In this year, the theme of the International Women’s Day, on March 8, is “Invest in women: Accelerate progress”. Achieving gender equality and women’s well-being in all aspects of life is more crucial than ever if we want to create prosperous economies and a healthy planet, states the United Nations on its website. Women’s economic empowerment is central to a gender equal world. When women are given equal opportunities to earn, learn, and lead – entire communities thrive.

Historically, women were widely excluded from engineering careers. But there were some women, who became engineer, a long time ago. One of the female engineer pioneers was Edith Clarke (1882 to 1959). She was an American electrical engineer inventing the Clarke calculator, a tool that facilitates electricity distribution over long-distance DC/AC high-voltage transmission lines. Ada Lovelace (1815 to 1852) was a British computer pioneer, developing algorithms to compute Bernoulli numbers for the Analytical Engine mechanical computer by Charles Babbage. She was by some means the first software engineer. Maria Telkes (1900 to 1995) born in Hungary made contributes to solar energy and energy storage.

Since those days, the number of women becoming engineers has increased. Nevertheless, there are still nowadays more male than female engineers. In 2022, the percentage of female has increased in one year from 13 percent to 14, 5 percent in UK. In USA, the percentage increased from 13 percent in 2019 to 17 percent in 2021. In Bulgaria, Latvia, Lithuania, and Portugal, there are about 50 percent of engineers women. In China, the female engineer rate is about 40 percent. This means, in many countries there is room for increasing the number of female engineers.

Let’s take a look to the mirror: CiA has two female engineers, Olga Fischer and Maryam Khaghani. This is 29 percent of the CiA engineering staff. The two women edit CiA specifications, support the CAN community with trainings and articles, etc. Unfortunately, the CiA community does not count many female engineers. When the CiA was founded in 1992, there were nearly no women participating in technical meetings. This has changed. Nowadays, we have in CiA technical groups an increasing number of women. One of the early ones is Heidrun Scheller working with Port Industrial Automation, a CiA member since 1992. She was active in CiA groups already in the early days of the CANopen higher-layer protocol development. She contributed especially to the CiA 402 profile specification for drives and motion controllers.

I hope, this trend goes on. One day (hopefully not that far in the future), the ratio between women and men becoming engineers is equal. Some countries already have achieved this goal (see above). By the way, February 11 is the International Day of Women and Girls in Science, which was adopted in 2015 by the United Nations General Assembly. From 2014, the International Women in Engineering Day is celebrated annually on June 23 around the world. It has been recognized by UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Culture Organization. Such events can be used as a trigger to invite girls and young women to become engineers.