Welcome to Our Voices, an oral history podcast by The Common Room in association with Dr Andy Clark, a research associate with Newcasle's Oral Hisotry collective. Andy chats to Ruth about the gender expectations she faced when making career choices at school. Ruth shares her career progression from truck garage receptionist to designing umbilical pipelines. Ruth recalls being a woman engineer navigating different attitudes and expectations in a male-dominated workforce and reflects on the small number of women applying to apprenticeships today. Also, they chat about the impact of deindustrialisation and globalisation in the North East.