As part of the Women in Aviation & Aerospace Charter’s Meet the Signatories series, members of the Charter explain why they joined the Charter, and what steps they have since taken to ensure the inclusion of women in the sectors.
Next in the series, we talk to Leonardo:
Please name your organisation and explain what it does in the aviation or aerospace industry
Leonardo is one of the UK’s leading aerospace companies and one of biggest suppliers of defence and security equipment to the UK MoD, making a £2bn contribution to the UK economy annually, around 50% of which is in export.
The company employees more than 7,500 highly-skilled people across 7 major UK sites from its end-to-end helicopter facilities in Yeovil to its dedicated radar centre of excellence in Edinburgh leading the sensor development for the UK’s next generation Combat Air System. Committed to the UK’s future prosperity, Leonardo has over 400 young people at any one time developing in-demand skills through their placements, apprenticeships and graduate schemes.
Why did you join the Women in Aviation & Aerospace Charter?
Leonardo is proud to be among the first to sign up and pledge our support for improving gender balance across our Industry.
We are committed to creating a better gender balance within Leonardo and have the full support of our Senior Leadership Team in making this happen. We are putting pace into our programme to attract more women, to support and develop the women who already work at Leonardo and to create a pipeline of talent for the future. This is all within the context of our wider actions to reflect the full diversity of the populations in which we operate, across gender, sexuality, race and ethnicity and socio-economic background.
Dr Carol Marsh OBE is Deputy Head of Electronics Engineering in Leonardo and past President of the Women’s Engineering Society:
“Leonardo supports all the activities I do to promote engineering to women, from sponsoring events I’ve launched, like the Female Engineering Student Conferences, to hosting female only events in the workplace. We really are committed to creating a more diverse workplace.”
What steps are your organisation now taking to help improve gender balance in the industry?
Starting with attraction, we have been actively engaged with events at schools, colleges and universities for many years to increase the appetite for roles in our Industry and have seen many more females joining our placement, apprenticeship and graduate schemes in recent times. We have calculated that well over 100,000 children across the UK have had the opportunity to engage with our STEM activities and we are exerting a great deal of focus on how we can adapt our STEM offering most effectively to a post Covid environment. To celebrate International Women in Engineering Day we hold UK wide events for girls in their final year of Primary School, in which their teachers take an active role.
With the arrival of the pandemic, we found a means of moving many of our STEM activities online, housing them on our ‘STEM@Home’ pages which offer quality STEM activities to capture the imagination of students, parents and teachers so they could maintain their interest in STEM and a wider awareness of careers in this field. This platform has proved to be a valuable channel through which our female engineers have communicated the story of their passion for engineering and the motivation and inspiration they draw from this field to engage and inspire the next generation of female engineers. They have told the stories of how they became interested in engineering and the individual career paths they took to become engineers offering practical insights into why they find the profession so exciting and engaging.
As part of our vision to attain gender balance across our organisation, we are in the early stages of initiating ‘AeroWomen21’, a new Leonardo led women’s network formed in collaboration with the Royal Aeronautical Society, which aims to support and inspire current and future generations of women working in the aerospace industry.
Once with us, we welcome and support all of our employees to perform at their best, offering mentoring, development and opportunities to join our active employee Network Groups: Carers, Gender Balance and Pride.
We have recently released our new Custom Working Guide which offers all of our employees flexibility in the way they work as a team and ensures we are proactive in maintaining inclusivity especially in the current climate. We understand that feeling connected is more important than ever right now and are happy to talk about flexibility to any new job applicant.
We offer accelerated development through our innovative ‘Succeed to Lead’ talent programme which invites any employee to apply for a place on the initiative and allows them to explore their potential to the full. Through this talent programme our female participants benefit from a tailored curriculum targeting their needs for their next career move.
Women working within our organisation have been actively supported in their efforts to empower and engage the next generation of female engineers and the quality of their work in the community has led to several of our female engineers being presented with the IET Young Woman Engineer of the Year Awards, and being named in the Women in Engineering’s top 100 engineers in the UK. Several of our female engineers are members, Past President, or on the Young members board of the Women’s Engineering Society and we greatly value our connection to this organisation as our active members share their insights and experiences to inform our forward path of STEM engagement.
Finally, we strengthen public awareness of female role models in engineering by publicising their achievements in the Press and the Media so that they can inspire current and future generations of engineers. We feel this is especially important during the current pandemic in order to encourage the aspirations of young people who are facing additional challenges in positively visualising their future careers.