Is the industrial automation industry still a man's world? Yes, although it might seem that a lot has changed over the distance of the last few decades or even a dozen years, hard data shows something quite different.
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The industrial market, or being a bit more precise - the industrial automation sector has always been classified as a typically masculine universe. Does such a statement hold true today, in 2024?
According to a report by the Manufacturing Institute, women currently make up about 29 percent in the industrial automation sector. That's a rather modest number, especially considering that in the broader manufacturing industry they hold as much as 47 percent of all positions.
Different era, similar numbers
To better visualize what numbers we are talking about, however, in the context of some comparative analysis, we need to go all the way back to 1970, when women in the industrial automation industry accounted for... 27 percent of the total labor pool. So, as you can see from the attached example, the growth rate for more than half a century was really small.
It was. However, as experts in the industry believe, the situation regarding women and their presence in the labor market should already be changing dramatically. The decisive factor, in turn, is expected to be the exponential technological progress that is taking place before our eyes.
New opportunities
The digitization of production, the encroachment into more factories of intelligent robots and machines capable of streamlining a whole host of processes - this is just the tip of the iceberg. More technological innovations are appearing like mushrooms after the rain watered very effectively by artificial intelligence and machine learning solutions.
Today, industrial automation is no longer associated by anyone with motors soiled with grease, PLC screens that show little or safety sensors of questionable quality. The trend in recent years has been to work on specific data that should be turned into benefits. - Data is the new gold - Sebastian Lemieszek, who at Siemens is in charge of implementing new solutions in production plants, said in an interview with Automation Trader.
In his opinion, the automation process is one thing, but what we do with the data we have acquired as a result is a completely different tale. - If we have already managed to automate production and move from Industry 3.0 to Industry 4.0, we should have huge amounts of process data. And now, it is in the Industry 4.0 phase that we need to focus on the utilization of this data to achieve a tangible financial benefit - he added.
Jobs for everyone
And it's this progress and a whole palette of new opportunities that means the threshold for women to enter the industry will be firmly lowered. At the recent World Economic Forum, it was predicted that by 2026, as many as 75 million manufacturing jobs will be replaced by machines, and another 133 million jobs will be created just functioning in tandem with artificial intelligence and machines.
What does this mean for women? Less physical and energy-demanding work is an obvious gateway for this gender. Interestingly, women themselves are already beginning to see improvements in this regard.
The aforementioned report shows that as many as 58 percent of the ladies surveyed during the study confessed that positive changes in the attitude of the "industry" in general toward women as employees have been noticeable over the past five years.
- When I entered the industry, I was only 20 years old and the only woman on a team consisting of only white men in their 40s - confessed Omron's Wendy Tonks, quoted by the company's official blog.
- It took a good few years for her to be accepted. She had to work hard to gain confidence and show that I really am capable and have the right skills - she added.
Wendy Tonks today holds the position of chief systems test engineer at Omron. Today, as many as 25 percent in her department are already women. - This diverse team is something I really love. It all results in looking at things from different perspectives, which can be helpful in solving problems - she concluded.
The growth rate of women's presence in the industrial automation industry will therefore continue to increase, and all indications are that if we revisit this topic in a few years, we will already be operating on completely different numbers.
