We Believe Girls Can Do It: Real STEM Inspiration

Last Tuesday, our team sat around a scratched table in a Manchester co-working space, reviewing applications for our latest workshop. Out of forty-three sign-ups, just nine were girls. We stared at the spreadsheet, and someone muttered what we were all thinking: “It’s 2024. How is this still the ratio?” That moment wasn’t just frustrating — it was personal. Between us, we’ve racked up decades of experience in labs, on construction sites, and inside engineering firms where being the only woman in the room stopped feeling novel and started feeling exhausting. We launched this site because we’re done waiting for the numbers to shift on their own. If you’ve ever wondered whether girls genuinely lack interest in engineering, or whether something far more complicated is at play, you’re asking the same questions that keep us working late into the evening.

Why We’re Still Talking About Girls in STEM in the UK

We wish this conversation felt outdated. It doesn’t. Walk into any secondary school careers fair and you’ll spot the pattern instantly: boys clustering around the robotics demonstrations while girls hover near the life sciences table. The divide isn’t accidental, and it isn’t innocent. Despite decades of initiatives, glossy campaigns, and well-meaning social media posts, the UK’s engineering workforce remains stubbornly male-dominated. Our team has spent years unpicking why, and the answer sits somewhere between cultural inertia, classroom dynamics, and a pipeline that leaks talent at every stage.

The Numbers That Keep Our Team Up at Night

Here’s the statistic we can’t shake: only 16.5% of UK engineers are women, according to EngineeringUK’s 2023 data. That figure hasn’t budged meaningfully in years. The WISE Campaign’s annual workforce statistics tell an equally sobering story — women make up just over a quarter of the core STEM workforce, with engineering and technology roles lagging far behind biological sciences. When we present these numbers at school assemblies, the girls look genuinely shocked. They assume the battle was won decades ago. It wasn’t. Every percentage point represents thousands of talented women who either never entered the field or left it early, and we refuse to accept that as inevitable.

Classroom to Boardroom: Where the Pipeline Leaks

The drop-off starts earlier than most people realise. By Year 9, many girls have already decided physics isn’t “for them,” despite performing equally well as boys in standardised tests. A-level choices narrow the pool further, and by university, engineering courses routinely enrol cohorts where women are outnumbered five to one. But the leak doesn’t stop at graduation. Our team has interviewed dozens of female graduates who entered engineering firms full of enthusiasm, only to leave within five years. The reasons they cite aren’t about competence — they’re about culture. Isolation, lack of flexible working, and the sheer exhaustion of constantly proving you belong wear people down.

Why ‘Pipeline’ Thinking Isn’t Enough Anymore

For years, the dominant metaphor was a pipeline: get more girls into the top, and eventually more women will emerge at the bottom. We’ve come to hate that framing. It suggests the problem is simply one of volume, when actually the pipe itself is riddled with holes. Fixing the gender gap requires more than recruitment drives — it demands we redesign the entire system. That means challenging how engineering is taught, who teaches it, and what workplace cultures await women when they arrive. We’re not interested in filling quotas. We’re interested in building an industry where women don’t just survive but thrive.

Women in Engineering Who Changed Our Thinking

When our team first started researching female engineers, we expected to find a handful of familiar names. What we discovered instead was a hidden history so rich it made us angry. Generations of brilliant women built bridges, designed engines, and solved problems that shaped modern Britain, yet their stories barely register in school curricula. Knowing these women existed — and seeing contemporary engineers reshape public perception in real time — fundamentally altered how we talk about STEM for girls.

Historical Heroes the Textbooks Skipped

Let us introduce you to Dame Sarah Guppy, a 19th-century inventor from Bristol whose name should be as familiar as Brunel’s. She patented a method for constructing safe piling foundations for bridges, designed a device to protect ships from barnacles, and contributed significantly to railway engineering — all while raising six children. Her patents were often filed under her husband’s name or simply ignored by the historical record. We learned about her almost by accident, buried in a footnote of a maritime history book. The more we dug, the more furious we became. How many other Sarah Guppys have been erased? How many girls might have chosen engineering if they’d seen her face in a textbook?

Engineers We Follow on LinkedIn and YouTube Right Now

Representation isn’t just historical — it’s happening in real time on platforms teenagers actually use. Dr. Shini Somara, a mechanical engineer and broadcaster, has done more to reshape public perception of what an engineer looks like than a hundred government campaigns. Her media presence — warm, rigorous, and utterly unapologetic about her expertise — reaches audiences who might never attend a university open day. Our team regularly shares her videos in workshops because they spark a reaction no pamphlet ever could: “Wait, she’s an engineer? She seems normal.” That moment of recognition matters more than we can quantify.

