[00:00:00] Speaker A: Welcome to the our Voices Oral Histories podcast, coordinated by the common room and presented by Dr. Andy Clark, research associate with the Newcastle Oral History Collective. In this episode, we talk to Ruth Baldicera. At the time of this recording, she was the manager at Siemens Engineering in Newcastle. The episode starts by asking Ruth how she became an engineer.
[00:00:24] Speaker B: We bought. What were your first steps in engineering? How did you train?
[00:00:28] Speaker C: You won't believe me.
[00:00:30] Speaker B: My job to believe everyone.
[00:00:32] Speaker C: Okay, my story. Trying to tell my story briefly, I had a big brother who was always going to be involved in an engineering capacity.
It was a given. I mean, I was brought up in a pit village in north Tyneside.
So when I went to school, all the boys went to work at Parsons, or they went to Vickers Armstrong, or they went down the pit, or they went to the shipyard. All the girls got married, got pregnant, and had babies. That's the way it was. We're going back to the.
So I was always going to get married and have babies. And I think I was about 13 or 14 when I went for my career's advice, and I'll never forget it. I walked into the room and the gentleman sitting behind the desks put his paper down, looked at me and said, what do you want to do? And I said, I don't know. And he looked me up and down and he said, well, you're reasonably attractive, so I wouldn't worry because somebody will marry you.
So that was my career's advice in 1978, or whatever it was. So I came out of high school thinking, oh, somebody will marry me. So I just made it my mission to get married. But in the background, my brother had started at an apprenticeship at Vickers Armstrong, and being a boy was lazy, so he used to pay me a pound a week to do his homework.
So I self taught an HNC and HND in mechanical engineering by the time I was 15, because I wanted my pound a week.
So that's how I learned engineering. But it still didn't occur to me to do it as a job because this was just at that time, girls didn't do that. So I was going to get married and have babies. So I think where it started, I got a job working in a truck garage as a receptionist. But I was really interested in the trucks, and I started asking the lads to show me things. And to cut a very long story short, six months later, I was the first woman in the country to be a service manager for Scania trucks.
I just threw myself in, dived in, did all the courses, did all the training, joined the TA and trained as a recovery fitter.
I had a motorbike. I was always messing around with motorbikes. I understood engines. So I started in the heavy goods industry, as in charge of a garage, basically from there, when I finished working there, I went to work in a power station at Blythe, which no longer exists.
From there, when Blythe power station closed, I went to work at a pipeline inspection company. Again, I went in at administrator level, but worked my way up to the dizzy heights of commercial operations specialists, which involved going to customer sites and assessing pipelines for inspection and then putting together the scope of work and the specifications.
After that, a few years there, traveled the world in a sales rule, and then I went to another big company to design umbilical pipelines for the offshore oil and gas industry.
An umbilical pipeline is all about how you control valves on the seabed, basically from an oil rig.
And then from there, I came to Siemens, started in the project management office, and now I'm in the quality department. So I've had a bit of a jump around, but I am 55, so I'm allowed bit of variety. But what you find is hydraulic systems, mechanical systems, the same terminology repeats in all of those places. And pushing fluid through a pipe, whether you're doing it in the context of pipeline inspection, or whether you're doing it in the context of a brake system on a car or whatever it is, pushing fluid through a pipe is pushing fluid through a pipe, so you can transfer those things that you've learned into different job roles. So, as I said, as I said before, I'm a jack of all trades and a master of none. I need to know a little bit about everything, but I don't have to have the expertise.
[00:05:00] Speaker B: Did your brother finish his apprenticeship?
[00:05:02] Speaker C: He did, yes.
[00:05:03] Speaker B: Right, okay.
All thanks to you.
[00:05:06] Speaker C: Thanks to me? Yes.
[00:05:07] Speaker B: Only paying a pound a week for.
[00:05:08] Speaker C: Someone to do it.
[00:05:11] Speaker B: Do you remember how you felt when you were in school and you were almost told by the careers advisor that your future is getting married on babies?
[00:05:20] Speaker C: Well, I just supported what my parents and other relatives and everybody else was doing at that time. I mean, that was at the time, that was what girls did. You were going to be a secretary or you were going to be a nurse, or if you were really clever, you might be a nursery school teacher.
But never in a million years was it suggested that I would be an engineer. And it was just I wanted to thrash around on motorbikes and I wanted to. Unfortunately for me, my parents kind of said, okay then.
