Women are an unutilized resource in the steel industry

Lena Norrström
Project Leader, Triple Steelix – K2

K2 is the acronym from the Swedish words for women and competence, and K2 is one of the areas included in Triple Steelix – environment, equal opportunities and integration. K2 is financed by Mål 3 (Target 3) and Nutek (Agency for Economic and Regional Growth).

K2 is the world's second highest mountain, and it can be climbed by having the right equipment, support and will.

Women are not particularly well represented in the steel industry. SSAB has only about 17% in production. Outokumpu has 14–15 %.
You will not find many women in the company management.

Many questions arise
Many questions, but are there any answers?
Why aren’t more women employed?
Why are there no women in higher posts in the industry?

Who will be tomorrow’s engineers and shop floor workers?
Who is being educated today?
How can companies and the region attract persons with the right education?

The way girls and women tackle reality is to get educated. Theoretical knowledge is becoming increasingly important and further education is needed for survival.
Engineers must continuously keep abreast of the rapid technical developments. Women are good at that.
Girls already get better marks in all subjects at primary school level and can manage better in all programmes in secondary high school, including subjects such as building and vehicles.

Girls now account for more than 70 percent of university students, and women are in a crushing majority at Komvux (Adult Education) and Kunskapslyftet (Promotion of Adult Education). There are no signs that this trend will be broken. Girls go up one percent or so almost every year.

Women engineers, for examples, are of very high quality, and many large companies employ all the women engineers they can get hold of. An interesting feature in this context is that women engineers have a very rapid rate of salary growth, and they command higher salaries than men in many companies.

What should the steel industry do?
Girls are entering most of the classically male occupational and professional fields, and men have almost entirely disappeared from some of them (lawyers, veterinary surgeons), although not yet from the steel industry. But developments in other areas illustrate what will be happening here too.

What are the future needs of the steel and engineering companies in the Bergslagen region? What should the companies be doing to succeed in competence recruitment in the coming six to ten years?

Considering the number of people who will be retiring in the coming few years and what group will be filling the vacuum that arises, we will be unable to make ends meet.

To get answers to these questions, thought must be given to who will be the most well-educated persons in the future.

How can the companies attract them? Triple Steelix has a role to play here. We can help companies think along new lines.

Take the whole population as the point of departure
To recruit employees, 100% of the population must be taken into consideration. This must be borne in mind when formulating advertisements, for example.

What can Triple Steelix and K2 do in concrete terms?
K2 has started a course in Leadership Development for women. The course is already in full swing and a group of women in leading positions in various steel companies in the Bergslagen region meet regularly under professional leadership.

Highlighting examples is also a good way. Whoever is not seen does not exist, as the saying goes. And if younger women see no women in the industry, they will believe that there are none.

K2 is also planning seminars and lectures aimed at highlighting examples of women in industry. Steelstars, women that are proud to work in the steel industry.