This International Women in Engineering Day, we’re celebrating the innovators and the inventors; the inspirational women conducting and publishing their engineering research and striving for a better future. 

Every day, we see innovative research published on topics ranging from robotics, mechanics, and electrical engineering, to energy, computer science, and civil engineering. Women in research, from authors to editors, are constantly seeking discoveries, testing and failing, improving and finding, solving and sharing. Their work ensures that the world benefits from their knowledge, that we can find ways forward and solve some of the biggest problems in engineering and beyond. 

From making buildings safer and skyscrapers great, to safeguarding our infrastructures, improving systems, and ensuring that technologies deliver better health and improve lives – these are just some of the amazing things that engineers are doing to make the world a better place. But, we need more women like them. We hope that the next generation of women and girls can see themselves in engineering careers. In a field where women continue to be under-represented, we believe it’s vital that they know that engineering is for everyone. Because who is going to innovate and change the world, if not our future engineers?  

Discover inspirational work from women in engineering 

Here is just a small sample of some of the innovative work being carried out by women worldwide: 

Punching-shear strength of reinforced concrete slabs subjected to unidirectional in-plane tensile forces 
Structural Concrete

In this paper, Eva Oller, along with her co-authors Pablo G. Fernández and Antonio Marí, work out ways to test the strength of concrete slabs in order to make structures safer and more resilient, and understand their limits. 

Wave propagation in a doubly tapered shear beam: Model and application to a pyramid-shaped skyscraper
Earthquake Engineering & Structural Dynamics  

Maria Todorovska, together with her co-authors Eyerusalem A.Girmay, Fangbo Wang, and Mohammadtaghi Rahmani, illuminate a useful model for detecting damage in tapered skyscrapers. This is particularly vital in earthquake-prone areas where a building’s seismic response is of paramount importance, and also allows the structural health of high-rise buildings to be measured in real-time.  

Adapting natural language processing for technical text
Applied AI Letters  

For those that work in technical roles for companies that store and use vast amounts of technical texts (such as procedures, reports, and work instructions), finding relevant information quickly and easily can be difficult. The algorithms that work well on semantic web data don’t perform well on engineering data, and the consequences of wrong or missing information can lead to unmitigated risks. Melinda Hodkiewicz and Sarah Lukens, along with their co-authors Alden Dima, Thurston Sexton, and Michael P. Brundage, are aiming to improve this, as the goal of their work in Technical Language Processing. 

Shaping a brighter future 

We’d like to thank all of our authors to continuing to innovate, to push boundaries within engineering, and for inspiring future generations of engineers. Their work makes the world a better, safer place for everyone.  This International Women in Engineering Day, discover more research from women across all areas of engineering. Our Editors have selected a collection of papers authored, or co-authored, by women, that aim to make a real difference to people's lives. Ready to get inspired? Read the virtual issue today.