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International Women’s Day – Mieke Robijns
 What drew you to an engineering company? |
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| I’ve always been interested in Engineering. It is in line with my studies. | |
 What was your first job? |
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| I started at Siemens PLM Software as a Product Development Engineer. | |
 Were you the only woman on the team? What was that like? |
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| No, there was one other. There weren’t many women that studied engineering, so I was used to it. | |
 How has your career evolved over the years? |
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I had several functions in the mean time and grew a lot. |
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 Do you think being a woman helped or hurt your career? |
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No, I feel it is really irrelevant. |
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 What type of advice would you give young women looking to enter engineering? |
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It doesn’t make a difference if you’re a man or a woman to be a good engineer.
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 Would you advise your daughter to follow in your footsteps? Why or why not? |
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| Yes, certainly, if engineering is what interests her. | |
 What still should be done to make the world of engineering more gender equal? |
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| Globally, not just for engineering, I think men should also get a full paternity leave of 15 weeks, the same as women. This will be beneficial for the mother, child and family and will take away the resistance that employers might feel when hiring a woman.
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 Have we achieved gender equality? If so, why? |
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| Except for some improper jokes from my male colleagues, I have never felt discriminated or treated differently than anybody else.
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 Do you honestly think gender equality is possible? |
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| No, men and women are not the same, just as two different persons are not the same. But both genders have qualities and strengths that are useful in engineering companies. |