What We Learned from Interviewing Apprentices at BAE Systems

Last autumn, we spent a day talking to female apprentices at a BAE Systems facility in Lancashire. We expected to hear about technical skills and career progression. What we actually heard was about belonging. One nineteen-year-old told us she’d nearly dropped out of her college course because she was the only girl in her workshop. What kept her going was a female supervisor who pulled her aside during the first week and said, “I’ve been where you are. You’ll be fine.” That conversation lasted maybe five minutes, but it changed the trajectory of her career. Role models don’t need to be famous. They need to be present.

STEM for Girls That Actually Sticks: Our Team’s Honest Take

We’ve tested dozens of STEM kits, attended countless workshops, and watched hours of educational content marketed specifically to girls. Some of it is brilliant. Much of it is infuriating. The assumption that girls need pink microscopes, sparkly coding cards, or science experiments rebranded as “beauty chemistry” isn’t just condescending — it’s counterproductive. Our team has strong opinions about what actually works, and they’re backed by watching real girls engage with real challenges.

Why We Ditched the Glittery Science Kits

The “pink it and shrink it” approach to STEM toys treats girls as a marketing demographic rather than curious human beings. We’ve watched girls roll their eyes at kits that promise to teach them how to make lip gloss while their brothers build circuits. The problem isn’t glitter — it’s the assumption that girls won’t engage unless science is feminised. When we swapped gendered kits for open-ended problem-solving challenges, engagement transformed. Girls who’d been quiet and hesitant suddenly leaned forward, argued about design choices, and lost track of time. They didn’t need science made “pretty.” They needed it made meaningful.

Coding Clubs, Robotics and the Raspberry Pi Foundation Effect

The Raspberry Pi Foundation, based in Cambridge, has quietly built one of the most effective interventions in the UK’s gender gap. Their network of coding clubs actively works to create environments where girls feel genuinely welcome, not just tolerated. We’ve visited clubs in Leeds, Cardiff, and Glasgow, and the difference is palpable: female mentors, collaborative projects, and a culture that treats computing as creative rather than purely technical. The girls we spoke to didn’t describe themselves as “future engineers” — they described themselves as people who liked making things. That language matters. The Foundation’s approach proves that when you design for inclusion from the ground up, girls show up and stay.

How Parents and Teachers Sabotage (Without Meaning To)

This is the uncomfortable part. We’ve watched well-intentioned parents steer daughters away from engineering because they worry it’s “too dirty” or “too male-dominated.” We’ve heard teachers praise boys for being “clever” while praising girls for being “conscientious.” These micro-messages accumulate. A girl who’s told she’s helpful rather than brilliant learns to doubt her intellectual horsepower. The London Science Museum’s Wonderlab runs hands-on workshops that deliberately counteract this dynamic, putting girls in charge of open-ended experiments where there’s no single right answer. The relief on their faces when nobody hovers, corrects, or “helps” them is something every educator should witness.

Role Models Aren’t Posters — They’re Conversations

We’ve lost count of how many schools display posters of female scientists and call the job done. Visibility matters, but alone it’s hollow. A girl staring at a portrait of Marie Curie feels nothing like the girl sitting across a table from a living, breathing engineer who asks about her interests and actually listens to the answer. Our team has spent years observing what happens when role models stop being images and start being relationships.

From Instagram Scroll to Coffee Chat: Making It Personal

Social media has democratised inspiration. A teenager can scroll through engineers’ Instagram accounts, watch YouTube explainers, and feel a flicker of possibility. But the jump from passive consumption to active identification requires something more. We’ve seen it happen when a girl gets thirty minutes alone with a female engineer — just enough time to ask the questions she’d never voice in a group: “Did you ever feel like an imposter? Do you have a family? Is the work actually interesting?” Those conversations can’t be scaled, but they can be replicated. Every coffee chat, every school visit, every informal Q&A plants a seed that algorithms can’t reach.

The Stemettes Method We’ve Seen Work First-Hand

Stemettes, the UK-wide social enterprise, has built something remarkable. Their hackathons — running across Birmingham, Manchester, and London — don’t just teach coding. They create temporary communities where girls collaborate, compete, and see themselves reflected in every mentor and organiser. We’ve attended their events as observers and come away as converts. The energy in the room is unlike anything we’ve seen in traditional classroom settings. Girls who arrived shy and uncertain leave clutching prototypes and swapping phone numbers. The Stemettes method proves that mentorship works best when it’s intensive, in-person, and designed around genuine connection rather than box-ticking.

