WPR recently caught up with two UK public health engineers – Kate Longley of the Arup group in Manchester and Linda Dulieu of the Cundall multidisciplinary consultancy in London – and we just had to ask ‘what are nice girls like you doing in a job like this?’

How did two young women, fresh out of university, end up working as public health engineers for two of the biggest companies in the UK?

Linda Dulieu, who works at Cundall, says the decision back then wasn’t too hard.

“You might say engineering is in my blood,” she says.

“My father, uncle, grandfather and great-grandfather were all in the plumbing industry.

"My father (now retired) had his own business, and during the Second World War my grandfather worked on ships, repairing their plumbing.

"Every time the family got together, the talk would be about plumbing and what happened on site at various jobs.

"Basically, there was no escape for me.”

For Kate Longley of Arup, the beginnings were a little different.

“I was the first person on dad’s side of the family to go to university,” she says.

“They were from a farming background. Perhaps the fact that I grew up playing constantly with my train set was a clue that I was destined to become an engineer.”

Longley says initially her work experience looked like leading to a career focused on transport, which didn’t really excite her. (What happened to the influence of that train set?)

“I found I really enjoyed the water elements of the course, so I went on to complete my masters degree in water engineering.
Then I began applying for as many jobs as my qualifications would permit.

“I applied for a position as a graduate with Arup. I can’t remember what for – certainly not public health – but that’s what they offered me. At first it was all very new and frustrating and I didn’t know how to do most things. As they say, it was nothing like what they taught us in school. The first six months were horrible. I hated it, because everything I did got corrected and covered in red pen.

“But then I began to realize that there weren’t many of us, I was getting lots of projects to work on and I learned a lot. My boss Nick Howard taught me everything I knew at the time – he had to.”

Dulieu’s story takes a different tack.

“At first I was looking to enter environmental health as an officer, but I didn’t get the grades I needed.

"My father then suggested that public health engineering wasn’t a million miles away from environmental health, and suggested I contact various large plumbing companies to secure an apprenticeship.

"This I managed to achieve in the late 1970s, although it was classed as a technical apprenticeship as opposed to being site-based on the tools.”

When asked if being female in this field adds to the challenge, both women are enthusiastic in their responses. They laugh when remembering the first few times they went on site inspections.

“I had a guy yell out to me that wives weren’t permitted on site,” Dulieu says.

Longley says: “I swear that the way some men reacted, you’d think they’d never seen a woman on site before. But I would say that building sites are one of the few bastions of chivalry left in the UK.”

She says 'real gentlemen' have opened doors and warned her about possible dangers.

Dulieu says: “I’ve had boards put down on the mud so that I wouldn’t get my boots too dirty.”

Most specialized professions have steep learning curves for new employees, and the women say the learning curve was steeper than they had imagined, especially in the first year.

“There were a couple of times when I thought ‘what am I doing here?’,” Longley says.

“Me too,” Dulieu echoes. “And the learning never stops. There’s always something new.