The Women’s Engineering Society (WES) has launched its search to find the 2021 Top 50 Women in Engineering. As in previous years, the competition will follow a public nominations process from which the top 50 will be selected.

This year’s theme is ‘Engineering Heroes’ to celebrate the best, brightest and bravest women in engineering, “who recognise a problem, then dare to be part of the solution, who undertake everyday ‘heroics’ as much as emergency ones”. 

In 2020-21 engineers around the world have played a major role in protecting and defending communities from the Covid-19 pandemic. At the same time, the extraordinary public health crisis has brought into sharp focus how engineers also deliver and maintain critical services and infrastructure, keep civic society functioning at every level, and support lives and livelihoods. Not forgetting either, those engineers who also undertake world-leading research and innovation to tackle the long-term, structural global challenges of our time, especially climate change.

Full details of the criteria nominees will need to satisfy for the 2021 Top 50 Women in Engineering awards can be found on WE50 web page at www.wes.org.uk/we50.

Nominations should focus on the criteria and any other reasons why the nominee, who can self-nominate, should be considered. Nominees do not have to meet all criteria. The aim is to be inclusive and to highlight and celebrate women who have gone beyond what is expected in the sector or discipline of engineering and allied sciences, technology and mathematics.

Nominations close at noon on Monday 8 March 2021, International Women’s Day. The awards will be presented at a virtual ceremony on 23 June 2021 in tandem with the WES annual global campaign International Women in Engineering Day (INWED).