Finding a Mentor in the NHS, Not Just Silicon Roundabout

When people think STEM mentors, they picture tech entrepreneurs in Shoreditch or engineers in hard hats. But some of the most accessible role models work in the NHS. The Scientist Training Programme places trainees in disciplines from genomics to clinical engineering, and many of those trainees are women eager to share their experiences. We’ve connected girls with NHS mentors who talk about saving lives rather than shipping products, and the impact is striking. For teenagers who care deeply about making a difference, hearing a woman describe how she calibrates radiotherapy equipment or diagnoses rare diseases opens a door they didn’t know existed.

Our Team’s Pledge and What You Can Actually Do This Week

Inspirational content is easy. Action is harder. We’re making a public commitment to move beyond words, and we’re inviting you to join us with specific, achievable steps that don’t require a massive time investment or a policy change. Small actions, repeated consistently, shift cultures.

One Email You Can Send Right Now

Open your inbox and think of a curious teenager you know — a niece, a neighbour’s daughter, a family friend. Now forward them a profile from the Royal Academy of Engineering’s “This is Engineering” campaign. These short, vivid videos feature real engineers doing unexpected things, from designing rollercoasters to developing sustainable food packaging. Add a single line: “Thought you might find this interesting.” No pressure, no lecture, just a door left slightly ajar. We’ve done this dozens of times, and the responses — “I didn’t know engineers did that” — remind us how narrow the public imagination remains.

UK Organisations We Trust With Your Time and Money

If you’re able to donate, we recommend the UK charity Girls Who Code, which runs free clubs teaching programming in supportive, girl-centred environments. If you’d rather give time, volunteer with the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s Code Club network — they provide training and resources, and you don’t need to be a professional developer to make a difference. For those in a position to nominate, the IET Young Woman Engineer of the Year Awards represent one of the most prestigious recognition programmes in the country. Putting forward a deserving colleague costs you an hour of paperwork and could transform her career visibility overnight. We’ve compiled a fuller list of vetted organisations on our resources page, but these three are where we’d start.

The Uncomfortable Question We Ask Ourselves Every Month

At our team meetings, we close with a question that makes everyone squirm: “What did you actually do about the gender gap this month?” Not read about it, not tweeted about it — did. Sometimes the answer is “not enough.” We sit with that discomfort rather than rushing past it. The question works because it refuses to let us off the hook. We’d encourage you to adopt it, in whatever form suits your context. Systemic change doesn’t arrive through inspiration alone. It arrives through thousands of small, consistent interventions — the forwarded profile, the nomination submitted, the conversation started in a staff room.

We believe girls can do it. But believing isn’t enough. The UK’s engineering future depends on all of us treating this gap not as a sad statistic to be lamented, but as a solvable problem to be attacked with urgency and hope. Let’s get to work.

FAQ

Why are there still so few women in UK engineering?

The 16.5% figure reflects decades of cultural messaging, classroom dynamics that subtly discourage girls from technical subjects, and workplace cultures that often fail to retain the women who do enter the field. It’s not a pipeline problem — it’s a systemic one that requires changes at every level, from primary school teaching to boardroom policies.

Who was Dame Sarah Guppy and why does she matter?

Dame Sarah Guppy was a 19th-century inventor from Bristol who patented bridge construction methods and contributed to railway engineering at a time when women were largely excluded from formal scientific institutions. Her story matters because it challenges the assumption that women are newcomers to engineering — they’ve been here all along, often written out of the history we teach.

How can I find a female STEM mentor for my daughter?

Start with Stemettes, which runs regular hackathons and mentoring events across major UK cities. The NHS Scientist Training Programme also offers opportunities to connect with female mentors in clinical and engineering disciplines. For a lower-commitment introduction, the Royal Academy of Engineering’s “This is Engineering” campaign features profiles of working engineers that can spark conversations.

Are coding clubs like the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s really effective for girls?

Yes, and the evidence is in the retention rates. The Raspberry Pi Foundation’s clubs prioritise female mentors, collaborative projects, and creative applications of computing — all factors that research shows increase girls’ sustained engagement. Our team has visited multiple clubs and observed girls who initially lacked confidence become enthusiastic, skilled participants within weeks.

What’s the IET Young Woman Engineer of the Year Award?

It’s one of the UK’s most prestigious recognition programmes for early-career female engineers, run by the Institution of Engineering and Technology. The award spotlights exceptional talent and provides winners with a platform to inspire the next generation. Nominating a deserving colleague is a concrete action anyone in the industry can take to amplify women’s visibility.