So I wasn't prevented from doing those things, but it was purely hobby.
But it was purely my interest in that. That sort of got me into working to the level that I did in a truck garage, because I couldn't possibly have achieved that if I hadn't ripped engines to bits and put them back together myself in my private life.
[00:06:17] Speaker A: After the overview conversation, Andy went back and asked for more reflection from how Ruth moved from being a receptionist to a mechanic in the truck garage that she mentioned earlier.
[00:06:29] Speaker C: I was just interested, and I guess the management that were there at the time recognized that I was interested. And I knew how everything worked. And I had long, thin fingers, so I could help them get the bits and pieces in and out of gearboxes and things, because in those days, that's the way work was. But I was just interested. I kept asking, can I learn about this? Can I learn about that? And, well, yeah, we'll put you on a course. We'll put you on a course. And I just built up my technical knowledge and I would just read the manuals.
So they started letting me do the quotations for customers. So if somebody came and said.
[00:07:10] Speaker B: It.
[00:07:10] Speaker C: Could be anything from I've got a charging fault, which I knew it could either be a fuse or a white switch or an alternator, or somebody would. It could be that, or it could be my truck has blown over in the wind, I need a new cab, and it's going to be 25,000 pound in an insurance claim. So it could be anything in between.
But at the time, I just remember one significant thing.
The local bus company at the time had about 23 scannia buses, eleven liter three series buses. And I remember that gearboxes had input shafts on them, which used to melt. And we were, like, curious to understand why they were melting and the gearboxes were seizing up. And we discovered it was because when the component got to a certain temperature and was at fault, there was an override button that the driver could press, which was supposed to give him enough time to get back to the garage and take the bus off the road. But the drivers were just pressing it and pressing it and pressing it and running the bus all bloody week.
We had 23 buses with melted input shafts, and we had to change all the gearboxes on these buses. And I led a project because we weren't going to replace them with another scanier gearbox because it would just happen again. So we did a voice retrofit on all of them. And it was quite a big project. And I did it and I did well. So I kind of proved myself as a project leader, if you like, that way.
There was a few things happened like that where just thinking out the box and using a bit of common sense and being prepared to take a few risks, I sort of proved that I could learn, I could do things, whatever. So I just ended up getting promoted and getting promoted and never ever earned as much as my male counterparts. But in those days, women didn't. They didn't have a female uniform for me, so I had to wear a man's shirt and men's trousers, seriously.
But I wasn't bothered. But I think girls and women now get a lot more het up about those things than we did back in the day. Back in the day, you just wore men's clothes and didn't care. But they would get upset about that now, I think.
So, yeah. I just sort of proved myself and got on and that was it. But I didn't think about it.
It was just purely driven by, I'm interested in this, I don't want to be bored.
[00:09:48] Speaker B: What was the reaction like from your male colleagues to you?
[00:09:52] Speaker C: It was difficult. I mean, at first it was difficult because I was managing the garage. I was sort of like having to ask fitters to go and do something. Now you start off with asking politely and you get.
So then you would go to, like, you'd be nasty and just tell them to go and do it, or go home, and you'd get. You get attitude. But I found most of them, it was just all show, you know what I mean? It was just all a face. And underneath there was actually a mutual respect going on. And as long as I was prepared to equally go and have 25 liters of waste oil over me head in the pit, they were okay with me. Do you know what I mean?
Back in those days, some men would see you as a threat, and you would get it pointed out to you that you were a woman. I mean, I have had bus drivers and lorry drivers come into the service reception area and say, can I talk to one of the blokes? And I've said, well, you can, but you'll not get anything fixed until you talk to me.
But you sort of had to earn respect. But once you'd earned it, you got it, and that was that.
Whereas now you are automatically tread as an equal. So there is a difference. We have moved on. Things have changed for the better.
[00:11:23] Speaker B: How has your experience as a female engineer changed?
[00:11:27] Speaker C: Or has it changed?
Funny enough, I thank Lady Diana for a lot. You might laugh at that, but before Lady Diana, you had to wear court shoes and a pencil skirt, as we used to call them, for work. If you were a woman, you couldn't wear trousers, you weren't allowed, and you wouldn't be seen dead in flat shoes because people would know, make remarks at you what you wear frumpy flat shoes for. Lady Diana made it fashionable to wear flat shoes, and I'll always thank her for that.
