Girl Power ‘rewrites’ the Brunel legend with £62,000 grant funding
GWR engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel and his father Marc Brunel have long been immortalised as iconic figures of Victorian engineering.
Isambard also had an older sister, Sophia, who was said to be a promising engineer in her own right, but because of general attitudes towards women which prevailed in her day and indeed for long afterwards, she was at the time was dismissed by figures such as Lord Armstrong as “Brunel in petticoats.”
Accordingly, she was never given the opportunity to become an engineer in her own right.
Sophia’s much-downplayed talents will now be placed centre stage by the Brunel Museum in Rotherhithe in a new programme to support young women in engineering, following a £62,000 grant from the Esmée Fairbairn Collections Fund.
The museum’s project, ‘Sophia’s Story,’ is aimed at overturning the male domination of engineering; just 12% of engineers are women.
Its plan is to develop engagement with young women and girls aged under 15 both within and outside school settings using a collection of engineering drawings,
The museum said that instead of encouraging young women to build their confidence, the project will focus on delivering sessions tackling gender stereotypes to co-educational schools, with the intention to help boys recognise bias and work to overcome it. Sessions will be offered free to local schools in the first year.
The programme also hopes to improve representation of female engineers, targeting young women in the early years of secondary school at a point where they are able to choose science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) related GCSEs.
The museum, which is located at the southern portal of Marc
Brunel’s Thames Tunnel, will run an afterschool club in support of the Southwark Cultural Strategy.
The Esmée Fairbairn Collections Fund is run by the Museums Association, financing projects that develop collections to achieve social impact. Since its launch in 2011, it has awarded grants of more than £11 million to 162 projects.