The UK has spent years getting more women into engineering, and it’s working: more are entering than ever. But the profession keeps losing them. 57% of women leave the engineering register before they turn 45; for men, it’s 17%. On average, women leave at 43, men at 60. In a single year, 66,000 women aged 35 to 64 left the field (EngineeringUK, 2024).
This isn’t a mid-career wobble, and it isn’t a confidence gap. If it were simply the career stage, the men alongside them would be leaving at the same rate. They’re not. It’s structural – and the reasons are remarkably consistent wherever you look.
Women in UK tech name lack of progression first, then too little recognition and unequal pay (Lovelace Report, 2025). The most thorough study of women who’ve actually left engineering – US, and now about a decade old – found the same drivers: workplace culture and a lack of advancement, not family (Fouad et al., 2017). More recently, the Women’s Engineering Society reported UK women leaving after 35 because they feel undervalued, with unsustainable demands and a culture that drives them out (WES, 2024). Different countries, a decade apart, tech and engineering alike: the reasons converge.
It’s tempting to file this under fairness. It’s cheaper to treat it as what it is: a workforce problem. The UK is already short of engineers, with 76% of employers saying they can’t fill key roles (IET, 2025). Losing experienced women on top of that is lost capability you have already paid to build.
And it is paid for twice. Replacing one mid-career professional typically costs 100-150% of their salary; Oxford Economics puts the average UK replacement cost at over £30,000 per employee. Once to lose her, again to replace her, before you count the expertise that walks out with her.
The barriers aren’t about capability. They’re about culture, recognition, and the behaviour of the managers closest to the problem. That’s also where the leverage sits: Gallup finds managers account for 70% of the variance in team engagement, the single biggest factor in whether your best people stay or go.
And the same study of women who stayed in engineering found they stayed for the reasons anyone does: their employers invested in them, recognised them, and gave them a path forward.
That is a fixable problem. It’s the one I work on.
