Girl, Interrupted

Female engineers are as busy as the men in the automotive industry and just as good at their job – we intercept one working in Continental.

- Shreejit Changaroth

MARILYN Yong, a software manager at Continental Automotive Singapore, has been with the company for 10 years. She graduated from Nanyang Technological University with a bachelor’s degree in Electrical & Electronic Engineering, majoring in Communication.

Her pre-university school days were spent in Raffles Junior College and Raffles Girls’ School.

Before she joined Continental in 2006, she was a software engineer developing PDA phones.

Marilyn is currently in Continental’s ID business unit (Instrumentation & Driver HMI), which specialises in instrument clusters, climate control panels, secondary displays and related on-board devices.

Instrument clusters in her case refer to the dashboard components that indicate vehicle information such as speed, fuel level and warnings.

Her department is divided into four different customer segments, with Marilyn doing software development for Asian car manufacturers on a global scale.

How do you feel as a woman working in a male-dominated professional environment?

In my business unit, we have a female-to-male ratio of one to five, which is around the same as when I was in university.

But we have female representation at every level and in every function group. Generally, I feel there are many women in my company.