As the world celebrates International Women's Day on 8 March, we must focus our attention on the ongoing need for more women in engineering and technology. The gender diversity of the engineering and technology workforce has grown by 6 percentage points in the last 11 years, with women now making up 16.5% of the 5.7 million working in these areas. But this is still woefully short of women's 48% presence in the overall workforce. A quick, back of the envelope calculation shows that there would be 1.8 million more women in engineering and technology if they were present at the same rate as overall UK employment. This highlights the scale of the gender imbalance. And I encourage you to take a moment, please, to imagine what a balanced workforce would look like, how its nature and qualities would change, and what it would be like to eliminate the current, very limiting skills shortages. So what would it take to make this vision a reality?
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