We Are Power Podcast
The We Are PoWEr podcast spotlights voices and perspectives that need to be heard. Our weekly podcast, with listeners in over 60 countries, delivers PoWErful conversations that inspire, challenge, and empower... from personal life stories to business insights and leadership lessons.
We share diverse experiences, bold discussions, and real solutions. Whether you're looking for career advice, topical themes, or stories of resilience and success - this is where voices spark change.
We Are Power Podcast
Being Scared and Doing it Anyway with Dr Beth Barnes
2024 Northern Power Women Awards Future Lister, Dr Beth Barnes shares her journey into the world of engineering.
From her accidental discovery of civil engineering to her dedication to building inclusive spaces, Dr. Barnes provides valuable insights for listeners from all walks of life.
And find out how she founded the Durham Women's Engineering Society to create a safe space for women to discuss challenges and support each other.
Listen to learn:
- How we can create inclusive spaces within engineering
- The role of representation and mentorship in retaining women in engineering
- How to cope with feelings of 'mum guilt'
- Dr Beth's advice to her younger self
Find out more about We Are PoWEr here. 💫
Hello and welcome to the we Are Power podcast Northern Power Women podcast. For your career and your life, no matter what business you're in, hello and welcome to the we Are Power podcast. And this podcast is all about highlighting the brilliant role models we have in and from the North, getting them on board to have a wee chat about their personal or professional stories and hoping to pass on some of those top tips, advice, guidance, strategies, hacks, whatever it may be, that will help you, whether it be your career, your life, whatever your adventure that you are on. And this week I'm very excited to introduce Dr Beth Barnes, who is Assistant Professor at Durham University, academic Lead for Durham's University Women's Engineering Society and 2024 Northern Power Women Awards Future Lister, beth.
Speaker 1:Dr Beth Beth, welcome to the podcast. Thank you for having me, and we were just chatting before, weren't we? And so there was a recent report, which is the Engineering UK report. We know that women make up less than 20% of the engineering sector and highlighted very recently in an Engineering UK report which has seen the number drop from 16.5 to 15.7% of women in engineering, and I think that equates to something like 38,000.
Speaker 2:Wow it feels like we're going backwards Nightmare. Yeah, it's really, really disappointing to see, you know, having joined the engineering sector back in 2009, when I started started at university to have only seen it go increased by about six and a half percent in that in that kind of 14 year period is not a great increase anyway and now to see it slipping backwards again and to find that we're actually having a massive retention issue. So we're finding that women in the 35 to 44 age category are now not stopping in engineering, and that ties up with the professional registration councils as well that are seeing that women who have spent a long time getting chartered, becoming a chartered engineer, are then not actually sticking with industry anyway. They're deciding to leave. So there is a huge retention issue.
Speaker 1:And that is going to have a massive effect. Isn't it on the? The wider inequality across the sector, isn't it? If we're particularly that age group, that 35 to 44? We talk about attraction at the start, but that's massively going to impact, isn't it, across the whole sector.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we've been making some real gains at kind of the entry point. So, you know, at university and in some ways for apprenticeships, we are starting to see more women coming through the pipeline. But if that pipeline's leaky and they leave like kind of leave halfway down, and then for me, looking forwards now, if there's no role models, if there's very few women who are kind of getting up to those senior levels and smashing the glass ceiling, then that's really difficult to kind of look for inspiration and know which pathway I might be able to take and can I do this or can I do that or how do I do that? There's, you know, there's not necessarily someone to ask how do you do something.
Speaker 1:And where did you start? Who were your role models as you entered the world of engineering and then into civil engineering and now assistant professor at Durham?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I always describe myself as an accidental civil engineer. So I I wish I could say, oh, I really wanted to be an engineer all my life. I did, from a young age, have a fascination with my dad's cement mixer. I used to spend so much time, anything I could put in the cement mixer, put my hard hat on and we'd mix it up. But then that kind of fell into the distant past. And when I was looking for university didn't.
Speaker 2:At that point I didn't really realize there was other options. So it was do your A-levels, go to university. And I'd done maths, chemistry, physics, so you know, very science and maths based. I thought I was just going to go and do a straight science degree. I thought I was going to do something like chemistry.
