Engineer Olga Cavalli is the President of the Forum "Women in Engineering and Business" of the World Congress and Exhibition: ENGINEERING 2010-ARGENTINA gives her opinion about the obstacles that women engineers face in the development of their careers.

1)   Which are the most important topics that will be dealt in the Forum you chair?
A key issue in the development of our countries is to have skilled labor and human resources for the production and provision of services of enhanced added value. In this sense, it is very important to have more women committed to this process. We believe that degree courses in hard sciences and, particularly, in Engineering, offer a work scenario with great opportunities of development for women as well, mainly taking into account the role of information and communication technologies in the operation of all business companies, associations and the government itself.

However, the number of women registered in Engineering colleges is still low in comparison with other degree courses.

One of the objectives of the Forum is to discuss the causes of this phenomenon and propose possible alternatives to give rise to changes in the future.

Moreover, we want to analyze the obstacles that women engineers face in the development of their careers: which types of barriers to growth, discrimination and lack of information on the real needs in working roles are present in professional careers which have been almost exclusively practiced by men in previous years and, nowadays, there is no reason for any discrimination.

2)  According to your view, how should women’s interest in this profession be encouraged? 

This is precisely one of the topics we want to analyze and look to arrive to some relevant conclusions at the end of the Congress.

Considering what has been discussed up to the present, I could say that awakening the interest by means of subjects such as Mathematics in primary schools and Physics in secondary schools seems to be the first challenge to encourage young women to take up degree courses in hard sciences such as Engineering.