Women’s Engineering Society Tyneside Cluster

The Women’s Engineering Society (WES) is a charity and a professional network of women engineers, scientists and technologists offering inspiration, support and professional development. Working in partnership, we support and inspire women to achieve as engineers, scientists and as leaders; we encourage the education of engineering; and we support companies with gender diversity and inclusion.

The number of engineering roles filled by women is often quoted at about 11%. This hasn’t changed significantly in the last 30 years. Coupled with this, there is a huge skills gap in STEM, estimated to be 173,000 last year, and expected to rise over the next 10 years as the number of roles in STEM in the UK increases. By encouraging more girls, as well as boys, to consider careers in STEM we can go some way to closing the skills gap.

WES has clusters across the country to support women locally, and the Tyneside cluster covers Northumberland, County Durham, Tees Valley and Tyne and Wear. The funding would be used to relaunch the WES Tyneside Cluster. The cluster can then be a place of support for female engineers in the North East, and enable organisation of outreach activities to inspire the next generation of engineers. Specifically, the funding will be used in two ways; firstly, to organise a launch event to reinvigorate the cluster, and secondly, to buy materials that can be used by members who wish to organise events in schools or with community groups.