woman engineer
I’m in my 50s and a highly qualified, very experienced professional engineer. A few years ago I was job hunting and one company was initially very interested, I had two or three interviews with them, it was looking good etc. Then a few weeks later I was informed they had found someone more suitable. Well, these things happen. I didn’t think any more of it until recently, when I came across that “more suitable” person on a project. It’s a man, who retired nearly a decade ago (on a gold plated final salary pension), who although is an experienced engineer, it is only in one niche area, and he only has a few years background in my field I.e. at the time of the interview he would have had none, and hence it’s like dealing with a much more junior engineer. Needless to say, this makes me very angry, plus the situation reeks of boys club. Men like that who don’t properly retire when they can easily afford to also perpetuate the status quo and effectively bed-block my generation getting further up the ladder – including women like me who have now been fighting for decades to make even a bit of headway towards the top slots in various patriarchal companies… and they wonder why there’s few women engineers in managerial/board positions. To all those companies who block progress, just for once, try to understand how heartbreaking scenarios like this are.