Australia has more than 69,000 qualified female engineers, yet only around 34,000 work directly in engineering roles. If women were employed in direct engineering roles at the same rate as men, the country would have an additional 13,000 women working in the field today. That gap is the real story behind women in engineering in Australia right now.

BottomLine: Australia's engineering workforce has more qualified women than it employs, and the middle years of a career are where the sector loses most of them. Connexus works with engineering and built environment firms across Sydney and Brisbane who are actively trying to close that gap, and the data below shows exactly where the opportunity sits.

How many women actually work in engineering in Australia right now?

The pipeline into engineering has improved. Women earned 24.1 percent of engineering undergraduate degrees at Australian universities in 2022, up 2.5 percentage points from 2017. That's real progress at the entry point. The problem is what happens after graduation.

Representation varies sharply by sector. The gender share of engineers in Professional Scientific and Technical Services sits at 15.7 percent, compared with 19 percent in the education sector and just 10 percent in construction. Construction, the sector with the biggest infrastructure pipeline and the loudest skills shortage, has the lowest female representation of the three.

Workforce composition backs this up from the employer side. WGEA data shows the construction industry workforce is skewed to men, who make up 74 percent of the total workforce, and men hold 88 percent of roles in the highest pay quartile. Women aren't just underrepresented in construction and engineering. They're concentrated in the lower-paid parts of the organisation when they are there.

The takeaway: the graduate pipeline is slowly improving, but workforce representation and seniority haven't caught up, particularly in construction.

Why does representation drop off in the middle of a career?

This is where the numbers get sharper. Female representation in engineering drops sharply through the middle years of a career, declining by around one percentage point annually, at the exact point the industry can least afford to lose experienced talent.

Utilisation peaks at 64 percent for Australian-born female engineers and 53 percent for overseas-born female engineers in their mid-30s, then declines by about 1 percent per year from there. A related figure explains part of why: 20 percent of mid-career women in engineering work part time, compared with just 8 percent of men.

Parental leave and return-to-work transitions sit at the centre of this. Research from the Bankwest Curtin Economics Centre and the Workplace Gender Equality Agency found that employers offering at least 13 weeks of paid parental leave halve the rate of women leaving the workforce after returning from leave. That single policy lever, paid leave length, appears to matter more than most firms assume.

There's also a demographic pattern worth flagging for hiring strategy. 75 percent of Australia's female engineers were born overseas. Any retention strategy that ignores skilled migration support is only addressing part of the workforce.

Employers who treat the mid-career years as a retention problem, not an inevitability, have the best shot at keeping experienced women in the field.

What does the gender pay gap look like in engineering and construction specifically?

The pay gap in this sector is wider than the national average, not narrower. Based on WGEA data, the gender pay gap in Professional Scientific and Technical Services is five percentage points higher than the all-sector average of 11.2 percent.

Construction fares worse again. Four out of five workplaces in Financial and Insurance Services, Construction, Mining, and Electricity, Gas, Water and Waste Services report gender pay gaps above WGEA's national mid-point of 11.2 percent.

This isn't just a reputational issue anymore. Legislative changes commencing in 2026 require employers with 500 or more direct employees to select and meet gender equality targets, or demonstrate improvement, over three years. For large engineering consultancies and Tier 1 contractors, pay equity has moved from a values statement to a compliance requirement with a clock running on it.

For firms under the 500-employee threshold, the same targets aren't mandatory yet, but the direction of travel is clear. Getting ahead of it now costs less than reacting to it later.

Where is progress actually happening?

It isn't all mid-career attrition and pay gaps. Some real growth has happened over the past decade. The number of female engineers doubled in many industry sectors in the decade to 2021, including Professional Scientific and Technical Services, which now employs more than a third of all female engineers.

There's also new, well-funded momentum specifically targeting this problem. Champions of Change has received 1.9 million dollars in funding from the Australian Government to establish a new Champions of Change Engineers Group, a three-year national project focused on systemic change to accelerate women's participation, retention, and progression in engineering. The project aims to lift women's representation in engineering from 16 percent to more than 40 percent over a 10 to 15 year horizon.

That target sits alongside a broader workforce reality Connexus sees in the market daily: Australia doesn't have enough engineers, full stop. Engineers Australia reports the country currently lacks 30,000 engineers, a shortfall expected to grow to 100,000 by 2030. Retaining experienced female engineers isn't a side initiative to that problem. It's one of the more direct ways to solve it, since the qualified talent already exists in the workforce, just underutilised.

What are engineering employers doing about it?

The most effective interventions so far are structural, not symbolic. Structured return-to-work programs are one example. WSP introduced a specific Return to Work program for anyone who has had a break from work or the industry of longer than one year, running for the first six months back in the role. Programs like this target the exact point in the pipeline where the data shows women drop out.

