National Engineering Day: inclusive PPE design and safety lessons for site engineers
Reviewed by Joe Ashwell
First reported on New Civil Engineer
30 Second Briefing
National Engineering Day uses the simple child’s question “Can you be an engineer and wear a dress?” to challenge stereotypes that still deter many girls from civil and infrastructure careers. Female engineers describe working on site in PPE adapted for smaller frames, maternity needs and religious dress, contrasting this with ill‑fitting hi-vis, harnesses and safety boots that can compromise comfort and even safe movement on scaffolds or in excavations. The piece signals growing pressure on contractors and PPE suppliers to provide gender-inclusive, standards-compliant kit without diluting EN ISO safety requirements.
Technical Brief
- PPE must still comply with EN ISO standards for hi-vis, helmets, gloves and safety footwear.
- Harness and lanyard attachment points need correct positioning on smaller torsos to avoid fall-arrest injury.
- Poorly sized boots reduce ladder and scaffold grip area, increasing slip risk on wet steel.
- Oversized hi-vis and jackets can snag on rebar, scaffold fittings or plant, breaching safe systems.
- Maternity-compatible PPE must maintain impact, penetration and fall-arrest performance across changing body dimensions.
- Religious dress on sites is typically managed via flame-retardant, close-fitting layers under standard PPE.
- Wider adoption of gender-specific sizing is framed as a safety-critical control, not a welfare “nice-to-have”.
Our Take
New Civil Engineer appears repeatedly in our database as a convenor of early-career initiatives and awards (e.g. the Beyond Design Early Careers Bridges Challenge and Heathrow’s innovation competition), so a National Engineering Day piece on identity and dress likely feeds into its wider effort to reshape what ‘typical’ engineers look like to entrants.
By linking personal presentation to engineering identity, New Civil Engineer is extending the same platform it uses for awards and conferences into values signalling; for practitioners, that can influence how client-facing organisations frame site dress codes, office policies and mentoring for diverse early-career staff.
Prepared by collating external sources, AI-assisted tools, and Geomechanics.io’s proprietary mining database, then reviewed for technical accuracy & edited by our geotechnical team.
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