Our Women’s Pilot Project is dedicated to supporting women in academia, who work in the broad electronic systems space.
Our flagship Women’s Pilot Project has been co-designed with the women it aims to support.
It aims to build a strong and supportive peer community of practice.
We hope to create opportunities for professional growth and support women working in this environment.
The pilot is also designed to close the funding gap.
“Underrepresentation of women in the engineering and physical sciences remains one of EPSRC’s largest equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) challenges, and is a well-known issue in the engineering and physical sciences community, with gender diversity in our large grant portfolio an area of particular concern.”
-ESPRC
Our pilot cohort is undertaking 1:1 career coaching with an expert careers coach, who specialises in supporting C-suite and industry leaders.
Designed to provide bespoke guidance for individuals, our coaching series has helped the participants to navigate career and workplace challenges, identify paths forward, reframe issues, and enhance their career trajectories.
The coaching program is set to run throughout 2024–2025, with each participant receiving four individual coaching sessions.
A key offer within Women’s Pilot are intensive multi-day writing retreats, designed to address one of the EPSRC’s most pressing EDI challenges: the underrepresentation of women applying for grants in engineering and physical sciences research.
Our first retreat was held in Co. Fermanagh in January 2025, with the long-term goal of increasing the participation of women project leads in EPSRC’s research grant portfolio; and boosting the number of applications submitted by women for larger grants.
This pilot retreat fostered a supportive and collaborative environment, allowing participants to focus on their own proposal writing, as well as engaging in meaningful peer interactions and structured experiences, curated to foster new research collaborations.
Watch our short video for some of our retreat participants’ feedback.
This initial meeting of the Women’s Pilot project scoped the support gaps existing for women working in electronic systems research; and began to co-design potential impactful solutions to these. It also enabled the participants to get to know each other; and provided facilitated networking session to share each other’s’ research interests and ambitions.
Our leadership development workshop (January 2024) was delivered by Fiona Reith and designed to support participants to gain clarity and direction in their professional and personal lives, and develop agency to change their trajectories.
The two-day intensive workshop provided a structured platform for the attendees to explore challenges, delve deeper into career motivations, align values with research, and develop actionable strategies for growth.
If you’re interested in getting involved, please contact Natalie Magill at natalie.magill@qub.ac.uk.
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