Laura Gilmour, Melanie Lang, Katherine Prescott, and Wai Yee Yeong. These are the four nominees for the first-ever Women in 3D Printing Innovator Award unveiled today ahead of this year’s TCT Award’s ceremony.
The names on the list hold expertise across metals, medical, academia and humanitarian efforts using additive manufacturing, and the long list, created by Women in 3D Printing’s international network of ambassadors, covered just about every nook of AM knowledge you could hope to think of.
Announced back in April, this award was founded in collaboration with the TCT Group and Women in 3D Printing, an organisation which aims to promote the achievements and opportunities for women in the sector through events, content and quarterly diversity reports. TCT has been working with the organisation since 2017, along with partner company Cyant, on a number of female-led panel sessions at our events in the UK and the U.S., with another planned for this year’s TCT Show. The award felt like a fitting celebration of those efforts.
You might be thinking (and many have asked) “why do we need a Women in 3D Printing award?” So, I figured it would be a good idea to address why the award is so important.
Some people who have been in the industry for 30 years took the news as an opportunity to reel off lists of women they had worked with back in the early days. “True pioneers of 3D printing”, they said. The problem is, when it comes to industry recognition or thought leadership, those pioneers are not the ones you usually come across in day-to-day conversations or content. There were many names on the long list for this very award, for example, who I had never come across before. After reading their profiles and achievements, I couldn't understand how they had escaped my radar.
Fittingly, at the weekend I watched David Letterman’s My Next Guest Needs No Introduction … with Tina Fey, in which he asked for her thoughts on the historical lack of female comedy writers in television, a problem he admits he was all but unaware of during his late-night talk show days. The host was honest and admitted how back then he assumed women wouldn’t want that kind of job, working until 3am in the writers’ room day in day out, writing on his show. Fey quickly snapped back, “Yeah, well, we do want to write on it, though” receiving a huge cheer, and went on to talk about how the culture at Saturday Night Live, where she became the first female head writer, changed once they brought more women into the writers' room. Attitudes changed, the jokes changed because there were more diverse voices taking part in the conversation.
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That’s just the thing, it’s not that anyone is actively pushing for a homogenous industry, it’s likely as simple as a lack of awareness of the problem in the first place. However, given the increased visibility of the problem, it is difficult to avoid. An event from earlier this year springs to mind where there wasn’t a single female speaker to be found on the bill and during the six-guy closing panel session, the first audience question was along the lines of: “Can I ask how you feel about being on a panel with no female representation?” There isn’t really a satisfying answer to that question, but the speakers gave it a good go. On the contrary, at a similar manufacturing industry event, it was refreshing to hear a male speaker from the UK Space Agency use the last few moments of his talk to call on the room to do more to bring more women on board in the sector. That job is far too often left to the women in this industry to speak out for change.
Having representation and putting role models at the forefront, does matter. In a non-related but perhaps much more universal example, I was reminded of this back in March when, after years of the Marvel Universe failing to produce a standalone female superhero movie, I couldn't help but cry with joy watching Captain Marvel and left the cinema feeling like I could kick anybody’s ass. There were so many young girls in that cinema who would have left feeling the same.
I hope that this award can be a similar source of inspiration. I hope that the names of those four nominees, who are already making waves in their respective fields, will be in those same lists reeled off by colleagues, not just in the case of awards like this but in wider conversations, when seeking out speakers, thought-leadership pieces, and so on. There is always more to be done, and we are working on it, like many in the industry, to close the gap in our output and we're open to learning how we can do better.
Until that happens, however, the more awards, panels, initiatives, whatever it takes to keep things moving in the right direction, the better.
