Girl technicians for engineering

Abstract

This picture shows a part of the training centre at Joseph Lucas, the Birmingham‐based engineering group. This is the grinding section; it is only one section, and then not the largest section, within this training centre. I have seen engineering training workshops the world over; you'd have a long way to go to beat this one. One thing that marks it out as unusual is the number of girl trainees about the place; another is the remarkably high calibre of the girl entrants. Although under training in a craft training centre these girls are not training as craftswomen: they are girl technician trainees and, as such, they are extremely rare. Britain has 250 000 technicians in its engineering industry and of these, only 3 000, or about one per cent, are women and even these are concentrated in certain specialised branches of the industry, particularly in electronics. Clearly, this situation is unsatisfactory. In 1976 the Engineering Industry Training Board decided to mount a limited investigation into the problems of bringing girls into the industry at the technician level. It decided that the best way was to have a go itself to recruit and train girl technicians or, at least, to play the major role in such an exercise, and study what happens. That is how these girls came to be in the Lucas Training Centre.

Citation

WELLENS, J. (1977), "Girl technicians for engineering", Industrial and Commercial Training, Vol. 9 No. 3, pp. 105-111. https://doi.org/10.1108/eb003597