Q&A Michelle Russell, Senior Analyst at the National Skills Academy for Rail

Girls are not exposed to the idea of railway careers from early childhood right through to when they leave school.

Michelle Russell, Senior Analyst at the National Skills Academy for Rail

RAIL: Why are there so few women working in the rail industry supply chain?

Michelle Russell: It’s not attractive to young women. It has always been portrayed as a masculine career. Think of

Thomas the Tank Engine - a majority of the characters are male. If you look back to the previous generation, it was the same with Ivor the Engine. I think the only female in that children’s programme was the shopkeeper. These concepts get embedded in children from a very early age. Parents don’t challenge it because it is accepted as the norm.

Surely this is not the case in schools now?

I used to teach before joining NSAR. The information given to young people in terms of careers has diminished greatly over the last ten or 15 years. That is due to education cuts. There are no longer specific staff doing specific careers advice, it is left to other teachers to give out information. And teachers tend to give information based on their own experience, which hardly ever includes working on the railway. If they don’t have any knowledge of the wide range of careers that exist in the railway, then they cannot pass that information on.

What can the industry do to change that?

There are really good young female mathematicians coming out of our schools, but they tend to go into safe jobs like accounting or banking rather than jobs associated with the railway. There is a task to do to persuade them to see the railway as a safe career, too.

There has to be a large drive to promote the range of rail careers. Network Rail has a project called People Like Me. It is a resource pack for schools, and it is about creating role models. It is about showing an industry that is more reflective of young people in terms of gender, ethnicity and nationality. It is a start, but girls are not exposed to the idea of railway careers from early childhood right through to when they leave school.

Whose responsibility should that be?

The industry, if it wants change, has to lead that. It needs buy-in from everyone, both financially and in terms of giving time. We need to enthuse young women.

What we are seeing instead is a few companies making modest donations to the Women in Rail group and leaving them to it.

Yes, I think that’s right. Companies consider that’s their corporate social responsibility job done - box ticked, some money put aside, move on.

Companies are quite good now at getting their ethnicity balance right, because they recognise the railway has been quite white and overly middleaged. We know we need to recruit at a younger age. But the gender balance has not really been tackled.

Is there much regional variation in this?

Obviously the ethnic figures in London are much higher than in more rural areas, because that reflects the population of the capital. But there are certainly variations by gender.

Women in rail stand at 13.1% nationally. In London it is 16.4%. In the North East it is actually higher. But in Scotland it drops to 12%. The differences may not seem large, but you need to take into account the total numbers. In London the railway employs 67,000 people, against the North East at 3,500 and 13,500 in Scotland.

So, London represents a disproportionate amount of the railway, suggesting the rate for women outside London must be very much lower than the average across most of the country.