Award-winning engineer promotes career for women

As school leavers prepare for 2025 university offers, Queensland’s Professional Engineer of the Year is encouraging more young women to explore engineering as an option. Infrastructure Project Solutions managing director Sascha Kurz has blazed a path for women, creating a consultancy where females comprise more than 30 per cent of the engineering workforce - more than double the Australian average. She said it would be great to see more young women embracing engineering as a viable and rewarding career. “We need more young women to bring their skills, creativity, and resilience to engineering, and we need workplaces that are ready to support them every step of the way,” she said Josephine Krishna (pictured above with Ms Kurz) has just completed her first year of engineering studies at the University of Queensland (UQ) and plans to specialise in civil engineering. “I didn't always want to do engineering, but when it came time to consider what was next for me after school, I realised engineering could be a great degree because I liked math, science and formulas,” she said. “The course is still male-dominated, but there are more women than I expected. This may be because UQ really encourages and supports girls who do engineering and I have several female friends in my course. “Newer companies are looking for diversity more than ever, so my group is quite hopeful of getting a job when we finish our degrees.” Ms Kurz said achieving a higher-than-average proportion of women engineers at IPS had been more organic than deliberate, reflecting the company’s unique culture. “We always hire on merit, but I think the combination of our culture and female leadership has attracted more women candidates to roles at IPS,” she said. Ms Kurz is chair of the Engineers Australia College for Leadership and Management Committee QLD, the first female in this position. In September, she was named Queensland Professional Engineer of the Year in the 2024 Engineers Australia awards and is now in the running for the national title.“When I was in high school 25 years ago, engineering wasn’t offered to me as a career path – only through some very fortunate circumstances I found my way into a Bachelor of Engineering degree in my second year at university, and I’ve never looked back,” she said. “Having the opportunity to work on projects that make a genuine difference to the community and peoples’ lives has been incredibly fulfilling."

Award-winning engineer promotes career for women

Industry Queensland

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