The railway industry could have more women like me if we stopped feeding kids harmful tropes

A colleague’s young daughter recently told her: ‘I can never be a train driver because in books, they’re all boys.’ It was a lightbulb moment – and it’s true. Career perceptions, at an early age, are vital

Who drove your train to work this morning? Who was the signaller? Who was the dispatcher? Who gave it its last maintenance check?

There’s a very high chance that they were all men.

Unfortunately, the railway industry has very poor gender balance – out of 85,000 employees across the country, only 14,000, or 16 per cent, are female. And the proportion is even lower in certain front-line roles: when you’re on a train, the odds are that you’ll hear a male voice making announcements because 19 out of 20 train drivers are men.

A colleague’s young daughter recently told her: “I can never be a train driver because in books, they’re all boys.” It was a lightbulb moment – and it’s true. Career perceptions, at an early age, are vital. If we want to close the gap in pay and career attainment between men and women, we need to begin in the nursery.

When the creators of Thomas the Tank Engine introduced several female characters last year, a lot of people sneered. Political correctness gone mad, scoffed the usual suspects.

Thomas’s friends, Gordon, James and Percy, were joined by Nia and Rebecca with more “strong girl” characters including: Isla, an Australian flying doctor plane; Charubala, a controller from India and Hong-Mei, an engine from China.

This may all sound like a PR stunt and no doubt it’s partly driven by marketing. But it’s the type of change that matters, and I say that as one of a select number of senior female executives on Britain’s rail network. We can only truly change the skewed makeup of the UK’s workforce by challenging stereotypes from day one.

Figures released this month show that men earn 9.6 per cent more than women at Britain’s biggest companies. This was a very slight improvement from 9.7 per cent, when gender pay reporting became mandatory a year ago – but unfortunately, in many workplaces, there’s little momentum: at 45 per cent of firms, the discrepancy in pay increased in favour of men.

This gap isn’t just about discrimination. It’s about stark differences in the career paths taken by men and women – which are particularly evident in my industry, transport, but are obvious in so many different places: manufacturing, heavy industry, even in female-dominated roles such as nursery teaching.

Rail has parallels with aviation: easyJet, for example, reported a gender pay gap of 51.7 per cent – not because it discriminates against women (until recently, its CEO was female) but because a large majority of well-paid pilots are men, while most of the crew working in the cabin of aircraft are female.

There’s really no reason or logic behind all this. I’ve worked on the railways throughout my career – at Network Rail before joining Southeastern. Driving a train offers flexible hours, good benefits and a four-day working week. It is highly skilled, has a promising career structure and is in many ways ideal for working parents. It would clearly be ridiculous to suggest that a man is any more innately suited to working in a cab – or cockpit – than a woman.

Only 14 per cent of the applications Southeastern receives for driver roles are from women – and that has to be down to stereotypical views. It’s down to us to tackle them. The days when boys played with trains, and girls played with dolls, should be long behind us.

Southeastern has pledged to take action to push the number of female applicants for driver roles up to 40 per cent by 2021. We’ve started working with schools in Kent to see what can be done to alter perceptions right back in infancy. And like many rail operators, we’re making sure the imagery in our recruitment campaigns reflects the modern world – which means both gender and ethnic diversity.

A great deal of investment has gone into modernising Britain’s railways – London Bridge station has been rebuilt, and there are thousands of new trains running on the network. But in some respects, we still have work to do.

Changing the gender balance of Britain’s workforce won’t happen overnight. But step by step, flight by flight and train by train, we’ll get there. Working on the railways is a terrifically rewarding career. Alright, we may come in for stick from time to time but, ultimately, we’re entrusted by millions to get them home safely every evening.

I’m always struck by the diverse mixture of passengers who catch our services. It can, and should, be just the same in terms of the staff who work on the railways. It takes men and women of every possible background, working together, to run a successful organisation.

Ellie Burrows is train services director at Southeastern Railway