See What You Can Be: Women in Solar

We are thrilled to be beginning our ‘See What You Can Be’ webinar series to promote girls to explore areas of work that are underrepresented.

GSA’s student careers webinar series

Ask a fifteen-year-old to picture a cricket analyst, a solar engineer, a barrister or a games designer, and the picture that comes back is shaped by who she has already seen doing the job. That’s why this series exists.

See What You Can Be brings women working across a range of industries into the classroom, live, to talk frankly about how they got there. A real account of how they got there and the inside track on the routes in that often aren’t talked about – giving students insights into careers they may not have heard about and might suit them best.

Girls’ schools already break barriers; half of GSA alumnae have worked in a STEM-related field against 8% of working women nationally. Girls in girls’ schools are nearly three times more likely to take Further Maths at A Level, and over two times more likely to take Further Maths, Physics and Computer Science.

Ambition isn’t the missing ingredient, but visibility is. Every session in this series puts another woman in front of students and closes that gap a little further.

In every session, speakers will cover:

• How they actually got there – including the plan that changes
• Routes in – qualifications, apprenticeships, sideways moves, second chances
• Women in the industry – where the sector stands now, where it’s shifting, and what that means for the next generation
• The jobs behind the job title – the roles students never see advertised
• The impact – what the work changes and why they stay
• What they wish they’d known at 16
• Live Q&A – students’ and teachers’ questions

How it works

Sessions run on Microsoft Teams and are designed for whole classes, year groups or careers clubs to join together. Teachers submit students’ questions during the session and put them to the speaker in the Q&A. All students are welcome, whatever they think they want to do – the point is to widen the field of vision.

Upcoming sessions include careers in cricket and women in solar, with more industries being added through the year.

Register your group.

See what you can be: Women in Solar

Solar is the largest employer in renewable energy, and one of the few industries where women’s representation is already close to parity at entry level, and nowhere near it at the top. Women make up 40% of the global solar workforce, nearly double the share in wind or in oil and gas but only 19% of senior management and board roles. The industry your students will work in is being bult now, and who builds and leads it is still an open question. This session is about getting in early.