‘Ann James has feathery red hair. Her voice and eyes are dark brown and she drives a scarlet Capri,’ read the Observer’s introduction to British female engineers on 31 January 1971. James was also a lubrication expert with a job ‘crawling round vast pieces of machinery’ – she was photographed examining a sewage plant.
The star of a government film hoping to encourage more girls into engineering, James was a perfect advert for her profession, with ‘my own home, a car and a good salary’. But she was also a rarity: only a tiny fraction of science and technology workers were female. Beyond the popular image of ‘women in greasy overalls with scarf-wrapped heads’, who were these technically minded unicorns?
Dr Elizabeth Laverick was a Fellow of the Institute of Physics and one of the UK’s most senior female engineers. She thought it would help if ‘Fathers paid more attention to their daughters to encourage them’. For Sally Craven, an mechanical engineer at ICI, who ‘copes with a husband, a house and a job’, that was just what happened. ‘My father is an engineer and he hasn’t got any sons; he was always going on at me to do science.’
How did they navigate this testosterone-heavy world? By managing male egos, mainly. ‘Never fall back on being a woman as an excuse,’ advised James. ‘You’ve got to fight a little bit harder to get on,’ said Peggy Hodges, a Fellow of the Royal Aeronautical Society, though ‘I try not to use the fact that I’m a woman as an advantage, as a weapon.’ Laverick cautioned against pomposity: ‘Men won’t allow it. I’m careful not to be domineering.’ ‘Slight and solemn’ Elizabeth Mount, working on the Barbican redevelopment, agreed, ‘I think a woman has to be extra tactful.’ It was working: the foreman had left a box of chocolates under her safety helmet recently.
They were all convinced more women could thrive in these macho, exacting environments. As Maria Wallis, an Imperial College student, said, ‘After all, engineering is living, isn’t it?’
