Over the past year, as part of a social impact study of the Global Engineer Girls initiative, researchers put exactly that question to female engineering students and recent graduates. The exercise was simple: imagine a world built by women, and a world built by men, and describe each. The students answered separately, in different countries, with no knowledge of what the others had said. The striking thing was how much they agreed.
The city built by women, they said, would be green. It would use natural materials and renewable energy. It would be full of light and colour, with trees, playgrounds and spaces designed for children, families and older people. Above all, it would be safe. "I feel safe in that world," one student said. "Even the bumps on the street will be safer." Others described eco-friendly buildings made from natural materials, and a place built with patience and attention to detail, one that might take longer to finish but would, as one student put it, be considered down to the smallest element: "Women think about everything. They think ten times about every tiny detail. It is going to take a bit longer to build, but it will be perfect."
The city built without them, in their imagination, was its opposite: greyer, more uniform, efficient but cold, with buildings that could feel almost interchangeable. The students described such a place as monotonous and a little lifeless, driven by logic with less room for warmth or play. One offered an image that stayed with the researchers: a world like that, she said, "would only have morning times, no nights."
These answers are not really a verdict on men, and the students did not offer them as one. Many were quick to say that the best city would be built by women and men together, and that balance was the point. What they were describing was not an argument for replacing one group with another. It was a description of what tends to be missing when the people who design cities, bridges, networks and machines are drawn from only half the population, and what those things might look like if the rooms where they are designed were more diverse than they currently are.
This matters because, in most of the world, those rooms are still overwhelmingly male. Women remain a small minority in engineering, and the reasons they do not enter the field, or leave it, are rarely about ability and more often about something quieter and more persistent.
Several students described being gently steered away from engineering by people who cared about them, family or teachers who worried the path would be too hard for a woman and suggested something safer. Others described the subtle, recurring assumption, in classrooms and on-site, that technical work comes more naturally to men. None of this tends to arrive as open hostility. It is small, often well-meaning, and constant, and it accumulates over years. In some of the countries, the obstacles are sharper still: in Kosovo, for instance, where fewer than one in five women are employed, the barrier can be as concrete as whether a family can afford the equipment a degree requires.
Across all of these settings, the students kept returning to one thing that helped them push through: seeing a woman who had already done it. The single most powerful encouragement, again and again, was a role model a few steps ahead, someone who had faced the same doubts and built her career anyway. "If she can do it, so can I," as one student put it.
That is the logic on which Global Engineer Girls was built. For over a decade, the initiative has supported more than 2,000 young women through their degrees and into the profession across eight countries, with training, scholarships, mentorship, practical experience and a sisterhood that crosses borders, so that a student who is the only woman in her class at home discovers she is not alone. The aim has never been to celebrate women in engineering for its own sake, but to put the people who can imagine a safer, greener, more considered city in the room where it gets designed.
This International Women in Engineering Day, that is the thought worth holding onto. The young women studying engineering today can already describe the city they would build, down to the safety of the streets and the light between the buildings. The only open question is how many of them the profession will keep long enough to let them build it.