Engineering - boys' toys or saving the planet?

Think of an engineer and what do you conjure up? Maybe you think 'lad down the local garage, greasy overalls, good with his hands, nice enough but without too many qualifications' … i.e. a car mechanic! But I hope not - if we're lucky and some of the education campaigns have worked, you'll be thinking "professional type, smart clothes, bright, with a degree, good 'people skills', doing an interesting, creative, high-tech job and earning a good salary".

However, how many of you will be seeing this engineer as a woman? Not a lot I'd guess - and it's certainly true that girls still form a minority (15%) of students going into engineering higher education. But why? Is it because many girls still think of engineering as very much cars, planes, perhaps computers - which may appeal to some girls but to others may be "boys' toys" or "techie" stuff - whereas what interests them are things to do with people or the environment? Does that mean engineering is not for them? Of course not!

Let's look at the role of engineers in disaster relief. One of the biggest problems is providing large numbers of refugees in camps with clean water. The equipment has to be cheap, and made from very basic, easily obtainable and transportable materials. It's got to be simple to install and operate, effective in reducing both biological and particulate contamination, and reliable. The engineers installing it have to be experienced in assessing the necessary capacity, flow rates, size of pumps, the best location and so on. They need to be able to train local staff to operate and maintain the system. They need to be sensitive to how the people in the local culture lead their daily lives - is fetching water a woman's job, for example, and what implications does that have? Aid organisations such as Oxfam employ some engineers full-time, but they also call on trained volunteer engineers, normally working for other companies, through schemes such as the Register of Engineers for Disaster Relief (RedR), to respond in cases of emergency. Other critical jobs might be in restoring water, gas or electricity supplies, as Women's Engineering Society (WES) member Jo Parker did in Sarajevo at the end of the Bosnian war, or providing temporary bridges - often done by the Army's Royal Engineers - where bombing has destroyed the highway infrastructure.

Development work is also crucial, especially trying to make this sustainable and appropriate. At the recent Johannesburg World Summit on sustainable development, one issue was alternative cooking fuels for impoverished populations, to stop the cutting down of forests, with the consequent loss of cover and animal habitat, soil erosion and so on, leading to even further impoverishment. Simple cooking pots making use of solar energy and the heat absorption and retention properties of basic materials have been designed by engineers, which, though they take a bit longer to cook the meal, do it at little cost and without using valuable trees or causing pollution.

Technology also has to be appropriate; there's no point installing a high-tech pump for which spare parts are too expensive or hard to get or where no local has the knowledge to fix it when it breaks down. A more robust, simpler device that can be looked after by the locals has a much greater chance of making a long-term difference. Even providing villages with just enough electricity to light one 40W bulb in each house for a few hours a day through a simple but reliable local electricity generating and distribution system can be a better investment than millions poured into a large centralised power station which the country cannot afford to keep running. Simple things like this lead to improvements in health and education, making further improvement in standards of living then achievable.

Helping people isn't restricted to the Third World though. Think about the engineering involved in medicine. Designing a respirator for premature babies with breathing difficulties is a challenge: you've got to get enough air into the lungs but if the flow rate is too high you can cause lung damage. Development of a successful artificial heart - essentially a very complex pump system- is only a recent achievement and is still fraught with problems. And imagine the joy of a patient with a neurological problem whose walking is vastly improved using equipment that provides electrical pulses to the nerves and stimulates the right muscles in the right order and at the correct time. Even at the - these days - more routine level of providing hip replacements there's work to be done improving materials or wear characteristics so the lifetime of the joint is extended and a second operation is not necessary later in life. To me, medical engineering is a really fascinating and exciting area and if I were starting my career again it is a direction I'd be tempted to take!

Even if you work in say the high-tech end of mobile telecommunications or satellite engineering, you could be helping with disaster relief. When there's an earthquake, communications frequently are disrupted and aid workers in the field cannot get information out about what emergency help is needed. Creating mobile telecommunications links based on a network of small cheap low-level satellites, accessible to field workers with portable battery or solar-powered equipment can enable rapid and effective action to be taken. But the work itself behind such devices is very technically advanced and challenging.

Even in those "techie" areas of cars and planes much attention is being paid to sustainability, while responding to our society's urge to travel ever faster and further. Car designers are not only working to improve fuel efficiency and cleanliness for conventional fuels but exploring alternatives - LPG and alcohol are already used widely in some countries, and electric cars are becoming more common and effective. Fuel cell technology is improving fast and will enable really clean car travel. Manufacturers are producing more and more re-usable or recyclable parts and materials in cars, and along with this comes the need to design new ways of fastening parts together so they can be easily disassembled and re-processed.

So girls (and lads too!) if you want to make a difference to the way the world is, whether it's by hi-tech means or just appropriate technology, then engineering can be for you. There are lots of challenges and lots of rewards - money, travel, responsibility … There's absolutely no reason you can't combine an engineering career with a family - many of my WES friends have children and Marianne, one of my students, brought up twins while doing her engineering degree! - or get to the top, like Dr Julia King who is Director of Rolls Royce's Engineering & Technology Marine division for example.