The theme of this year’s International Women’s Day is “breaking down the bias” and working towards a world of complete gender equality.

According to an article on Imperial College London’s website, women make up only around 12% of the engineering and technology workforce in the UK, although on further reading this statistic is expected to rise, which is positive to see.

At Sentridge, we are following a more upward trend with women making up 20% of our team.

International Women’s Day provides the perfect opportunity for 2 of these team members to reflect on how they ended up with a career in the Electrical Engineering sector.

We begin with Andrea, our Technical Drives Specialist. Andrea tells us, “From a young age I was surrounded by male family members who have interests in Engineering, be it Mechanical, Electrical and a love of tinkering with Motorbikes.  This must have rubbed off on me, along with my love of problem solving, Engineering seemed to be the right direction for me. In my teens, I attended an all-girls school where a wonderful Physics teacher instilled into us girls, that we can do anything we want to including Engineering and the Sciences, this being the early 80’s was quite unusual.  So, Mr Jeffries inspired me to take the Electrical Engineering Career route via an Apprenticeship at GEC in Stoke on Trent.

The apprenticeship took me into many different areas of the Business, from manufacturing, design, sales, support and into service.”

Andrea continues, “Over the last 35 years I have helped to supply solutions into and learned about many industries such as Food & Bev, Water, Plastics, Recycling and HVAC just to name a few.  A really enjoyable part has been visiting factories just like Greg Wallace on “Inside the factory”.  It really makes you appreciate how products are manufactured and the incredible talent and innovation there is to create such processes.”

Andrea’s years of experience means she is well placed to understand the problems of our customers and help design solutions to improve efficiency and drive down energy costs.

Another linchpin within the business is Samantha Cahalin, our Operations Manager. Samantha has many roles within Sentridge, but her passion for learning and developing her knowledge of our products and services has led her to become our black-belt in making sure our engineers are where they need to be and fully informed of what work needs to be carried out.

Samantha explains how she hadn’t always planned a career within engineering, “I grew up with my Dad working in engineering and enjoyed a basic level of electrics at school, mainly circuits and boards in DT! However, reading and writing was always my forte and I ended up taking English Literature at University and then randomly ended up with a career in banking! After having my daughter 8 years ago I was looking for a change and started doing some admin at Sentridge where I very quickly started taking on more tasks and responsibility. I found myself keen to learn about the products we sold and the general infrastructure of the business. I love the fact that we are heavily focused on energy saving and strive to provide an excellent service to our customers for which we are often praised! If I was to do my time again, I would almost certainly focus more on the engineering side of things as I think it’s such a niche market for women and would really give me great leverage for my career.”

Follow the conversation on social media with #IWD2022 #breakthebias