The Women in Engineering Leadership summit was held in Auckland yesterday (18 March 2015). I was honoured when Liquid Learning invited me to Chair the day. It was a great event with over 90 participants.

What an incredible group of inspiring speakers who have achieved awesome success around the globe and in NZ. As you can imagine, being mostly engineers, they were very passionate about building and doing stuff!

The tone of the day was extremely constructive and professional; and there were a lot of practical ‘take outs’ for participants to explore and use in their own careers.

There were so many great stories, lessons and insights that I can’t summarise it all. However, here is a wee snapshot …

Alison Andrew, Chief Executive Officer, Transpower – shared the story of her amazing career journey and the lessons she has learnt along the way, highlighting the value of sideways career moves, being open to opportunities that arise and ensuring you understand the context of issues that arise with people. A powerful start to the day with many key messages that resonated throughout the summit.

Nicki Crauford, Senior Consultant, WorleyParsons – presented some scary statistics about the lack of gender diversity in Engineering. Incredibly there is still a significant pay gap between male and female engineers with the same experience doing the same work!

Sulo Shanmuganathan, Chief Technical Officer, Opus International Consultants – outlined her story and some of the awesome projects she’s been involved in; Sulo also shared her learning, key insights, personal development journey and spoke of the need to be brave.

Debbie Scott, Principal Fire Engineer and Director, OnFire Consulting Ltd – juggling family commitments, volunteer work and building up a successful specialist consulting practise with offices in the Waikato and Auckland is no easy task, but Debbie has persevered and is still growing her business.

Elena Trout – Vice President, IPENZ, presented her perspectives and led a panel discussion about creating a positive workplace culture to unlock female potential.

A very interesting session with some good, bad and ugly stories about workplace culture – mostly good, I’m pleased to say!

On the ugly side – would you believe that one woman, when she became pregnant, had her boss effectively tell her to have an abortion if she was serious about keeping her career!? (not here in NZ thankfully) His treatment of her got worse too, but we won’t dwell on that as she is now working for a great company that genuinely supports its employees.

Panellists were:

• Kim Gilkison, Director – New Zealand Operations, Independent Technologies Ltd
• Tracey Hickman, General Manager – Generation, Genesis Energy
• Sharon Danks, Water Transmission Manager, Watercare
• Gemma Collins, National Building Services Manager, Fletcher Construction Company
• CDR Emma Grant, Commander Naval Specialist Training, Royal New Zealand Navy

Sue Bonham-Carter, Principal Mining Engineer, Golder Associates, another fascinating case study of a successful specialist consulting venture being run out of Nelson (and who wouldn’t want to live there!) with some great insights and lessons learnt.

Alice Chaplin, Associate Director – Energy, AECOM, a strong advocate for excellence and leadership in project delivery, Alice also spoke of the importance and value of mentoring – one of the consistent themes of the event.

Helen Ferner, Technical Director – Structural Engineering, Beca, spoke about authentic leadership and challenged some of our assumptions about what this means. She highlighted the importance of authentic leaders having a genuine passion for the work they do.

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More male business leaders need to attend this forum in future. They will gain a deeper appreciation and understanding of the very real challenges that women can face and the conscious and unconscious biases at play in companies.

I heard there had been research in which two identical CVs were presented to people, with the only difference being the name (one male and one female). The male was consistently chosen as the better candidate…. It is often not that people are intentionally biased, this is just an example of the unconscious biases that we need to challenge more.

Interestingly, I heard that story from the one man who attended the summit to learn and understand the issues … thanks Jay.

This post was originally published on LinkedIn 19th March. By Gillian Taylor