Each June, we celebrate International Women in Engineering Day here in the UK, recognising women's inspiring and ground-breaking work in this largely male-dominated field. Well, we firmly believe women in engineering should be celebrated always, so we recently spoke to Pamela Hardie, ISS’s Key Account Portfolio Director for Technical Services..
An ambitious powerhouse in her field, she worked her way up the engineering ladder from Apprentice to Regional Manager in just six years and has been with ISS for over two decades. Here she shares a little about her background, the challenges she’s faced along the way, and her hopes for future female engineers.
The Only Female Apprentice
Pamela encountered a fair amount of opposition to her desire to follow in the footsteps of her electrician father and grow her career in a technical field.
“I took technical studies at school, and I was actually told I shouldn't go ahead and learn a trade because I wasn't confident enough about the tools we were using in class. I was talked out of it for a more academic route, to be more like my sister. I ended up doing a lot of subjects like her and felt like I was sort of becoming a clone! She’s successful and has a degree, but I wanted to take a different route,” she says.
At 17, Pamela enrolled in the same apprenticeship at the same company as her brother.
“I was the only female on the tools in the company, and I was the only one on the college course as well. We had to stay away six weeks at a time at the college and it was pretty tough. But it was (also) a good time, and I made some real friends,” she smiles.
Pamela successfully completed her four-year apprenticeship, with plenty of support and encouragement from both her father and brother, even though she worried her sibling would “hate having his little sister in college” with him!
She remained with the same company and stayed ‘on the tools’ for a number of years before making a move. Throughout this time, she continued to be the only female working outside the office.
“I was really determined to prove everybody wrong. Many people thought I wouldn't be able to do it, that I'd quit in the first week or be on the tools for a month and I'd be off doing something else. I was a rebel - I just wanted to do something completely different and get in amongst a male industry and push the agenda.”
A Move Into Management
In speaking to Pamela, her ambition and determination is evident. This is reflected in what she did after working onsite.
“I used my apprenticeship as a stepping stone as I’d always wanted to become a contract manager, like my father. I wanted to be the first female contract manager, well, the first female everything within the company, really!” she laughs.
“I’d expressed an interest in becoming a manager and at the time, the woman that worked distributing the jobs went off sick leave. My manager asked me if I'd like to step in to get used to the office environment,” she explains.
“I found that really invaluable because I learned how the business worked, especially as I got to complete a lot of quotes and things like that. I used it as a springboard to keep moving up in the company.”
After being in that role for a year, the business underwent some changes and they were looking for managers to oversee employees. That was when Pamela landed her first management job.
In this role, she managed an all-male team, including the tradespeople she’d worked alongside while on the tools.
“Obviously there was one or two who wanted to write me off but overall, they were actually incredibly supportive. I built up a close relationship with many people, and they wanted to see me do well,” she explains.
But the contracts manager role wasn’t her end goal. After a year, she applied for the regional manager’s position and secured it successfully, once again the only woman at that level.
“That was a tough one to manage. I think many of my peers I’d worked alongside at the management level wanted the role for themselves and thought, as a man, they're more qualified than I am to get it.”
To cope with that, Pamela says she focused on doing her job as well as she could, aiming to manage as reasonably as possible. She was lucky to also have her manager as good support, as well as her father to ‘sound off to’.
Challenges Aplenty
Pamela is well used to being a lone woman, having been one at every stage of her apprenticeship and engineering career. And of course, with that comes some challenges.
During her apprenticeship she says, “It was just a group of young boys (and me). Every day I had doubts, thinking that I couldn't do it. I'd often go home frustrated because of my experiences.”
“But I did have my dad as a sounding board … he’d mentored other apprentices within the same business and I think he knew that I was as good, if not better than the others. It had nothing to do with gender … he always believed in me and pushed me on. My biggest reason for completing my apprenticeship was my father, honestly.”
Role models make a real difference, for as the saying goes, ‘seeing is believing’. But for Pamela, she had none, from lecturers to working onsite to upper management.
“I didn’t have any female mentors to look up to ... and it’s not something I thought about until I had children. When I had my two young girls, I thought, ‘No, I don't want them to struggle the way I did’.
And then of course there is the juggle of motherhood and work, as along with her twin daughters, she also has a son.
“Women take on most of the childcare duties, so many of the men I was working with would stay away all week and then go home at the weekends with everything done for them. But I was trying to run a house, look after kids and work full time. It was tough.”
“When I went off on maternity leave for four or five months to have my son, I came back and we’d changed over to ISS. It was a whole new company with completely different contracts to deal with. I found it hard to adjust to coming back to work. But I did have the support of a colleague who helped me through and brought me up to speed,” she says.
Pamela also had support at home, with her mum helping with childcare.
“I knew the kids were fine. I wasn't leaving them at nursery or with strangers, so I was lucky I had my mum. I was phoning her every 10 minutes the first day or so, though!” she laughs.
The second time she returned from a more extended maternity leave with her twins was more challenging.
“It gets tougher the older they get, (particularly) when I'm missing out on things like school plays, especially if I'm travelling. I try to be at as much as I can but you've got to sacrifice some things.”
Looking To The Future
Not content with her current achievements, Pamela wants to make a difference for the next generation of women in engineering.
“At the moment in mobile engineering, we've got about 250 engineers and two of them are women. Part of my role is looking at taking on women in apprenticeships to try and increase the diversity within the team,” she explains.
“ISS is focused on gender balance and improving it across the industry. I think they are leading the way with lots of great activity around returning to work from maternity leave and implementing a proper return-to-work process, as well as ‘keeping in touch days’, where you're coming into the office to get back into the swing of things.”
We hope you enjoyed learning about Pamela’s journey as a female engineer. You might also like to read Chelva Nava and KatParson’s stories, two more highly successful and inspiring UK female engineers.
