Professors head south

Womens’experiences during the Great War are to be at the centre of a conference involving Paisley academics.

Dubbed“Voices of Women in the Great War and its Aftermath”, the gathering has been organised by the Women’s History Network and will see University of the West of Scotland academics playing a key role in“The Emerging Voice of the Woman Engineer in WW1 and Post War Periods’”event.

The conference panel will examine some outstanding women engineers of the period who emerged from the war to become leaders in the movement that allowed women to be professional engineers.

The panellists include Professor Katherine Kirk and Professor Katarzyna Kosmala, both of UWS.

Professor Kosmala said:“Many women gained technical and professional engineering skills in WW1, some rising to positions of considerable responsibility, yet their contribution continues largely invisible.

“We are delighted that our multidisciplinary research collaboration with the Women’s Engineering Society will see the delivery of this timely conference panel.”

The Women’s Engineering Society was founded in 1919 by a group of women who had enjoyed engineering careers during the First World War.

Amongst its founding members was Dorothee Pullinger, a pioneering woman in engineering in Scotland, who had her initial engineering training at the Arrol Johnston car works in Paisley.

She went to work for Vickers munitions plant in Barrow-in-Furness in World War I and returned to design a car for women after the war, at Arrol Johnston’s new factories in Dumfries and Kirkcudbright. Her life story and career is the basis of UWS-led collaborative research initiative‘A Car For Women and Other Stories’.

Professor Kirk and Professor Kosmala are the lead researchers of this project.

The conference will take place at the Black Country Living Museum in Dudley on April 13 and 14.