Speaker 2:And I kept sitting in these talks and thinking, gosh, this looks really dull, this is not what I want to do. And my partner, who's now actually my husband we went to Edinburgh together to do the open day and he said oh, I'm going to go and sit in this civil engineering talk have you got anything to go to? At the same time and I was like, oh no, I don't, I'll just come and sit with you. And it was like my eureka moment. I was like, oh no, I don't, I'll just come and sit with you. And it was like my eureka moment. I was like, oh, this is what I've been looking for. It's got the maths, it's got the science, but it's also quite hands on, it's vocational. I can see how I'll be applying my skills to a real world problem. So yeah, I always term myself this accidental civil engineer, because had I not gone to that talk, I probably wouldn't have found it.
Speaker 1:It. Had I not gone to that talk, I probably wouldn't have found it.
Speaker 2:It's all literally about being at the right place at the right time. And then how did you sort of transition into your, the role that you've got now? So I did a four-year degree, so I left university with a master's in engineering and had done a few summer placements so I got a job. I went into industry based on those summer placements but I just didn't really find the right fit. I had three jobs in three years, which I'm not ashamed of, you know.
Speaker 2:I knew when a job was not right for me and you know when I wasn't developing and I needed something new and I went and found it. And I always say that to my students. Now it's not something to be ashamed of. You know. In the past it was you get a job, you stay in this job. Not something to be ashamed of, you know. In the past it was you get a job, you stay in this job. Um, whereas now I think we have so much more flexibility and can kind of identify for ourselves. You know this isn't right for me and I'm gonna look for something different.
Speaker 2:So, yeah, I spent three years in industry, um, I gained a lot of skills, but I just didn't feel like it fit it. Just it wasn't kind of challenging me enough. So I decided I want to do a PhD. So I decided, you know, for some mad reason, I wanted to go and study again. So in 2016, I went back to university to start studying for my PhD and then, leading on from that, I ended up thinking do you know what? I don't want to go back to industry right now. I want to try and give it a crack at being an educator myself.
Speaker 1:So kind of went down the academic pathway and talk to us about your research, because you work now around in a. This is this blows my mind, so I'm gonna have to read this out but you deal around inequalities in computational models of city-scale evacuations during emergency scenarios. What does that mean? Obviously it's around emergency scenario planning, but what does it mean?
Speaker 2:Okay. So when we have a hazard or a disaster, we don't know how people are going to react. So one way that we can test how people might react is to do what's known as a real life simulation. And you'll have seen them on the news where the police and the ambulance they kind of say, right, we're going to pretend that the tubes crashed, and then we're going to have these hundred people and they're going to have X injuries, and then we're going to have these hundred people and they're going to have X injuries and we're testing the blue light response and how do they deal with that scenario, which is brilliant because our emergency personnel know exactly what to do. But it's really really expensive, really time consuming, so we can only kind of do one a year if we're lucky.
Speaker 2:The other option is to do what's known as a tabletop scenario. So you kind of work through going. You can do option A, b or C, you choose one of them and then you can do option A, b and C and you kind of see what happens as you go through. It's a bit like role play, which again is a way of testing the emergency response, but you've got no real people involved in that. So what my work is about is creating these computer models which allow us to make lots and lots of changes really quickly, really easily, without a huge cost implication, and we can then make sure that that population that's included is actually representative. So you know, we are taking into account ethnicity, we're taking into account sex, we're taking into account mobility and we're actually making sure we can see what happens. What if people aren't compliant? What if people don't want to do what the police say? What effect does that have? And so we can try and test lots and lots of different outcomes.
Speaker 1:My gosh. I mean I'm working on some of those scenarios. If this equals this, then that happens. Then go here. That sounds. It sounds pretty stressful. How, how can? How do you sort of come outside of your work environment and not take that with you because it must be constantly in your head as your scenario plan? How do you switch off from that?
