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I have had an exhausting couple of weeks. Work is hectic. My inbox is filling faster than I can clear it and I have had back to back meetings almost every day. I am commuting from Cape Town to Johannesburg to Bloemfontein on a weekly basis, living out of a suitcase, working 12 hour days and coming “home” to an empty hotel room. This is one of those times when I wish I were a doting housewife living the simple life.
The key to being a good housewife, as far as I can tell, is efficiency and planning. And as an engineer, I think I would be excellent at running a home like a well-oiled machine. To be honest, I often fantasize about drawing up cleaning and inspection schedules for my domestic worker to follow. You know… like with different frequencies for inspecting and cleaning different rooms and objects in my flat, with pictures of how things should look before and after cleaning… But I just never get around to it.
If I were a housewife, I would simply execute those schedules and checklists like clockwork. And of course build a replenishment forecasting tool on Excel to manage my grocery inventory and work in progress stocks (e.g. of work in progress… frozen, grated tomato cubes ready for adding to a dish on the stove). And in my spare time design a system to route all the grey water from the kitchen and bathroom down to the garden. And get solar panels installed to reduce my household’s electricity consumption.
Yep. Domestic bliss.
As the title of this blog implies, I am a female engineer. A 26 year old, South African female chemical engineer to be specific. Since working-crying-praying my way to graduation, I have worked in South Africa’s Fast Moving Consumer Goods industry (FMCG companies manufacture and market detergents, toiletries, food products, etc) for five years, mostly practicing as an engineer. I have recently moved into the less technically - but more fashionably - challenging Banking sector to bring some industrial savvy to the rusty cogs turning behind the scenes of catchy slogans and smiling tellers that you see in TV adverts.
The word Femgineer started as a nickname for my own work persona. I am of the opinion that the female engineer, the Femgineer, is a distinctive subset of my gender. I’m not sure if we’re drawn to engineering because of who we are, or if we end up in engineering by mistake and it makes us who we are. But we are a bit… different.
Maybe a lot of what I have to say about us is applicable to female lawyers, doctors or businesswomen as well. All I know is, the experiences that women in engineering endure, the awful things that we have to wear, the amount of chemicals, voltage, radiation, grease and blue collar sexual bravado that we are exposed to, combined with the generic feminine hormonal concoction that is infused in our blood leads to some interesting results, and hopefully some interesting stories. None of them fatal or particularly sexy… I just wanted a catchy title.
