When Kerris Boulton started out in engineering, she was told there were no women’s toilets on the shop floor. The message was clear, even if it was never said outright: this isn’t a place for you.

She stayed anyway. And she’s spent the years since making sure the next generation of women don’t have to fight quite so hard to belong.

Kerris is our Technical Project Manager here at Electrica, and her route into engineering is anything but straightforward. She began as a mechanical maintenance engineer, one of just two women at her college, before switching to electronics and completing an apprenticeship that would prove to be a turning point. In 2018, she was put forward for the WorldSkills UK Industrial Electronics competition and came home with a silver medal.

That medal opened doors. It also gave Kerris a platform, and she has used it deliberately ever since.

365 Faces of STEM

In March 2025, Kerris was approached on LinkedIn by Enginuity, a skills and workforce development organisation she’d been connected to since her WorldSkills days, and invited to take part in their 365 Faces of STEM campaign. The year-long initiative celebrates women, and their allies, in engineering and manufacturing, shining a light on the people helping to shift the culture of the sector.

Kerris was featured in Week 3. Her story of persistence, reinvention and advocacy was exactly the kind the campaign was built around.

A year on, in March 2026, she was invited back. Enginuity brought together all the campaign’s featured faces for a celebratory event at Millennium Point in Birmingham, and what Kerris found there stayed with her.

“The majority of people in the room were women,” she reflects. “At different stages of their careers, having faced all kinds of different barriers, but all there for the same reason. It felt genuinely empowering.”

A career built on persistence

Kerris’s path hasn’t been without its difficulties. The early comments, “no place for crying in engineering,” were just the start. She was the only woman on her university course. She navigated personal challenges alongside professional ones. And as an LGBTQ+ woman in a sector that has historically struggled with inclusion, she has had to carve out space for herself more than once.

But rather than step back, she stepped up.

Kerris became a STEM Ambassador and has attended events at the Houses of Parliament. She has spoken in campaigns for Stonewall, including their Young Futures initiative, where she shared her experience as an LGBTQ+ woman in engineering with honesty and purpose. She currently sits on the WorldSkills UK Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Advisory Group, helping shape how the organisation approaches inclusion at a strategic level. In February 2026, she travelled to Glasgow to deliver a series of inspire talks to college students, challenging stereotypes, encouraging participation in WorldSkills UK competitions, and showing learners that engineering is a career for them, whoever they are.

What this means for Electrica

Although Kerris moved from the technical side into project management after completing her degree, she remains firmly rooted in the electronics world and is passionate about bringing more people into it.

We’re proud to have her on the team, and not just for the work she does for us day to day. The talks, the campaigns, the committee work, it all reflects something we genuinely believe in at Electrica: that the best teams are built from a mix of backgrounds, perspectives and experiences. Creating an environment where everyone can do their best work isn’t just the right thing to do. It makes us better at what we do.

Kerris puts it simply. She wants the next generation to see someone who looks like them in engineering and to know that the door is open.

That’s the kind of colleague, and the kind of thinking, we want more of.

You can read Kerris’s feature in the 365 Faces of STEM campaign here, and follow her work on LinkedIn.