Was it challenging to find other women to join your team? 

I tried to find females for the team. There are lots of restrictions being a startup because we can’t provide a full time salary for an employee long term. So there’s a lot of risks associated as well. We haven’t been able to expand the tech team with females, which is what I really want to do. Especially with my passion to support women in tech. 

“One thing I’m really proud of is that the team is really diverse in terms of skill set, ethnicity and neurodiversity. To me, that is also just as important to be considering. We are also highlighting areas that as a company culture, is there anything that would prevent a female coming into the team when that happens? I think that’s important to think of at the start, and what type of language is used within the company.” 

That’s something that we’re trying to do from the outset. So that hopefully whenever we raise and expand the team, we will not hinder any women from joining.

What kind of judgement do women in STEM experience?

The experience of myself being a female engineer has had major negatives, but also more positives overall. In a way I’m glad to have had the negatives to be aware of, so now I can empathise, help and assist other women who have a similar experience.  I have found that for women in STEM it depends on what area of STEM that you’re in.

“From my own personal experience in engineering, I’ve literally had someone walk up to me and tell me that females shouldn’t be engineers. So it can be tough.”

However, on the other side of it, since starting my business being a solo female founder in engineering, I have seen so many positive experiences. I really think again it comes back to company culture and how companies are supporting females as they come in. 

I would say the stigma is changing which is amazing. Although even as a STEM Ambassador, I do some work with primary school levels. We still need to make changes at a very early age. Even at five and six years old. A six-year-old girl is heavily put off STEM because they think it’s a man’s job. So it’s not even in company culture. So I think there’s quite a lot of different areas that we need to work on.

From the TEDx talk that I did, I got a lot of girls from university messaging me. I was really targeting that for A level students that didn’t meet the gender stereotype and were unsure of what they wanted to do.  I was really shocked that it was girls in first and second year of university that watched my TEDx talk. They reached out to me and said:

“I still don’t know if I should be an engineer. I don’t think my personality meets it.”

I was really taken back by the number of messages I received. But in a way I was so thankful that I had the opportunity to talk to them, and direct them to other areas and resources.

Overall, we need all types of skills in engineering. We need emotional skills, because how do people become emotionally attached to our product? We need caring skills because we’ll be going into biomedical engineering. There is such a diverse range of skill sets within engineering. I think we need to highlight that you can be emotional, or stubborn, or a tomboy or a really girly girl. We need all of these personalities in engineering.

What advice would you give to other women engineers who want to start their own business?

Ultimately, it’s taking the first step. But also really make sure that you know your customer. Because so many people have fantastic ideas. But we focus on other areas, and we lose sight of why we’re actually doing it, and who’s going to use it. The best thing we can do is actually speak to customers, see what annoys them, and find out if they would use your product.

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