A little doll from Donegal has donned her hard hat and high-vis gear for an exciting week of work this week.

The Lottie Tour is well underway this Engineers Week as 150 volunteers bring Lottie Dolls to their labs, offices and work sites to show the world what a little girl can do in STEM careers.

#lottietour

Lottie is a doll created by Letterkenny-based company Arklu. She is a real-life child inspired doll with an ambition to disrupt gender stereotyping in the toy aisles.

For the third year running, members of the Women’s Engineering Society (WES) have brought Lottie dolls to work and shared photos on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram with the hashtag #LottieTour.

Lottie has been seen test driving Aston Martins, inspecting construction sites, investigating fires and researching the human brain.

The aim of the project is to present images of what a career in engineering might look like by use of a Lottie Doll, to help capture the imagination of young girls and boys.

Over 150 engineers, female and male from all over the world, have been involved in taking photos using Lottie Dolls borrowed from WES, coordinated by the WES Young Members’ Board.

Lottie Dolls donated an additional 50 Lotties to the Top 50 Women in Engineering 2018 winners so they could participate too.

Lottie has also visited schools in Ireland and the UK to highlight the variety and excitement of a career in engineering to school age girls.

Lottie Dolls MD Ian Harkin said: “This is the third year we have worked with WES during #TEWeek, last year we reached over 500,000 people during the week with really powerful imagery of engineers in their workplace together with Lottie. The images then get shown to children by their parents and teachers by following #LottieTour and #TEWeek18 on social media. We have potentially 10 times the number of companies/people participating this year.”

Mr Harkin continued: “If you can see it you can be it” really rings true here, there are so many exciting careers that we are privileged to get an insight into during the week, the hope is that it will spark an interest for a future potential career in engineering or science.”

If you would like to follow Lottie’s Tour this year, all of the images from the week can be viewed by searching #LottieTour on Twitter, Facebook or Instagram, or following @YMB1919 and @Lottie_dolls on Twitter.