Electrifying Women: Understanding the Long History of Women in Engineering.

This project promotes public awareness of women's historical participation in engineering so as to support the UK's Women's Engineering Society (WES) centenary commemorations in 2019. We aim especially to support the WES centenary programme theme of 'Remembering the Past'. The WES centenary comes at a time when recruitment of women to engineering positions in the UK is exceptionally challenging, with women only constituting 11% of UK engineers, compared to 47% on average for other professions, and associated challenges in diversity. This situation is exacerbated by the remarkably resilient - yet inaccurate view - that women's place in engineering has no real historically-embedded position. So like WES we will deploy stories of women's past work in engineering to help normalise the expectation that women today can also become professional engineers for a full career, working against unhelpful myths that women have been systematically excluded from engineering in the past. Our project will complement WES's centenary activities by focusing upon women's participation in engineering well prior to WES's foundation, and the long-term ramifications thereof into the WES era, in activities that draw upon the PI's AHRB/AHRC supported outputs Domesticating Electricity (2008), and co-authored Patently Contestable (2013). We thus aim to i) enhance public understanding of women active in British engineering before WES's foundation in 1919, and indeed before World War 1 ii)show how WES's role in promoting women in engineering drew significantly upon that 'pre-history' iii) highlight how women's historic work in engineering becomes more visible if we reject individualist myths that it was accomplished only by individual (male) heroes iv) show the value of longer term historical evidence in addressing the current concern about UK women's comparatively low participation rate in engineering: in redeeming this situation there is in fact a long tradition of women's participation to build upon, rather than any new ground to break. Our primary activity will be a series of lectures across the UK followed by discussion and with audiences. This will raise awareness of women working in pre-First World War engineering using stories from Domesticating Electricity's exploration of spousal support roles, especially Alice Gordon, contrasted with Caroline Haslett as an example of an independent engineer. These lectures will take place in museums, libraries, universities, and Heritage Open Days. Our second major activity will be to create an 'Electrifying Women' blog and social media profile which will be at the heart of a social media campaign run by project members. Blog posts will highlight both particular cameos of other women working in electrical engineering before WES Our third activity, inspired by our previous collaboration with the IET and WES, is to organise with a professional Wikimedian (Alice White) dedicated wikithons to create, enhance and promote pages for the women involved in engineering before the rise of the Women's Engineering Society. Our fourth activity is to run creative writing sessions as follow-up events for lectures, with audiences enabled thereby to explore fresh ways of bringing to life the rarely documented work of engineering spouses e.g. through fictional diaries that extrapolate from extant fragmentary sources. Our fifth activity is to set up a project website of resources and links to help meet all the objectives outlined above to facilitate further engagement in creative activities that can promote better historical understanding among a wide-range of audiences both inside academia and in the wider public sphere. Our sixth activity will be to support a group of Theatre and Performance Students at the University of Leeds in producing a musical theatre production titled 'Electrifying Women', devised using our project materials. A recording of the performance will be shared on Youtube.