From sewerage and slaughter to safety and health

摘要

A woman's path towards a career in health and safety may be splashed with blood and worse. It may wind through pollution control, food safety or the laboratories that investigate the concerns of environmental health. But, increasingly, women are joining the vanguard of people making health and safety their first career of choice. Our experience at Principal People has been that 1 in 3 placements made by us over the past 18 months have been female. Yet when we examined our own database of candidates for this piece we found that 83 percent of the people on file were men. The Institution of Occupational Safety and Health membership reflects this ratio with women accounting for just 19 percent of its 26000 members. Ten years ago IOSH was a male bastion with only a 7 percent female membership; within 5 years the figure had doubled to 14 percent and the convergence seems to be ongoing.