Getting her wheels in motion

By ANGELA McCARTHY

For Nikki Cox, 43, there was never any doubt that she would choose a practical career: "I was the sort of kid that would pull my bike apart and try and put it together again."

Now a telecommunications and IT engineering consultant, Cox has spent 20 years in the field. Her day might start with customer questions regarding a staff training programme and the evolution of a new system. Then there might be cabling to organise, and examination of some new switches that have a different operating system to ones already installed.

There might be a call to make to find out why another engineer is not on-site installing software as scheduled, and a re-assessment on a project schedule.

Yet Cox is still in a minority. The numbers of female practising engineers in New Zealand registered with main industry body Engineers New Zealand sit at 5.7 per cent.

At the University of Auckland, 20 per cent of engineering students are female; in 1992 that figure was just 12 per cent.

To lift the profile of engineering among young women, the university runs an annual show-and-tell Enginuity Day. This year's event, in mid-April, saw more than 300 girls register to attend from schools in Northland, Auckland, Waikato, Bay of Plenty, Hawkes Bay, Gisborne and Taranaki.

But it's about more than numbers, says Lorraine Evening, the university's equal educational opportunities manager.

"By not attracting more bright females into the profession," she says, "engineering is missing out on 50 per cent of New Zealand's potential talent pool, which adds up to a huge loss of talent."

The females who take the plunge do well. The most popular engineering fields with women at Auckland's university are engineering science, chemical and materials engineering and environmental engineering.

In 2001 - the latest year for which figures are available - the overall engineering pass rate was 90 per cent. Women averaged 91 per cent and men 89.6 per cent.

Evening says women enrich the profession by offering alternative ways of viewing problems.

They are also better at lateralthinking and multi-tasking, and have superior verbal and managerial strengths. "All these skills," she says, "complement those of their male colleagues."

Stereotypes about engineering being a guy's game hold many young women back, which is why Enginuity Day is so important, says Evening.

Competenz, the New Zealand Engineering Food and Manufacturing Industry Training Organisation, reports that just 15.3 per cent of its trainees are female. It is now preparing a strategy to target women.

Megan Tibby was won over to engineering after attending an Enginuity Day in 1997. "My mother was horrified, but it really appealed," she says. "I wanted a career that involved maths and physics as well as working with people."

With a civil engineering degree behind her, Tibby is working as a transportation engineer for Sinclair, Knight and Merz, where there are seven females among the 112 staff engineers.

The 23-year-old's job includes creating computer models of road networks, general traffic engineering, public consultation, technical presentations and project management.

Around 70 per cent of her work involves report writing and discussions: "There is also lots of creativity in engineering, something I hadn't realised."

Nikki Cox did a four-year technical engineering apprenticeship with the civil service in Britain, which then sponsored her through an electrical and electronic engineering degree.

As the first female apprentice in that area there were barriers, but she feels people are now more aware of women's engineering abilities.

Cox has enjoyed a varied career, her jobs including converting mechanical knitting machines to computerised control, design engineering, project management and project engineering.

Since she became a consultant nine years ago, she has frequently worked overseas, and this month heads off for one year to work with the Bank of Thailand.

"IT and telecommuncations are really converging now," she says. "Look at internet banking, and bank branch networking."

A speaker at the recent Enginuity Day, Cox believes it's important to promote engineering to young women: "A woman with talent, drive and motivation will have a lot to give engineering and science."

Bachelor of electrical and electronic engineering graduate Nivi Sivapalan, 22, is in her second year at Vodafone, and says she has always "liked clean lines, maths and the technical side of things."

She is fascinated by telecommunications. "To pick up a cell phone and make a call is so painless, yet so much goes on between those two phones."