Flexible work arrangements matter here too, and this connects directly to broader shifts already reshaping the building services sector ("Flexibility Is No Longer a Perk: The State of Remote Work in Australia's Building Services Sector"). Firms that have already built flexible, output-based work models for their whole team are better positioned to retain engineers through the parental leave and return-to-work window, rather than treating it as a special case.

Pay transparency is the third lever, and it's increasingly not optional. Firms benchmarking roles against a current salary guide ("Salary Guide – Building Services Design") are better equipped to identify and close gaps before they show up in a WGEA report with the company's name attached.

What should Sydney and Brisbane engineering firms be doing right now?

Three practical steps stand out from the data above.

First, treat the mid-career years as a defined retention risk window, not background attrition. Build return-to-work support and flexible scheduling into policy before someone goes on leave, not after they've already started looking elsewhere.

Second, benchmark pay by role and seniority, not just by department. A firm can hit an acceptable average pay gap while still concentrating men in every senior, high-paid position, which is exactly the pattern WGEA found in construction, where men hold 88 percent of the highest-paid quartile.

Third, connect this to the broader hiring problem the sector already knows about. The engineering skills shortage (linking to: "The Engineering Skills Shortage in Australia: Why a $242 Billion Infrastructure Pipeline Isn't Enough") and the underutilisation of qualified female engineers are the same workforce problem viewed from two angles. Firms that solve one make real progress on the other.

Specialist recruiters who work this market daily can help firms move on all three fronts at once, and Connexus has written before about why specialist recruiters matter more than ever ("Why Specialist Recruiters Matter More Than Ever in the Built Environment") in a Built Environment sector this competitive for talent.

Gender share in engineering, by sector

Source: Engineers Australia / WSP, Unlocking Mid-Career Opportunities for Women in Engineering, June 2026.

Construction sits well behind the other two sectors despite having the largest current project pipeline in the country. That gap represents both the sector's biggest challenge and its clearest opportunity.

FAQs

What percentage of engineers in Australia are women?
Representation varies by sector. Women make up 15.7 percent of engineers in Professional Scientific and Technical Services and just 10 percent in construction, compared with 19 percent in education. Connexus Recruitment tracks these figures closely because they shape how firms across Sydney and Brisbane need to approach both hiring and retention.

Why do women leave engineering mid-career?
Female representation declines by around one percentage point annually through the middle years of a career, the point at which the industry can least afford to lose experienced talent. Parental leave transitions and limited flexible work options are the two factors most consistently linked to this drop. Connexus advises client firms to treat this period as a specific retention risk rather than a natural attrition curve.

Is the gender pay gap bigger in construction and engineering than other industries?
Yes. Four out of five workplaces in construction, mining, and finance report gender pay gaps above WGEA's national mid-point of 11.2 percent, and the gap in Professional Scientific and Technical Services runs five percentage points above the all-sector average. Connexus recommends firms benchmark pay by seniority level, not just department average, to see the full picture.

What is the Champions of Change Engineers Group?
It's a three-year national project, funded with 1.9 million dollars from the Australian Government, aiming to lift women's representation in engineering from 16 percent to more than 40 percent over a 10 to 15 year horizon. Connexus Recruitment sees this as a sign that gender diversity in engineering is now being treated as a national workforce priority, not just an individual employer initiative.

What can employers do to retain female engineers?
Structured return-to-work programs and paid parental leave of 13 weeks or more, shown to halve attrition after leave, are the two most evidence-backed interventions. Flexible work policy and transparent pay benchmarking round out the list. Connexus Recruitment works with engineering and built environment firms across Australia to build hiring and retention strategies around exactly these levers.

References

1. Engineers Australia & WSP, Unlocking Mid-Career Opportunities for Women in Engineering (Women in Engineering report), June 2026 — engineersaustralia.org.au/publications/australias-untapped-workforce
2. Workplace Gender Equality Agency, Tackling the Pipeline Problem in Construction Requires More Than Employer Action — wgea.gov.au/newsroom/tackling-the-pipeline-problem-construction
3. Workplace Gender Equality Agency, Employer Gender Pay Gaps Report 2024-25 — wgea.gov.au/publications/employer-gender-pay-gaps-report
4. Champions of Change Coalition, National Partnership to Accelerate Progress on Women in Engineering — championsofchangecoalition.org/resource/national-partnership-to-accelerate-progress-on-women-in-engineering
5. Engineers Australia, Re-engineering the Return to Work — engineersaustralia.org.au/news-and-media/2022/07/re-engineering-return-work
6. Australian Pathways Institute, Engineering a More Inclusive Future: Why We Need More Women in Engineering — api.edu.au/post/engineering-a-more-inclusive-future-why-we-need-more-women-in-engineering
7. gitnux, Women in Engineering Statistics: Market Data Report 2026 — gitnux.org/women-in-engineering-statistics