Highlighting the fact that a "major challenge" is being faced by the UK in increasing the number of women employed in tech industry, a business group - the EEF manufacturers' organization - recently said that the country needs to start a national campaign for encouraging more girls to study technology and engineering subjects, so that the number of women on company boards can be increased.

The EEF calls for a country-wide campaign to encourage more women engineers in the UK is apparently an upshot of the group's study which revealed that 90 percent of the engineers in the country are male; with women comprising merely 20 percent of the workforce in the manufacturing and engineering sectors.

Comparing the UK percentage of female engineers to 26 percent women engineers in Sweden, and 20 percent and 18 percent women engineers respectively in Italy and Spain, the EEF study said that there has been only 1 percentage-point increase - to 6 percent - in the number of women engineers in the UK since 2008.

According to the EEF study, women occupied only 19 percent of the board positions in the 29 manufacturing firms in the FTSE 100; with the percentage being marginally higher than the average of 17 percent female board-members for all the companies.

Drawing attention to the UK's failure in encouraging young women to study science-related subjects, EEF CEO Terry Scuoler said that women were "substantially under-represented" in manufacturing, especially at a time when "industry needs to be tapping into every potential talent pool."