By Lindsay Wood
I was pleased to be invited to attend the 7th annual International Women in Engineering Day (INWED) event at Turnbull High School. The primary purpose of this event is to encourage girls to consider engineering as a career path through discussion and practical engagement in core engineering principles.
It was encouraging to see that around 70 female pupils from second year, from schools across East Dunbartonshire, attended the day-long event to meet women in the engineering field and find out more about the jobs they do.
Including myself, female engineers from 8 different organisations attended the event. It featured an icebreaker, practical group activities, and a Q&A session for pupils to be able to ask all the engineers about our routes into engineering, our career pathways, and more about our specific jobs.
The girls worked in smaller groups, rotating around various practical activities that the engineers had prepared related to our specific fields of engineering. We created a wide range of activities to spark their imaginations and show how different engineering roles can have significant positive impacts on society. These activities ranged from building structures from paper straws and paper that had to withstand the wind loading of a hairdryer, bridges between tables made from Knex, to building a railway & working out the signalling controls, to improving the internal environment of a space using building services.
In DSSR’s activity, the girls were invited to consider how they could improve their classroom environment using a variety of measures, but working within a cost budget, with improvement targets for carbon, air quality & comfort. I was proud to see the girls discuss the merits of the various measures and the competing requirements that some of the targets posed. They quickly learned (as will be familiar to my colleagues in the engineering field) that in order to achieve their budget, compromise was needed!
It may have been the result of a throwaway remark to my daughter’s maths teacher, but I am very happy to have been invited to support the International Women in Engineering Day and help the next generation of women get a better understanding of the opportunities in the sector and, more broadly, how engineering influences their environment.
International Women in Engineering Day 2026
Last week, Regional Director, Lindsay Wood, was invited to support an event for International Women in Engineering Day. She went along to Turnbull High School to provide the students with valuable insight into the sector and discuss the pathway into its many different fields.