Speaker 2:well, I mean, I have two small children so they take a lot of time and you know, they know if you're not paying attention fully. You know, even this morning my little boy was like mummy, put your phone down, I'm talking to you. I was like, okay, I'll do as I'm told, um, so yeah, they are a really good way to to kind of help me switch off and kind of focus on. You know, they're so good at finding the joy in the world and reminding you of like the little things. You know they're always there to tell you they've seen an aeroplane in the sky or there's a ladybird on the floor.
Speaker 1:And you know, sometimes we just forget about those as adults, to just really relish those little moments, and we talk a lot don't we about, oh, having it all and work-life balance, and recently we've been kind of a sort of more alluding to sort of like harmony as opposed to work-life balance, because I think a balance is always going to shift one way or another. There's me trying to say that to an engineer. Anyway, I'm at my comfort zone now, but how, what? What advice do you do you have out there, um, to you know, working parents in, whether they be in academia or engineering or whatever sector. To be honest, what? What is that balance other than listen, listen to your son or listen to your voice.
Speaker 2:I mean, I think part of it is about picking your battles and kind of going do you know, what does it matter if the house is spotlessly clean?
Speaker 2:No, you know, we've also decided to kind of outsource some things. So you know, I couldn't survive each week if the cleaner didn't come and clean for us. You know that would take another couple of hours out of my week, which I just don't have, and I think actually we should shout out a little bit more about that. You know, I don't have it all, because other people are helping me with some of the bits I can't do for myself. And I think there's a lot around mum guilt and kind of, as you know, as a parent or a carer, feeling guilty about having to use kind of after school clubs and breakfast clubs. But actually my little boy absolutely loves them and my little girl loves nursery and they're absolutely thriving from it and they get to do things that you know I don't have the time or capacity to do with them, and and that's really wonderful and that should be celebrated as well.
Speaker 1:And going back to sort of your work at Durham. One of the things that you've done is actually you set up the, the Durham Women's Engineering Society, and you're also co-chair of the Tees and Tyneside Women in Engineering Society cluster. Why did you do this? I know we've talked about numbers and statistics, but why did you decide that? You know what I'm going to do this.
Speaker 2:When I moved to Durham, there was something missing and it was this sense of community. And what we found in our very, very first year was suddenly people were able to have conversations and it was like a really safe space to ask really like honest and open questions. You know, people could say but how do you have a family and a career as an engineer? Or how do you manage the menopause? Or you know, how do you manage being chronically ill and working as an engineer? And they never had that space before to ask difficult and honest questions and get a real answer from a real person. And so I just really wanted to create that space for them. And it's nice now that it's evolved into we've got a little committee and you know they're all so supportive of each other and oh, I'll help you with this. And oh, you've got the application. Can I read over it? And it's just really nice to see how supportive and inclusive it is.
Speaker 1:And you talked and we talked earlier, didn't we, about the statistics around the Engineering UK report. What do you think are the opportunities through both your sort of societies, if you like, and the clusters that you're part of? What do you think are the opportunities that are ahead that can try and help, or look at some of that retention issues?
Speaker 2:I think a lot of it now has to rely on allies. Like you know, it can't just be the women in the room doing this. You know we've been doing this for a long time, as have other marginalized groups, and actually what to get a real step change now? You know, we really need some allyship and to kind of get some big people and big names and companies to go. Do you know what? We're going to try? Something really radical, we're going to do something really different. We're going to look at this leaky pipeline and we're going to ask the questions and we're going to have these difficult conversations and work out what can we do, how can we retain these women?
Speaker 2:You know, is it a child care and a flexible working issue? Um, is it money? Is it progress? You know, is it mentors? Like you know, I think mentorship has a a real place within this conversation. There's not enough people ahead of me to ask to be mentors. The female professor in our department is trying to mentor all the young women and the young women academics are in the department and she's only got so much capacity. So we kind of need more mentors and more allies within that mentor space as well.
Speaker 1:I couldn't agree more, I don't think, you know, I think that the mentors, especially within your sector, it's it's trying to really unearth, even if they're sort of not in your area or region. It's it's kind of trying to find more, isn't it? And I think the allyship advocacy beat is is something we've. We launched our advocacy list last year, or this year, shall I say, alongside the power in the future list, and it's interesting, I always think, gosh, why we've always talked about northern power, women being all genders. So I don't know why we didn't do it earlier, but for me, it's about how do we really make that more? It's action orientated as opposed to.
