Wed, 27 June, 2018
International Women in Engineering Day took place on Saturday, 23 June and was celebrated by The Tipper Group with a special event on 25 June at TWI’s headquarters near Cambridge.
This event was initiated by the Women in Engineering Society (WES) to promote women in engineering in the UK and internationally. This year marked the 99th year of WES and 100 years since women were given the right to vote in the UK, while 2018 has also been announced as the Year of Engineering by the UK government. This year, The Tipper Group and the National Structural Integrity Centre (NSIRC) decided to theme this event around promoting professional registration (CEng, IEng) with the support of The Welding Institute.
There was a great deal of interest from staff and students, who were keen to learn how they could broaden their career prospects and network. To this end, several professionals signed up as mentors to help guide and support their peers, while also achieving the aims of their continuing professional development. The Tipper Group has emphasised that they could provide support and advice for staff from TWI, the Innovation Centre and NSIRC students on the registration process together with The Welding Institute.
The Tipper Group was formed in 2016 and has held a series of inspirational talks and events since then to encourage and support women in engineering. While the group has a focus on supporting diversity and inclusion and offers networking, peer support and mentoring, the group also focuses on issues such as returning from a career break (e.g. parental leave) and aids professional development, raises the awareness of unconscious bias and also partakes in the TWI education outreach programme to promote STEM (science, technology, engineering and maths) activities and subjects in schools.
The Tipper Group takes its name from Constance Tipper, a Cambridge fracture engineer who investigated the wartime Liberty ship failures. It was through this work that she became the first person to define the ductile–brittle transition curve to identify the temperature at which a metal becomes prone to shattering (brittle) under load, rather than deforming (ductile).
For more information, please contact us.
About The Tipper Group
Tipper Group Committee