Who Gets to Shape the System?
Each year, International Women in Engineering Day (23 June) offers an opportunity to celebrate the achievements of women engineers. But International Women in Engineering Day isn’t just about celebrating individuals – though there are plenty worth recognising. It’s also a chance to ask bigger questions:
Who gets to call themselves an engineer? Who decides what problems are worth solving? Who benefits from the systems we build?
Dame Caroline Haslett’s story is a good starting point. She trained as an electrical engineer in the early 20th century, at a time when women were expected to return to domestic life after wartime work.
She didn’t.
Instead, she co-founded the Women’s Engineering Society and later led the Electrical Association for Women. But her goal wasn’t just to get women into workshops; it was to redesign how technology fits into society.
Dame Caroline pushed for electric appliances in homes because she saw how electrification could free up time and labour, and how those benefits weren’t being distributed equally. She wasn’t just working on devices or infrastructure. She was working on the system as a whole.
Why does that still matter?
Engineering today still tends to focus on the hard problems: precision, speed, performance, innovation. That’s all valid. But systems don’t exist in a vacuum. From public transport networks to energy grids to smart homes and wearable technology, they’re designed by people and they shape how others live.
In the words of Steve Jobs; “You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work backward to the technology. You can’t start with the technology then try to figure out where to sell it.”
Dame Caroline’s legacy is a reminder that engineering isn’t just about invention. It’s about impact. And impact isn’t neutral. The values, assumptions, and lived experience of the engineer end up embedded in the system whether it’s a city’s charging infrastructure or an AI model’s decision-making logic.