For Manufacturers About Subcontractors

Register NOW

As Henry Seddon said, vice president, Europe, Middle East and Africa Marketing for UGS Corp., a leading global provider of product lifecycle management (PLM) software and services.

UGS is dedicated to ensuring Europe’s largest organisations streamline their design, production and manufacturing processes.

The company works at the heart of Europe’s engineering community and is a strong proponent of education programmes. In 2006, UGS donated more than $1 billion in in-kind software to education institutions across EMEA and is currently working to ramp up support of programmes that encourage women engineers .

“The Lisbon Directive promised to make Europe ‘the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world’ by 2010, but as we enter 2007, we are still behind in many of the targets,” said Seddon. “In 2004, just 29 per cent of scientists and engineers were women . If we support the building of a skilled female workforce, we could boost the number of engineers significantly and potentially create an engineering ‘tour de force’ that puts Europe back on track.

“There is little contrast in the number of males and females with science and technology education that are employed in Europe . The difference lies with those who have taken the necessary steps to actually become scientists or engineers.”

Eurostat figures from 2004 show that 2.5 times more men use their science and technology education to become fully-fledged scientist or engineers.

“If women had the correct information and support during that critical period of education, they could hold the key to Europe’s economic future. EU member states need to take action now to fill the ever-widening skills gap and address the impact it is having on European innovation,” added Seddon.