They believe it shouldn't be in the news, but in the Netherlands women in technical positions are still the exception rather than the rule. At Koldijk, three women are working in distinctly technical jobs.....

Women specialists in various technical jobs in installation technology

At the Industry & Infra business unit, Titia Jager feels like a fish in water, and in Lelystad they wouldn't want to be a day without the costing and planning engineers Linda van der Kreeft and Germa Romeijn, women specialists of which there should be more.

On 1 March 2007, she became the first Koldijk project planning engineer at the Lelystad branch, which she does not view as anything special. Germa Romeijn's father had a technical job and she liked the technology sector. So she attended lower vocational technical training (lts), went on to technical secondary education (mts) and became a service technician, in the heavy industry environment, no less. "Of course, in case of breakdowns I was sometimes asked whether they could speak to the technician himself. But if you just do your job well, and get things going again, they become used to you very quickly. In addition, ever since my first year at the lts, I was of course the only woman in a men's world.

At my previous employer, the work involved more and more paper work and what I wanted was to be closer to the technical side. People in industry tend to look condescendingly at 'the world of cables and power points', but it turned out to have significantly more challenges than I thought. When a part-time job also proved to be no problem, I didn't take long to decide. It has been a good choice. I like the set-up and the work is becoming more enjoyable by the day."

Titia de Jager has been an electronic technician for more than ten years, the last few years as control panel engineer in the workshop of Koldijk's Industry & Infra business unit in Zwolle. Already when she was little she wanted to become an electronic technician, and at the lts she accordingly opted for the electronic engineering course. Not everybody understood that, but by now she is fully at home at Koldijk. "The men in my team regard me as just another colleague".