Speaker 1:You know, I was six dollars for the pin badge, you know it's about doing things and like, like you said, to your point, it's it's different things. Different things will work for different people, won't they? There's no, there's no one size fits or solution. What are you most proud of? Uh, within the society, um, that that you've seen over the years, or something that's like really stood out to you, that go, oh, my gosh, that would not have happened. Or I'm so proud that we did this because this happened.
Speaker 2:I think probably some of the like the, the bigger. Like once a year we try and do a bigger event, so that involves like career speed networking, and this year we did a panel discussion as well. Um, and the panel discussion particularly was really really honest and raw and open and it was just wonderful to see you know that I'd brought in 14 external speakers and then our students and for everyone to sit there and listen to this panel and I felt like it just resonated with everybody. You know, everyone could take something away from the panel, whether you're young, old, male, female, it didn't matter. There was something that you could pick out and kind of think, oh wow, that's really wonderful. You know, I want to do more of like that, or aren't they amazing for persevering when things were difficult, and that was just really wonderful to kind of see it come whole circle and everyone takes something away from the room.
Speaker 1:I'm a big fan of that. Oh so we always talk about our tote bag moment. You know what is that phrase. What's that? Some people? They'll come out with something like, oh my goodness, that needs to be on a t-shirt or a tote bag. What do you really hope to achieve? Have you set yourself any sort of personal kind of goals or objectives through the wider work you're doing? So you've got your societies, you've got your work within the university, but this is really key for you promoting that equality, diversity and inclusion, both across engineering and academia. Two for one there, dr Beth.
Speaker 2:So yeah, so I do. I am on a research grant at the minute and we are looking at EDI interventions within the energy industry. So we've created like a bespoke fellow program where they come and do our training for about six months and then they do an individual research project where they're then targeting putting in some sort of tangible intervention within their workplace or higher education institution to then hopefully see some impact of it. And I think that's going to be the foundation, hopefully, of where my career goes forwards, because I think this will give us a really good kind of like toolkit, a list of things that have worked really well that we can then hopefully not only put in across the energy industry but also hopefully expand to the wider engineering kind of sector and kind of say look, we've got these case studies, this really worked well at retention and this really worked well with apprenticeships, and I really hope that this will drive forward some more impactful change, but on a much wider scale. I love that that's.
Speaker 1:It's true, knowledge, knowledge. There isn't it? That knowledge exchange, and it's in its all forms. So everything you're doing here in the future is going to be so transferable. And finally, what is that one piece of advice that you would give to your younger self, your younger engineer, your younger Beth, who didn't go into that lecture theatre that one day to listen about civil engineering, who was maybe a bit unsure as to what to do?
Speaker 2:next or where to go. I mean, I think I would say to myself you know, look at how far you'll come. You know, I wasn't a massively confident person at kind of 17, 18 years old, and I really came out of my shell at university. I kind of discovered my voice and kind of what I wanted to use it for, and I think that's it about being scared of things but doing it anyway. You know, feeling the fear and going, I'm going to really harness this power of being scared of something and put it into doing something good and doing something amazing and and that's okay. And actually it challenges me to feel scared of things and to do things that are new and different.
Speaker 1:Absolutely Every day coming out of your comfort zone in one way, shape or form, or you know all of those things, beth. Dr Beth, thank you so much for joining me on this podcast this week. So many top tips, so much advice and guidance.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much. Thank you so much for having me. I've really enjoyed it.
Speaker 1:Oh and thanks all of you for listening. I know we get so many messages from you going oh my goodness, that advice was great. How can we get involved what we can we do? So I hope this inspires or motivates you to to make change, take action, come out your comfort zone, as dr beth said, um, and thank you so much. Please stay connected on all of our socials Facebook and LinkedIn, we are power. Tiktok, instagram and Twitter we are power. Underscore net. Thank you so much for joining me. My name is Simone. This is the we are power podcast. A work goes on media production.
