When Dawn Bonfield, the former chief executive of the Women's Engineering Society, ran a stand recently at a big military air show, she was in for a shock. There were around 900 _ among the crowd and Ms Bonfield says, "I'm saying to all these girls, 'Do you know about engineering, would you like to be an engineer, have you thought about engineering?' And in the whole day... probably five or six of them said yes. Every other one said no, just straight out no." What surprised her most, she says, is that it wasn't that these eight and nine-year-old girls didn't know what engineering was. Simply that they had already switched off. They had lost interest in engineering. "So how much work does it take to change that?" asks Ms Bonfield. "I mean it's huge." There's no shortage of data to back up her estimation of the scale of work required. The latest figures from the Office for National Statistics show that women make up around just 8% of engineers in the UK. And this is at a time when the UK needs to produce thousands more engineers, so much so that the inventor, Sir James Dyson, is planning to open his own instituteto address the skills shortage. Not enough female role models is well documented as a reason why girls don't choose engineering. The attitude of parents was also an important factor in career choices. For girls, perhaps unsurprisingly, mothers were particularly influential. "My mum was a bit iffy about it at first because she was more like, 'Girls should do this and that and the other,' more like 'keep your posture up and be ladylike'," says middle school student Hannah. "But my dad used to build a lot of stuff and he got me into that. So after my mum saw how me and my dad interacted she said, 'Yeah, go for it' and she's kind of the one who supported me with this." What shocked Dawn Bonfield most?
There were so many girls at the show. Many girls had run off before seeing her. Girls didn't know anything about engineering. Girls paid no attention to engineering.