When Dr Jacqueline Thomas started her academic career in civil engineering a decade ago, she was one of just two full-time women in the school. Thomas had returned to Australia after a stint in Africa to teach a new humanitarian engineering major at the University of Sydney, the first of its kind in the country.
“It was crazy, it really took me by surprise,” she said. “When I started, I just thought, ‘great, I got the job, perfect’. And then I realised.”
In 2025 the percentage of female academics at the faculty is still languishing below 20%.
Hoping to correct systemic gender inequities facing the sector, the University of Sydney has launched its first engineering faculty recruitment drive to offer academic roles reserved for women.
Five schools are part of the campaign, including aerospace, mechanical and mechatronic engineering, civil engineering, computer science, and electrical and computer engineering, where between 12% and 17% of continuing academic staff are female.
Thomas, who has recently given birth to her second child, said “the greater diversity that we have within our teaching space demonstrates for our student cohort that these pathways are possible”.
“I think that’s really important, especially as I’m a mum. It hasn’t always been easy, and there’s definitely been moments where you have doubts … but I think it is important for female students to see those examples,” she said.
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Prof Renae Ryan, a biomedical engineer at Sydney University who directed the initiative, says it is one of the largest recruitment campaigns for women in the industry’s history.
“We want to reflect the society we serve,” she said.
“If you’re looking at universities and you go to information nights and there’s no women, you feel like an outsider. We want women to have role models and people that they can look up to and see themselves as engineers.”
Ryan, who is the associate dean of culture and community in the faculty of engineering, has been in the industry for more than two decades. She was previously the academic director of the university’s Science in Australia Gender Equity program.
She said that in medicine and biology, courses now often comprised 50% or more women at junior levels before dropping off at later study stages, but in engineering, numbers had been low “the whole way through”.
“When you’re the minority, in any industry, it can feel very isolating and lonely,” she said.
“Women can feel undervalued and disrespected at times as well, particularly in engineering and the automotive industry.
“You’ve just got additional barriers all the time to get over, and you don’t have the same opportunities as other people. You get overlooked.”
A Diversity Council Australia report released last year found just 14% of qualified engineers identify as female, and of those, only 4% were born in Australia.
The gender pay gap for women in engineering was 24% compared with 14% across all industries.
Ryan said the barriers began early on. Girls selected out of maths and science subjects, she said, even if they were good at them, due to “societal pressures and cultural norms”. But she said the idea men and women have different skill sets lending themselves to certain careers was “garbage”.
“There are some countries where the engineering workforce is actually more female dominated,” she said, pointing to Turkey, Iran and Egypt, where women constitute a significant and growing portion of the engineering workforce.
The implications of gender equity in the workforce aren’t just good optics, either. The history of invention is one in which our world has catered to the male body.
For instance, women are more likely to be moderately or seriously injured in car crashes, even when controlling for external factors like crash intensity, because vehicles were designed for men.
Car safety designs were modelled off car crash test dummies based on the “average” male and seatbelts were also fitted with a male body type in mind, which can lead to discomfort and serious safety concerns.
“We need women in the engineering workforce … because if we don’t have diversity in the people doing the work and designing these systems, we’re not getting the best out of the technology,” Ryan said.
“We’re not building it for everyone. We’re building it for select groups.”
• This article was amended on 29 July 2025. An earlier version conflated two separate findings when it said 11% of engineering students who identify as female go on to work in an engineering role. The finding that was meant to be used was that 14% of qualified engineers identify as female.
