On International Women’s Day, we are delighted to announce the renewal of our valued partnership with Eurovia UK. The partnership includes 50 free membership places offered by Eurovia UK to women, and men, across its business.

I’m currently reading our next book club read - How Women Rise. It’s a great read and talks about how focusing on things that lie within your control can help improve your situation and clear your path to success whereas focusing on external factors that aren’t in your control can be an exercise in frustration. On that note, we can’t change the pandemic but at Women in Transport we have taken some positive steps in 2020 to support our members and to ensure the future of our network.

Congratulations to Neil Pepper MBE who has just won The European Women In Construction & Engineering (WICE) Awards for Best Male Mentor 2020. We are also thrilled that Victoria Sutherland, a Women in Transport members from Mott MacDonald was awarded Best Woman Rail Engineer 2020.

On 3 November, Rachel Skinner, one of the founder members of Women in Transport and our Patron, became the 156th President of the Institution of Civil Engineers and marked the start of her year with ICE's first ever fully-virtual Inaugural Address. Rachel spoke passionately about just one issue: Net-Zero Carbon and the need for civil engineers to act together, urgently, to help reduce carbon emissions and therefore address climate change.

High Speed Two Ltd (HS2), in collaboration with Innovate UK, is investing £300,000 in a Small Business Research Initiative competition to deliver innovation that will drive project efficiencies and process optimisations during the design and construction phase of the new railway.

Women in Transport is delighted to be a signatory of the Equality, Diversity & Inclusion Charter’ which has just been launched jointly by The Railway Industry Association (RIA) and Women in Rail (WR) to champion equality, diversity and inclusion in the UK railway industry. The joint charter is a commitment to work together to build a more balanced higher performing sector and has been backed by over 100 organisations.

One of the primary objectives of Women in Transport is to shine a light on the wonderful range of career opportunities in the transport sector. Another is to inspire our members with role models who have succeeded in some of these careers and overcome the inevitable challenges along the way. So we were delighted when Rowan Joachim, Head of Engineering at London Overground, generously offered to speak to our members online about some key moments in her 20 year career in the transport industry.