Female engineers behind the biggest UK construction

It has traditionally been seen as a male-dominated world - and to this day, heavy engineering is an industry that struggles to attract women, especially in the UK. Britain has the lowest proportion of female engineers in Europe, at just eight per cent. But there's one project that's been groundbreaking… both literally and figuratively.

Almost a third of the engineers on the £15 billion Crossrail project, the East-West London rail line due to open next year, are women, thanks to a concerted effort to increase the diversity of the workforce. Here are just some of those women making Europe's biggest construction project come to fruition. One of the project engineers, Rachel Morris, said: "When I was a little girl I was utterly ignorant of engineering." She went to Leeds University expecting to become an architect - but 'soon discovered I was terrible at architecture, so I did civil engineering instead'.

At the age of 24, another site engineer Chloe Etheridge has already been working on Crossrail for four-and-a-half years, starting as an apprentice. Another engineer, Houloud El Hakim, 30, said: "I am responsible for technical assurance. It's a huge responsibility, because it covers the building itself, the tunnels, the platforms, the escalators, the cameras, everything from the tiles to the electricity. It is designed to last 120 years."

-AA International Desk