Face of engineering always wears lipstick

Apr 14 2009 by Alastair Gilmour, The Journal

Jane Atkinson has become one of the most high-profile women in UK industry in the past decade. Alastair Gilmour meets a woman on a mission.

THERE’S no argument, the North East has got the lot. Beauty-wise, we can’t deny the sensory benefits of ancient woodlands, chocolate-box villages and historic sites, but there can be grace and harmony in industry, too.

Wilton International in Teesside is, at first sight, a brutal and uncompromising vision, but a moment’s reflection reveals there’s elegance in symmetry.

Wilton’s beauty is not in wooded valleys, heather-clad fells and fast-running streams, but in industrial handsomeness where men in hard hats and high-visibility jackets work among pipes, valves, tubes, pumps, scaffolding, conveyors, forklifts, storage tanks, chimneys, cables, wires, pylons, things that belch steam and things that don’t belch steam but look as though they will at any given moment. Wilton is sculpturally breathtaking.

The drive around the near-2,000 acre site is an introduction to some of the world’s leading chemical and manufacturing companies, multinationals such as Huntsman, Sabic, Invista, Artenius and Dow. But cruise past the polymer plant and the container park to something far more recognisable and almost comforting – a huge pile of freshly-cut timber. It’s the raw material for the SembCorp biomass power station, a £60m investment in renewable energy and the UK’s first purpose-built wood burning plant producing 30 megawatts of electricity – enough to power a small town – and a reminder of the natural world in an estate of silver grey mechanisation.

“It’s getting more and more technical here,” says Jane Atkinson, vice-president, utilities, at SembCorp UK. “I find this more scary than when I was at British Steel or Corus because you can see the product there, you can see the iron flowing out and the steel being melted. Here it’s all in pipes and you can’t see anything.”

SembCorp provides services for Wilton’s innovative manufacturing site and is the key supplier of power such as steam and compressed air. It’s a man’s world of overalls and rigger boots which fazes ultra-feminine chemical engineer Jane Atkinson not one jot.

“When I started, there were only about a dozen women amongst 1,700 men on the site,” she says. “I got quite used to the male environment where you quickly learn to adapt.”

In 2004, Jane became the first woman in the world to manage a blast furnace – the Corus cast house at Redcar – and was the second woman in the world to manage a coke oven.

She reluctantly offers the information that she was named CBI First Woman in 2007, a prestigious national award which left her “gobsmacked” because the shortlist contained dynamic entrepreneurs and self-starters. Blast furnaces she can understand, but even to a high-profile woman in the power business, operating your own company remains something of a dream.

More immediately important to her is the enormous task of enticing young people – male and female – into engineering. In 10 years’ time, we apparently will hit engineer deficit.

“You ask anybody, a teacher or someone in the street, what an engineer does and everybody will give you a different answer,” says Jane. “One of our guys asked a school group to name a famous engineer – you think of Brunel or even Dyson in a way – and one lad said Kevin from Coronation Street. He’s a mechanic – there’s a difference between a mechanic and an engineer. It shows the education isn’t out there.”

Education is big in the Jane Atkinson handbook, she is now on the University of Teesside’s science and engineering board and is studying for a Fellowship of the Institute of Chemical Engineers. When she was at Normanby South Park School, her careers teacher recognised her aptitude for maths and chemistry and guided her on an engineering path which took her through Loughborough University – sponsored by British Steel.

She says: “I did all my summers at plants on British Steel sites and did my sandwich year with them. When I graduated, they offered me a full-time role and I stayed with them and Corus for 14 years.

“I worked in Alabama for five years. I enjoyed it, though after that time I needed a green card and I wanted to come home. I was single as well – life out there is very much church-orientated, it’s the Baptist Belt, very community and family spirit, so it was quite difficult to meet people because I didn’t belong to one of those units.

“My life was work. I worked hard but played hard and I realised I missed the culture and I missed the news (she puts great stress on those four words). You never heard much about Europe or the UK, it was all American.

“I always say that British Steel were absolutely excellent for me and one or two people really mentored me. I don’t think you can go anywhere with a career unless you have a few supporters.”