Interplas Insights Podcast Ep. 9: Grants for female-led businesses

In preparation for International Women in Engineering Day (23 June), London-based manufacturing specialist Get It Made has announced a new grant to encourage the growth of female employment within UK engineering, design and manufacturing industries.

We caught up with Luke Smoothy, Director, and Aiza Sadirbayeva, Project Manager, to find out more about the grant, and learn about Aiza's experience of studying to be an engineer. Listen to the interview via the podcast - full transcript follows below.

Luke Smoothy: So I'm Luke I'm the founder and director of Get It Made. And I started Get It Made about eight years ago, which sounds weird because it feels like it's only been a couple of years. We still feel like we're in startup mode, but we do have a lot of hallmarks of being a much more established business. And in short, we're manufacturing experts and we can help with prototyping, hardware and full-scale production.

We offer a full range of manufacturing services, right from injection moulding and CNC machining, which includes plastics to things like aluminium extrusions, die castings and even 3D printing. So we offer quite a wide range of manufacturing processes. And what makes us different from traditional manufacturers is that we outsource everything.

So we don't manufacture anything in house. Most manufacturers will always outsource something, whether it's the tooling or the finishing; we outsource everything. And the way we do that is we partner with a very small number of manufacturing partners, both locally in the UK and internationally. And we only work with people who we trust and we've had a multi-year relationship with. So for injection moulding particularly we can produce tooling for moulded plastic parts in the UK or China. And sometimes we'll produce the tooling in China, get the first run of production completed and then ship the tool to the UK for long-term production. So we we have this hybrid ability to offer things.

Dave Gray: So Aiza, question for you, what has your experience been of joining the workforce in what is quite a male dominated sector?

Aiza Sadirbayeva: I personally haven't experienced any gender imbalance, but it's also is my first ever full-time job. And I don't want my experience to disregard all other examples of misogyny and sexism present in the workplace. But so far I haven't experienced thankfully, any gender imbalance.

Luke Smoothy: I think what's probably quite interesting was that your background was medical engineering at uni, and there was a bigger imbalance there wasn't there?

Aiza Sadirbayeva: Yes. I studied in two universities in America and in England. And unfortunately in both universities, we had over a hundred students in engineering and probably only 10-15 students were females. In my course, we only had me and another girl. It's not even that people treat you differently, but there could be this internal pressure of proving that you're good enough.

Dave Gray: I want to ask you now about what you're doing for this year's International Women in Engineering day. Tell us about the idea that you've had, where did it come from and what are you planning to do?

Luke Smoothy: What I've observed is people we come into contact with most I'd say are probably 75 to 80% male. From Get It Made, we've run a few different grants before. Some have been dedicated to specific industries like robotics and subsea, and say for founders under 30. And we'd been considering a women's engineering grant for a while and what we came across was the International Women in Engineering Day that's run by the Women's Engineering Society. And we thought, "okay, this is great. It's only in a couple of months time. Let's finally get this grant off the ground". We're conscious that we didn't want to seem like we're just 'diversity washing', and just using it as purely a marketing tactic, but I do believe that businesses can and should do good. And this is one that benefits us and our community at the same time. We're just hoping that it will support female founders and co-founders and lead engineers in small companies.

Dave Gray: Beyond the grant, is there any other support that the winning candidate will receive?

Luke Smoothy: Yes, definitely. We have a great team here, and we've got a wealth of knowledge so we can help. So sometimes people approach us when they might not have a fully defined product and they might need a bit of extra support. So what we've got is years of experience in understanding how to manufacture something. So someone might come to us with an idea, say, "hey, I need to CNC machine this part", and we could say "have you thought about extruding this and then machining a small plate, because it will make production much more efficient, cheaper, better, lighter". So we can give feedback on the 'design for manufacture' perspective. And obviously we've got a lot of experience in working with the industry.

Dave Gray: And how do people apply, and what's the deadline for applications?

Luke Smoothy: The deadline is the 31st of July. People can apply online, we've got a website, get-made.co.uk/grants. And you'll find some of the other grants we've done in the past. At the top, there should be the women in engineering grant, and people can just fill out a form there and just answer some simple questions, like, 'how will this brand impact your business?'; 'what benefits will it give to society as a whole?'. Maybe it's an impact led business or if it's going to help the environment? So we're looking for businesses who are making hardware that our society needs as well. We just want to help businesses, small businesses, startups that have a female lead in the business.

Dave Gray: I'm keen to ask for any thoughts you have on what tangible steps can we take as a society to improve gender imbalances within engineering and to also help close the skills gap whilst promoting diversity as well.

Aiza Sadirbayeva: I think greater representation will be quite important. I grew up in Kazakhstan where I feel like I haven't met many female engineers. I didn't even know I could be one, never even crossed my mind.

But then when I came to America as an exchange student my host family were a whole family of engineers. And the older sister was a medical engineer and talking to her and seeing her journey, it really inspired me. And I also went to the same university to do my foundation. Now, a couple of years after, this is where I am right now. Just graduated and working at Get It Made. And I think now that my sister is growing up and she's seven years younger and she's already thinking, I think she's quite set on being an engineer too. Maybe not a medical one, but she's going to college. And she already knows she's going to be studying like chemistry, biology, and physics - she's really set on it. And I think it's because she saw my journey - and representation inspires us and we want to do the same.