“As a women engineer, working in a field dominated by men for several centuries, we have to go that extra mile to prove ourselves. Once done, rest of the journey can be very profitable. I have worked in different countries, mixed with colleagues from different cultures and I have found that extremely satisfying.”

Early Days……………….choices framed

A Kolkata girl, I attended a school which is the first women school in whole India established and run by Indians.  After Higher secondary, I went to Bengal Engineering College at Shibpore, Howrah which was under the administration of Calcutta University at that time to study Civil Engineering. This is also a very old college – first engineering college established in India.  Both my parents were school teachers and supported me in my choice of a career. As far as education goes, after passing out from B.E.College, I also completed a Master’s degree in Civil Engineering from Jadavpur University. In both the colleges, girls were minority, only around 10-12% were girls. Surprisingly, that was much better than earlier when there were almost no girl students in Campus.

In my first job in a construction company, I was the first lady engineer. But there was no discrimination apparent and male colleagues were supportive, and never went overboard by being protective either. I was assigned the job of a site supervisor, which proves the fact that there was no gender based differentiation.

Work and Life…………balance works

Next I moved to Delhi, for family reasons, where I worked in designing highway structures, bridges, and subsequently moving to USA, continuing my work in design of building, and defence towers etc. From USA, I moved to UK, and I started working back in the field of highway engineering, mainly in design of new bridges.  Interestingly in UK, they have a very stringent inspection/maintenance regime for highway assets as most of the assets are quite old.  Lot of my work during this time involved assessment of old bridges, strengthening them to meet traffic- load that is much higher than they were originally designed for.  During this time I obtained professional membership and started to lead my own structural department. At some point I was involved in planning workload for Structural department in the North Eastern region offices.

But this required a lot of travel and I was planning to take a long leave due to arrival of my second child – so I decided to come back to family home at Kolkata after almost 13 years since we passed out from college so that I can manage both of my children who can be supervised by family while I am away at work.

Tryst with Energy Sector……………..scope unlimited

In Kolkata, I started working in the Oil and Gas sector company that was initially set up as an associate to extend help to offices in USA.  In all these years, the office has grown to be an independent unit, working with not only American but others like European, Canadian, Russian, and Singaporean companies, along with both North and South American offices – working for both upstream and downstream Energy Sector and in Mining and Metal as well.

Oil and Gas sector is a very unstable sector where commencement of projects or closure of projects frequently varies with the crude oil prices in international market. So, the companies have to be adaptive to these changes in the market, making it lean or thick depending on the market scenario. But no company would lose their capability if they have a choice. So even though market is flooding with engineers, core sector engineering companies are still in search for right kind of people to deliver the jobs.

When one thinks about it, a huge number of engineering students are going for either IT or Computer Science every year, to work in a field that is threatened by automation and where number of jobs are becoming lesser every single day. As a society, we need to provide this message to the young aspirants that taking up subjects like Civil or Mechanical engineering can also give them a fair pay as well as chances to visit other countries as well.

Future and Way Forward…………………equal opportunity

While staying in UK, I had worked as a women ambassador talking to school kids, working on projects with them – just to encourage them to take the Civil engineering as a profession later in their life. I also worked with engineers from different background and mentor them to progress towards professional membership/ chartered engineers.

Back in India, since there is no such shortage of Engineers, and women engineers too, I never felt any requirement to take up similar initiative. But in a recent survey in our company it was found that women are actually less than 20% of the total engineering workforce. There is a considerable gender gap in the engineering.

Hence, basically there is still a lot of scope to improve to include more number of  women engineers in the core industries. Company policies and guidelines need to evolve to help to increase women participation. I feel that the message needs to flow both ways – it definitely needs to go to the sector leaders who will recruit women as their future workforce and to the young girl students in schools, who would be motivated to become engineers, for a better career.

I was excited when I came to know about WEI, and their mission to promote women in Energy Sector. As a woman engineer, and having a long experience of working in core sector, I feel that women engineers like us can motivate and educate young students about engineering. We also need to bring forward positive role models as inspiration for engineering students.

Let us, all women Engineers of India, come together and work to craft a future path of equality and diversity, for engineering industries………………….

Author: Sumana Ghosh is a civil engineer by profession, working with a company in oil and gas sector.

@WEI