She's the woman, I believe got us out of wearing silly high heels and into flat shoes for work. And she wore trousers and she said, between Lady Diana and Margaret Thatcher, these are role models who enabled women to wear proper clothes.
I think that had a big impact on female in the workplace, and they were doing serious things, they were doing serious jobs. So you might agree or disagree with what they did, or. A lot of people hated Margaret Thatcher, but like it or lumpt, these were powerful women who were role models. And also Jermaine Greer, absolutely fantastic. Read all of her books, some of the concepts and some of the ideas that she's had. Bit mad, some of them off the wall, but a lot of them make a lot of sense.
I think I'm lucky to have been brought up in an era where some really extreme, sort of, like extraordinary women have got into the media and unconsciously have influenced a whole generation. So when I started, I was born in 1965, so my first job when I was 18, so what was that? 1983, when I started work, as I say, women wore pencil skirts, court shoes.
The men did this, the women did that, and in engineering, well, I mean, if a girl was going to be an engineer, she would just be seen as queer, what's wrong with her?
That kind of thing. But I can remember taking. I had a Suzuki Katana motorbike, a 650 shaft drive driven motorbike, and I can remember taking it for its mot around that time, and a man in the garage saying, what a waste that bike on you.
[00:14:06] Speaker B: Response to that?
[00:14:07] Speaker C: Well, I don't even get into discussions with people like that because they're just not worth talking to.
But I remember it.
So I've had a lot of things said to me over the years that were wrong, that were unacceptable, but I only listen to people that I respect, so I'm not going to get into arguments with people that I have no respect for. So if that's your opinion, mate, all right, jog on.
But, yeah, I think now, as I say, I'm the quality partner for the engineering department here, and I'm very much tret as an equal and respected and listened to and the man woman thing doesn't even come into it now, I haven't had a comment that I could class as sexist or whatever made to me in the whole time I've worked here.
[00:15:03] Speaker B: Right.
[00:15:04] Speaker C: But, yeah, 30 years ago I did on a daily bloody basis, but I don't know, it was just normal then. We live in different times.
But I think what's changed is that back in my day, if I'd said to my parents, I want to be an engineer, I would have been laughed at. I think today, if a girl says, I want to be an engineer, the opportunities are there and that's the difference. I think we've come a long way.
[00:15:32] Speaker B: When you're speaking to girls as a stem basket in schools, obviously you don't have the answers as to why women are less likely to be engineers, but do you have any inkling, based on those conversations about possible reasons?
[00:15:48] Speaker C: I think a lot of them think it's a dirty job and they don't want to get their hands dirty. I think a lot of them think it's maths. I don't want to sit and do maths all day. They don't think that's interesting.
So I have to put them right on those two things. I think a lot of them, sadly, are persuaded by the media that the best option for them still is to marry a football player.
And for years, they've sent STEM ambassadors in to talk to teenage girls. And for years I've been saying, you need to talk to nine year olds, because by the time they get the teenage, they've made their options. Whatever. It's too late. You need to go in and talk to younger children. So I've been trying to put that right. I had a group of students here from Nottingham University recently, all females, all studying engineering, and I sat them in a room with some of our young male engineers, and I brought up job adverts on the screen, live, real job adverts for engineers, and said, right, everybody, let's go through that advert line by line, and you tell me what's stopping you from applying for that.
And what came out of that was confidence.
The males will look at it and it'll say, you have to have an HNC in mechanical engineering, Hale. Look at it and go, well, I haven't, but I'll apply for it anyway, because they have a level of expectation that's through the roof and a sense of entitlement. I am entitled to that job. That is my job. That job has got my name on it. Don't care if I haven't got all the skills, I'll apply for it anyway, because it's got my name on it. Look at the salary. I deserve that salary. That's the way the male was coming across. The girls were like, oh, but I haven't got that. I haven't got that skill, so I can't apply. And I think it's because of clumsy parenting. I think unconsciously and for all the right reasons, I think we bring boys and girls up differently. I think with boys, we kick them out the door into the big wide world and go, go on, grow a set, get out there, sort yourself out. I think with girls, we protect them rightly from the world and we treat them differently, unconsciously. And that's a massive, massive part of it that you're never going to.
It's going to be really hard to change. Yeah, because boys and girls are. Tread differently.
[00:18:28] Speaker B: That was my next question in terms of thinking about, because even I was surprised when you said about the stats in terms of women and Parsons and nonsense. It's been broadly consistent over that period. Based on your practical experience as an engineer, also with your experience of the STEM ambassadorial role, what do you think could be done to encourage more women to consider engineering?
