INWED 2020 – Katherine Phillips
Celebrating our female engineers
International Women in Engineering Day 2020 (INWED20) launches on the 23rd of June with the theme ‘Shape the World’. INWED, now in its seventh year, is a campaign that brings together engineers and their supporters from across the world, joining to raise awareness of the opportunities and achievements of women engineers.
At the AqualisBraemar group, which includes OWC, we wanted to take this opportunity to praise the excellent work our women engineers do across the globe and celebrate their efforts to shape our world into a better, safer, more innovative and exciting place to be.
Katherine Phillips
Katherine Phillips, OWC director and UK country manager, is a chartered civil engineer with extensive experience in design, construction and operation of offshore structures in the energy industry including proven technical, management and project management skills.
Reflecting on this year’s theme for International Women in Engineering Day, ‘Shaping the World’, it’s easy to see how this idea has influenced my career. I began working in the oil and gas sector and made the very definite choice to move to the offshore wind sector due to a desire to do something “good” for the world and contribute to the clean energy transition. This is something I have in common with a large number of my colleagues – almost all work in our industry because, like me, they really believe that they’re making a difference. Having a sense of purpose has really helped to motivate me – and so I try to make sure that everyone I work with has the opportunity to work towards something which matters to them. It’s something we’re all passionate about in AqualisBraemar with our passion for energy and our oceans as well as our commitment to the UN Global Compact.
Of course, it also wouldn’t be International Women in Engineering Day without also thinking about how making a difference to women’s careers can make a difference to ‘shaping the world’. I truly believe that by giving women and girls the opportunity to excel in engineering that we can develop a generation of female (and male) engineers who will have a positive impact on our society. As an industry, offshore wind is by no means the worst for gender balance and opportunity, but we still have a long way to go. We can all play our part in improving this, however large or small our actions are — whether it’s a supportive conversation with a young woman who’s thinking about a career in engineering or changing your company’s policies. I hope I lead by example and that the policies we’ve implemented at AqualisBraemar will have a positive impact on our team but also influence others to make changes too.
2020 has been a year of extraordinary challenges. Although our professional and personal lives have seen great upheaval, this is also a wonderful opportunity to make positive and lasting changes to the way we work — and indeed this is what we’re planning to do — from flexible working arrangements to a reduction in travel to reduce our carbon footprint. For me though, the biggest change of 2020 is the arrival of my son in May, so for the rest of the year I’ll be tackling an entirely different challenge (and making the most of AqualisBraemar’s maternity leave policy), but I hope to shape the world in a small way!
Whatever you’re doing on this rather strange International Women in Engineering Day I hope you’re all managing to ‘shape the world’ in your own way, however large or small.