When Fiona Vessey stepped into her first engineering role 20 years ago, she soon became accustomed to being the only woman in the room.
Although women still comprise only 13 per cent of the engineering labour market, Vessey, who started her engineering career as Executive Officer in New Zealand’s Far North District Council, says she has noticed a shift in recent years.
“Twenty years ago there was me and a room full of men,” Vessey says.
“Over the past 10 years I’ve seen that change quite a bit - now I would say there's a good helping (of women in New Zealand councils), maybe 20 per cent, but we’re still really light on the ground.”
Add to that the fact that Vessey came from a management background with no formal engineering qualifications and the delivery of the $20million, 10 year Kerikeri Heritage Bypass as her first ever project becomes an even more remarkable feat.
“I really fell into engineering via project management,” Vessey said.
“The Kerikeri Bypass will be the largest project of my career, and I will always be extremely proud of that - I always thought it will be a good piece of work.”
In a whitepaper on agile project management, Vessey outlines the challenges the project posed.
“I was shown to my office, directed to the filing cabinet and told what was in it now belonged to me,” Vessey wrote.
“I had never worked for a local authority before I spent the following month familiarising myself with the organisation and the contents of that filing cabinet.
“There were some interesting projects in that cabinet including Manganui Streetscape, Whangaroa Reclamations and the Kerikeri Heritage Bypass. However, they were typically roading infrastructural projects and I had absolutely no experience in that area at all.
“I wondered what on earth I had got myself into and even worse there wasn’t any money as such to progress any of the projects.
“So not only did I need to manage these projects but I had to find the money to progress them.”
Vessey says while the bypass was a real “learning curve”, it taught her some valuable lessons.
“One of the things I learnt very early on was the key to success in whatever you do is people,” she says.
“You don’t need to be an expert on what you do, but you need to be an expert in managing people.”
Vessey is now group manager of service delivery for the Matamata-Piako District Council, and is responsible for overseeing a team of more than 100 people.
It is a position of authority women are statistically underrepresented in.
“In terms of positions, like mine, those group manager positions are typically held by men,” Vessey says.
“It’s a hard life to live, because you are going head to head with what has been a male dominated world.
“This organisation I currently work for, I came into what was a very well established, executive management team, all of them had 25 to 30 years experience behind them - and I don't think they’ve ever had a woman GM here ever.”
Vessey partially credits her success to finding a supportive mentor in former Far North District Council Mayor Yvonne Sharpe.
“She was most certainly for me a really positive role model, and it is because of her that I am where I am today,” Vessey says.
While there is a natural rate of attrition of women in the workforce as they leave to start families, Vessey does not believe that needs to be the case, if organisations are willing to be flexible.
“I know most of my counterparts across the county. Talking to them, in today's environment, there is flexibility for good people,” Vessey says.
“We work our mums into our organisation - if they’re out three months, six months, that’s a drop in a bucket.
“For them it’s a 10-15 year career plan.
“Sometimes there's a little bit of juggling, but each of those mums is available on the end of the phone.”
For Vessey, seeing more women join her in management positions is a question of when, not if.
“I would just love to see some more at the second tier level,” she says.
Attracting and retaining more women is one of the greatest challenges facing the engineering profession. In the first edition of IPWEA’s new magazine Inspire, you can find an in-depth look at the problem and what is being done to solve it. Inspire hits desks in early December, so make sure you pick up your copy.