[00:18:55] Speaker C: It's role models. It's like I say, but the other mistake they make is when they go to talk to girls about being an engineer, they'll stand there and go, oh, well, did you know it was a woman that did the London Eye? And the girls think, well, I'm not going to be able to do that. So I think we set kids up to fail. I think what we need to do is get them to understand that being an engineer isn't that hard. It's actually not that difficult. And you're not sitting doing maths all day because you've got software now that does it for you. You just input figures.
And yes, to be an engineer that's going to invent something or to work in an r and D department is going to be hard. But there are many, many job titles that have the word engineer in that really, it's not as hard as you think it's going to be and you can be taught anything. So I think we need to explain better what engineering is. I think we need to teach it as a subject in school because they don't.
And I think people like me need to keep on going and talking to nine year olds. And it's a tough sell, but the way I do it is to use hairdressing as an example, when I go to talk to girls, I talk about hairdressing, believe it or not, because if I was to go into a school and say, right, this is a power station and this is how a turbine works, they would just not be interested. So I go through hairdressing and explain how we use heat to form hair and how we shape hair using heat, and how we use ceramic in hair straighteners to do that. And then I liken that to the principles of engineering.
So I liken a hair dryer to kinetic energy to wind turbines. I liken the ceramic in the hair strainers to the combustion chamber in a gas turbine, and how we use ceramic tiles because it can withstand heat for the same reasons, blah, blah, blah, blah. And at the end of it, I say to the girls, right, so everything you're doing when you style your hair is related to engineering. Therefore I'm arguing you're already engineering, you just don't know it because it hasn't got the title engineer on, it's got hairdresser.
So, to me, a hairdresser is an engineer, and it's convincing the kids of that. But if you use a thing like hairdressing, you can actually.
They go, oh, it's like a moment of clarity. The light bulb comes on. But the basic fact is, we had 400 applications for our apprenticeship program last year, and only four of them were from girls. And yet, in society, we're having a 50 50 split. So we're doing something wrong, aren't we.
[00:21:46] Speaker B: In terms of industry in the region, in the northeast, like Newcastle and surrounding, what have been some of the big changes you've seen over your career in the northeast?
[00:21:58] Speaker C: Yeah, well, I mean, when I was a child, it was all shipyards and mines and this place. We employed 12,000 people here on this site back in the day. 12,000 people at once.
That is just enormous. I think Armstrong's had 20,000 at one point.
The northern powerhouse.
We don't make anything anymore, in a nutshell. There's bits and pieces, there's pockets in the oil and gas industry.
I think the saddest thing is, for me is the fact that all the british manufacturing companies around here, and the oil and gas and the shipyard and all the rest of it, what's left of it, is all owned by foreign companies. And I think that's what strikes me.
[00:22:52] Speaker B: Do you think there's been any social impact of that? Talking about use of 12,000, 20,000.
[00:22:58] Speaker C: Has it changed?
Oh, yes, there has. I mean, all your local pubs have gone the social clubs have gone. The sense of community is gone. We live in very, very different times. We all sit in our little breeze block houses now wired up to iPads.
[00:23:15] Speaker B: Don'T we, in terms of the future of engineering, manufacturing industry, et cetera, in the region.
Based on your extensive experience, what do you think the northeast needs or lacks currently that could reestablish industry?
[00:23:36] Speaker C: I don't think we make anything anymore, but I think our universities and I think we still have a lot of intellect here, and I think we have a lot of capability. And I think british engineering as a service and as a center for research and development and for coming up with ideas and inventing and that kind of thing, I think we've always been good at that, and I think that's where our strength is. We just don't seem to be very good at keeping manufacturing going. But I think I see it all the time because I run the customer feedback program. I see the compliments come in from all over the world.
You send some british engineers to go and figure out a problem in the outskirts of Jericho, some far flung place where nobody else even has heard of, and the compliments that come flutten back.
British engineering is still good, but you're talking about selling expertise. You're talking about selling opinions, ideas, solutions. I think we're good at that, but I just don't think we're very good when we set up factories to make things because it doesn't seem to last.
[00:24:55] Speaker A: Our voices is funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund in association with the common room and Dr. Andy clark. To find out more about the work of the common room, please visit www.thecommonroom.org uk or email
[email protected]. Uk.
