structural engineering and signalling and there is a need to improve capability in emerging disciplines like cyber security, autonomous control systems and intelligent infrastructure. However data released earlier this year from Engineering UK shows just 12% of the engineering workforce are female.