International Women in Engineering Day 2024

Did you know that International Women in Engineering Day (INWED) is this Sunday on 23rd of June.

Internation Women in Engineering Day (INWED) celebrates the amazing work that women engineers across the globe are doing. This day gives women engineers around the world an opportunity to be appreciated and celebrated. It also helps to encourage young women to take up an engineering career.

This year’s theme is #Enhancedbyengineering.

NUSTEM would like to join in and celebrate this day by introducing you to some of the engineers that are featured in NUSTEM resources.

For Early Years and reception children, our award winning Play, Be, C unit ‘The Civil Engineer’ was developed with support from Paula McMahon.

Paula is a civil engineer who has designed and built many large projects. Her current work is to look after the A19, a major road which runs from Seaton Burn and Cramlington in the North, through the Tyne Tunnel all the way to Doncaster.  

Thousands of people use the A19 daily, and Paula’s job is to make sure the road is suitable to get them where they need to go safely. Paula enjoys the variety of her work and particularly likes working in teams, and seeing things get finished. She talks to lots of pupils about engineering, hoping that in the future we’ll have lots of new engineers helping to build a better world. 

The ‘Civil Engineer’ unit includes six different activities that let children aged 3 – 5 role act as civil engineers. They think about balancing and force, and create their own structures. The activities are linked to a story book and there is also a poster to download which has a picture of Paula at work. 

For secondary school students NUSTEM has also created resources featuring women engineers as part of the Inventive Podcast Project. There are worksheets based around different science subject topics which feature different women engineeers including:

• Electrical engineer Shrouk El-Attar,
• Structural engineer and author Roma Agrawal,
• Aerospace engineer Sophie Robinson 
• Spacecraft engineer Sian Cleaver
• Inventor Ruth Amos

For primary school children we have a guided reading activity (pdf) which also feature Shrouk, Roma, Sophie and Ruth along with three other engineers.

We hope that our resources can help children, especially girls, think about how the world around us is #enhancedbyengineering.