Western Sydney Women in STEM award winner Mai Mai Yeung on Western Sydney Airport

One of the biggest infrastructure projects in Australia’s history is benefiting from the expertise of some of the country’s most brilliant minds, including world-class engineer Mai Mai Yeung.

Mai Mai Yeung has won the Western Sydney Woman in STEM award. She has more than 35 years of experience in the engineering and construction industry. Picture: Gaye Gerard

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There is no doubt that the impending Western Sydney Airport represents one of the single largest projects in our region’s history, so it’s perhaps no surprise that some of the state’s best engineers have been enlisted in the project.

Following a career spanning over 35 years, which included designing some of the infrastructure around Sydney Olympic Park, western Sydney’s Mai Mai Yeung will form part of the team assigned to engineer the airport runway’s lighting system at the complex.

Speaking with the Daily Telegraph, Ms Yeung spoke of her excitement and the importance of the project she was undertaking.

Ms Yeung is working on the most significant infrastructure project in Australia – Western Sydney Airport as Interface Manager in Sydney, Australia. Picture: Gaye Gerard

“The airport project I am definitely enjoying working on,” she said.

“In an airport with a lot of expected traffic, the lighting system we are engineering is vital and

without careful design, aircraft couldn’t safely fly here.”

While Ms Yeung is one of many world-class engineers around the state, she is one of only a few that is female.

Making up less than 13 per cent of the entire engineering workforce and on the decline, it’s a disparity issue that has become a focus in recent years for the industry to address.

Created in 2019, the Engineering for Australia Taskforce aimed to combat the issue, with leading professors from universities in Australia collaborating to find the reasons why females were turning their back on the industry.

The Western Sydney Airport is set to open in 2026.

Findings from this taskforce indicated that STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and

Mathematics) related activities often had low-visibility in secondary schools and on the occasions that they did, boys often received more guidance and feedback from teachers in comparison to girls.

Being a former chair for the Women in Engineering of Engineers Australia, the stark reality of the situation has not escaped Ms Yeung.

While agreeing with much of the sentiment from the report, she has called for intern and graduate opportunities in engineering to be more enticing to ensure a steady future pipeline of employees in years to come.

“We are losing numbers every year in engineering and we need to do be doing more.”

“At the moment, we are losing university students to jobs in other sectors which require similar degrees because they offer more enticing roles … whether it be civil engineering or even project management I urge students to give it a go rather than leave before they have even tried it.”

Ms Yeung was the 2020 winner of the Western Sydney Women in STEM Award in a testament to her ongoing work at Western Sydney Airport.