Engineering gender diversity: Take a step towards success at UTP

Creating awareness of opportunities, offering mentoring and support, and having the infrastructure in place to allow women to return to work after starting a family can go a long way towards narrowing the gender gap in the engineering profession.
“On my first trip offshore, I was the only woman on a CAT3 barge of over 200 men – and the prettiest one on board,” Hani Zahira Zaharudin recalls. Though the 26-year old project engineer’s anecdote is laced with humor, it reflects the more serious reality of the gender gap prevalent in the engineering profession.
Women engineers working in Malaysia’s oil and gas industry and abroad are emphatic about their field being male-dominated and point to the many challenges that exist.
“I’d be lying if I were to say my gender has never been an obstacle or a challenge. I can never really run away from the conscious or unconscious bias towards women engineers,” says Zahira, a project engineer with Sarawak Shell Bhd.