Female industry specialists invited to join NCE’s New Voices list

Putting female role models in the spotlight is a key part of today’s International Women in Engineering Day, which is now an annual event, and NCE is relaunching an initiative to ensure women remain in that spotlight throughout the year.

NCE is inviting women engineers to put themselves forward to join its New Voices database as potential spokespeople on their specialist subject areas.

The New Voices concept was first developed by the BBC as part of its 50:50 project to improve gender balance in its content, which NCE has also been a part of for four years this month. NCE launched its own New Voices database in 2021 and received a great response but the search is on to broaden the topic areas covered by the database.

“We have a number of specialists who are our go-to people when it comes to comment in incidents and changes in the industry but many of those people are male,” said NCE editor Claire Smith. “There is nothing wrong with the comment our established contacts provide, but we want to be open to bringing more female voices into the conversation. The challenge is finding those women who are qualified to speak on a subject at short notice to meet our news deadlines. The aim of the list is to give the NCE team a list ready for when the need arises.”

Women with experience in any discipline are invited to join the list but Smith said that the topic area where new commentators are needed are bridges, dams, energy and tunnelling. “Specialists on the list will often be our go to contacts when there has been an engineering failure, such as a bridge collapse or train derailment, either for comment on the likely mechanism of failure or for guidance on how to cover the topic,” she explained. “For this reason, we are looking for senior engineers who have a number of years of experience that they can draw on to help NCE deliver insight into the engineering issues behind these stories.”

If you would like to put yourself forward to join the database, please send your contact details and information on your area of specialism to nceedit@emap.com

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