Engineering is for everyone
From electrical design to the development of more efficient manufacturing processes, female engineers are central to the efficacy and impact of XP Power’s teams in North America, Asia, and Europe. The role they play in solving our customers’ power problems is invaluable.
And yet engineering is still overwhelmingly a male-dominated profession, with women representing just 16.5% of all engineers. So what can we do to help level the playing field?
Encouraging collaborative engagement
The workplace environment plays a critical role. A 2016 study published in Harvard Business Review looked at how the culture of the engineering industry may be causing large numbers of women to leave the profession after years of study – with a loss of confidence in their abilities linked to being assigned less interesting roles on projects due to their gender.
“Women in the male-dominated fields often lack self-confidence and suffer from feelings of inferiority,” says Lisa Pamplona, a product validation engineer at XP Power in Singapore with more than 15 years of experience in power electronics.
“In a workplace where the great majority of employees are male, women often feel as they don’t fit in, which I felt when I was starting my career in the engineering sector. There was indirect discrimination, especially with work distribution. But I made myself be heard. I worked hard to build working relationships with the people I worked with, so we could accomplish tasks together and overcome any challenges that came our way.”
Collaboration and inclusion are key to our ethos at XP Power. We are committed to equal opportunity for engineering talent and the elimination of any form of discrimination wherever in the world you may be working for us. Women are key decision-makers in both our senior leadership team and our Board of Directors – and visible as leaders driving positive transformation across the business.
Modelling a more inclusive future
Sarah Mlundira, XP Power’s Head of Engineering Change, has seen first-hand how her female peers have been reluctant to pursue a career in a sector that involves hands-on practicality – what she calls the more “dirty jobs – where sometimes you have to go into a lab and get dirty holding the equipment”.
She took mechanical mathematics as a subject as school, at a time when most other girls she knew opted for statistics instead, because “they didn’t have a person who they could see in those mechanical places that were women. They didn’t have someone they could see within those areas who they could relate to.”
It’s why she feels positive role models for the female engineers of the future are critical. Visiting schools, raising the profile of what women can do within the sector, and mentoring new talent are all part of the process.
“Today,” Mlundira observes, “engineering is a thriving industry with a much wider range of specialisms and broad appeal across genders – particularly with the rapid technological transformation we have seen in recent years. Digitalisation has created a level playing field that enables women to find new opportunities in engineering.
“People like Satya Nadella from Microsoft, or Richard Branson – those people are creating new tools and going into space and doing exciting things, and why can’t women do it, as well?”
Come join us
From new graduates to experienced engineering positions, we have a wide range of technical roles available for talented individuals of any gender, so please check our careers pages for more information.