HOW I GOT HERE
Chi Onwurah, Labour MP and shadow minister for industrial strategy, science and innovation, reflects on her journey through life
Chi Onwurah on her journey to shadow minister for industrial strategy, science and innovation
After growing up on a council estate in Newcastle, Chi Onwurah, 52, went on to study electrical engineering at Imperial College London. She graduated in 1987 and spent over 20 years working in a variety of jobs in STEM (science, technology, engineering and maths), including as head of telecoms technology at Ofcom. In 2010, she was elected as the MP for the Newcastle Central constituency. Here’s how she did it…
I KNEW I WANTED TO GO INTO SCIENCE FROM THE AGE OF SEVEN OR EIGHT.
I remember being told that because I was a girl, I wouldn’t be good at it. I was made to feel like I was a freak. But I was still determined; I wanted to know how the world worked and how to make it work better.
I WENT TO IMPERIAL TO STUDY ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING,
and in the last year of my degree I won sponsorship from the Canadian/ American company Northern Telecom, who then offered me a job as a graduate engineer. It was in this job that, aged about 23, I designed what was then the smallest double-sided ISDN board (part of the internet that allowed us to mix voice and data) in the world.
I DIDN’T KNOW WHAT TO EXPECT FROM THE WORLD OF WORK
because there was no support or women’s network. I remember wondering how I was supposed to dress. I had no idea because there were so few women role models.
I NEVER HAD A CAREER PLAN.
I moved around a lot; I was a hardware engineer, then a software engineer in Paris, then I worked in the US and then in Nigeria. I just wanted to try new and different things all the time; I never really kept still.
REMEMBER, YOU ALWAYS HAVE A RIGHT TO SPEAK.
I started out with the impression that everybody knew better than I did, and it was necessary to learn that that wasn’t true. I was once told that I didn’t seem very sure of myself. I was about 30 and had to rethink the assumptions I’d made about being arrogant. Since then, I’ve been on assertiveness training – I now have a reputation for being quite frank!
I EXPERIENCED SEXISM ALL THE TIME.
I was almost always the only woman in the room, and men took up all the speaking space. At conferences, I was assumed to be one of the hostesses. There was also a lot of sexist ‘banter’, which was difficult to deal with, but as I got older I became more able to challenge it.
‘THERE WERE SO FEW ROLE MODELS’
I GOT THE ROLE OF HEAD OF TELECOMS TECHNOLOGY BY PUTTING MYSELF OUT THERE.
I remember a boss of mine telling me to apply for jobs that I didn’t think I could do, rather than ones I did think I could do. So I applied for this role even though I hadn’t done anything like it before. I got it because I was confident enough to apply for something that was new to me.
ONE OF MY PROUDEST MOMENTS WAS ROLLING OUT THE FIRST MOBILE NETWORK IN NIGERIA
where my father lived. I was able to give him the first mobile phone in his town and the network that reached him a few weeks later.
I’D ALWAYS BEEN INTERESTED IN POLITICS AS WELL AS ENGINEERING.
I made the career shift because I realised I could design the best broadband network in the world, but unless people had the money to buy it and the skills to use it, it wouldn’t make a difference. So when I heard in 2010 that the MP who represented the part of Newcastle where I grew up was standing down, I put my name forward.