Meet Carlien Bou-Chedid - first female president of GhIE
A landmark event took place in Sunyani when Ing. (Mrs) Carlien Bou-Chedid broke the jinx of the male-dominated Ghana Institution of Engineers (GhIE) to be inaugurated as the 48th President of the over 5,000-member institution.
Advertisement
For quite a long time areas such as engineering, mathematics and the sciences generally have remained the bona fide domain of males, and females who defied the odds to venture into these fields continued to be subservient to their male counterparts.
And for a solid 48 years, males in the GhIE continued their dominance at the helm of affairs of this noble profession until Ing. (Mrs) Bou-Chedid shattered the glass ceiling this year to become the first female president of the institution.
The 48th Presidential Inauguration and Banquet, which brought Ing. (Mrs) Bou-Chedid to her seat, climaxed the 2017 Annual General Meeting of the GhIE which took place in Sunyani on Friday, March 31, 2017.
The tall, ever-smiling beautiful engineer took the mantle of leadership from Ing. Dr Kwame Boakye and received a lot of commendation from the Minister of Gender, Children and Social Protection, Madam Otiko Afisa Djaba, who graced the occasion to affirm the strides being made by women in the hitherto male-dominated areas.
By becoming the president of the institution, Ing. (Mrs) Bou-Chedid turned the saying “like-father-like-son” in favour of women by stepping into the shoes of her late father, Ing E.Y.S Engmann, a civil engineer who was a Past President of the GhIE.
Development
“I look back on my life and realise that there were several factors that influenced me to become an engineer and remain in the profession. There was nothing special about me. I was just fortunate to have been impacted by these factors,” she stated in her inaugural address.
As a daughter of an engineer and a mother, a teacher who established her own school, the North Ridge Lyceum, Ing. (Mrs) Bou-Chedid, explained that “these facts alone, however, though they contributed, do not account for my being in this position today.”
According to her, she grew up in a recently independent Ghana and got inspiration from science-based children’s television programmes that she realises must have been carefully selected.
“My parents understood the need to encourage the natural creativity of children and I had access to items such as batteries, bulbs, magnets, science sets and so on, with which I could explore.
“Having ample leisure time also meant that I could engage in many pursuits and acquire the diversity of experiences that are said to be so important to developing innovation in children,” she pointed out.
Ing. (Mrs) Bou-Chedid explained in her inaugural address that she engaged in activities as diverse as sewing, painting, playing musical instruments, ballet dancing, swimming and carpentry, among other extra curricula activities, during her childhood days.
At Wesley Girls High School, she was presented with great female role models such as Marie Curie, the only person to win Nobel Prizes in two sciences, Physics and Chemistry, and Helen Keller, the first deaf and blind person to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree.
Students of the school were required to read books on the two. She also attended Presec at Legon in Accra.
Academic profile
Ing. (Mrs) Bou-Chedid is currently a Structural/Earthquake Engineering Consultant with more than 30 years of experience covering a wide range of activities.
She holds a BSc (Hons) in Civil Engineering from the University of Surrey, UK (1883) and an MSc in Earthquake Engineering and Structural Dynamics from the Imperial College of Science and Technology and Medicine, London, UK (1999).
Ing. (Mrs) Bou-Chedid became the first Ghanaian female structural engineer when she joined the Architectural Engineering Services Corporation (AESC) from 1985 to 1993 where she was engaged in designing structures, supervising the work of contractors and managing engineering projects.
She has been actively involved in the activities of the GhIE from the early days of her career.
She became the first Ghanaian female to achieve full Corporate Membership of the institution in 1990 and was elected as the first female Council Member of the institution in 1992.
She later joined the staff of the institution’s secretariat as Director, Education and Training from 1993 to 1998.
After a period of private practice, Ing. (Mrs) Bou-Chedid returned to the GhIE to serve as the Executive Secretary from 2003 to 2010. Here she also achieved one of the firsts as the first woman to hold such a challenging position.
She has authored technical papers on building construction, seismic risk and vulnerability of buildings in Ghana, including a paper on “Structural Failures within the City of Accra” which was awarded the prize for best paper during the conference on Structural Engineering Analysis and Modeling (SEAM 3) in Kumasi in July 1993.
Ing. (Mrs) Bou-Chedid is a Fellow of the GhIE, a Member of the Ghana Earthquake Society and a member of first class of Housner Fellows of the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute (EERI).
She has served on several boards, including the Volta River Authority, Road Fund Board and the Cape Coast Polytechnic Council.
Currently, she is serving on the boards of Women’s World Banking Ghana Limited, North Ridge Lyceum and the CSIR College of Science and Technology (CCST).