The ICE Connects: Women in Fellowship network gathered across the globe in the lead to International Women in Engineering Day.
“As women we really need to be supporting each other,” said ICE Fellow Melinda Lutton at one of the latest ICE Connects: Women in Fellowship network events.
ICE Connects works to encourage women and other underrepresented groups to become ICE Fellows, the highest grade of membership offered by the ICE.
The network gathered women across the globe for two events on Thursday 20 June 2024, in the run up to International Women in Engineering Day (INWED) on 23 June.
Lutton, assistant operations manager and principal civil engineer at Tonkin, participated in a women in leadership webinar held by Fellows around the world.
The second event was a spotlight on resilience, where an expert panel discussed the subject in several contexts at the ICE’s HQ, One Great George Street in London.
ICE Fellow Roni Savage, who was on the panel, said: “The coming together of women with vast experience of working in the industry (...) getting the understanding that resilience is thinking about the future and not just short term has been really insightful.”
Encouraging women’s participation at a high-level
The women in leadership webinar saw Fellows attend from all over the globe. Lutton, who tuned in from Australia, was joined by:
- Smita Sawdadkar, delivery head at AtkinsRéalis in India
- Anne Kerr, global head – cities at Mott MacDonald in Hong Kong
- Jennifer Stables, associate director at AECOM in Qatar
- Isabel Coman, director of engineering and asset strategy at Transport for London in the UK
Coman highlighted the need for representation of women and diversity across leadership.
She noted the benefits of becoming an ICE Fellow, saying: “Not only is it a recognition of leadership and expertise, but it enables you to be a part of policy work and influencing within the wider engineering context, which is really important.”
Stables encouraged attendees to participate in driving things forward: “There are three main areas in our professional lives where we can make changes to influence things; our projects, organisations and the industry as a whole.”
’Saying yes to opportunities’
“The collective experiences matter,” Sawdadkar explained.
To illustrate how people can champion each other, she added: “Mentorship is about talking with someone that you trust, who can provide you with valuable insights from their experiences.”
Sharing her path to senior leadership, Kerr said: “Saying yes to opportunities and saying yes to finding fascination in everything I was asked to do helped tremendously.”
Jennifer Stables agreed, noting that you’ll only regret the things you don’t do, not the things you do.
Spotlight on resilience
The panel debate on resilience was hosted by infrastructure journalist Antony Oliver, and brought together the following experts:
- Janet Young CBE, ICE director general and secretary
- Rachel Skinner CBE, ICE Past President and executive director of WSP in the UK
- Roni Savage, CEO of Jomas Associates
- Juliet Mian, director of infrastructure resilience at Arup
The panel examined resilience in three strands: infrastructure, industry and personal.
Infrastructure resilience
Providing critical services to communities, infrastructure is a crucial part of everyday life.
Oliver said: “We can’t afford, as a nation, to fail by having the wrong infrastructure, or having infrastructure that doesn’t meet the needs of the present and the future.
We also can’t afford for our businesses to fail; we therefore need to make sure that the people who actually sit behind these businesses are also succeeding and are resilient to the changes happening all around.”
Infrastructure resilience provides a foundation to achieve sustainable development over time.
Reinforcing the need for infrastructure resilience to be taken seriously, Young said: “We need consistency and long-term thinking around our infrastructure planning”.
Industry resilience
The pressures brought about from, for example, changing client demands require infrastructure professionals to react quickly.
The panel made it clear that engaging civil and infrastructure engineers at the earliest stages of decision-making provides real scope for best practice and genuine, positive changes. Adaptation is consistently needed.
Looking more broadly than resilience in the context of climate change impacts, the panel considered the topic of artificial intelligence (AI) and its impacts on the profession.
There was a balance of caution and optimism around the changes that AI will bring, but agreement that – like it or not – it’s here to stay, so the profession must be agile.
Sustainable careers in the modern workplace
Juliet Mian encouraged hope for the future, saying: “Our young engineers are so passionate and engaged about tackling these issues; they are driving us on.”
To ensure that careers in engineering remain attractive to the best and brightest talent, it’s important to consider how the pressures of the modern workplace and lifestyles are changing.
“We need to make sure that we are attracting enough of the right range of all sorts of different people, and all sorts of different skills whilst ensuring that we are then doing everything we can to retain them,” said Skinner.
Personal resilience
When asked to draw on their own experiences of building personal resilience, the panel touched on the challenges that ‘wearing multiple hats’ can bring, and the importance of looking after other people.
“Lean into the things you can do the most with,” Mian said, regarding infrastructure itself, as well as professional or personal experiences.
Young reflected that her biggest takeaway was about personal resilience and the importance of really looking after your own wellbeing and putting yourself first no matter how difficult that might seem.
The ICE Connects: Women in Fellowship network
The ICE Connects: Women in Fellowship network was established on INWED 2021 to encourage others to learn from the shared experiences of female Fellows.
It seeks to motivate more women to become Fellows, but also connect those who already are.
Since the network began, there’s been a 40% increase of female Fellows at the ICE.
The network continues to celebrate and encourage connection among women, while encouraging experts to engage on matters of interest to all working across the infrastructure leadership spectrum.
Find out more about becoming an ICE Fellow.
