Sphere
#38
2015
19
>>
When she was small, Ms Ng was fascinated by machinery
and electronics and loved to dismantle broken things and
discover what had gone wrong. She didn’t grow up playing with
Barbie dolls but preferred model cars. She volunteered to help
her father chop firewood, renovate their basement and even to fix
the toilet when she was small. In all these interests, she received
the unstinting support of her father, a passionate architect at HK
Electric before the family moved to Canada in the mid-1980s.
She grew up on a steady diet of HK Electric and other
engineering stories recounted by her father and his colleagues.
She chose to study Electrical Engineering at the University of
Toronto, and then decided to return to Hong Kong and join
HK Electric. Her father was very supportive at every step and
even asked his friends working in the industry to offer career
advice. “I want to follow in my father’s footsteps,” Ms Ng says.
Follow she has. Today, Ms Ng is a Protection Engineer at
HK Electric, responsible for the design, commissioning and
maintenance of the protection system which safeguards the
electricity transmission and distribution network. If a cable or
transformer breaks down, the protection system will detect
the fault and signal the circuit breaker to isolate it to keep the
remaining network functioning.
She started in the Transmission and Distribution Division/
Technical Services Department after completing the company’s
graduate trainee programme. She was the only female
operations staff member in the department and remains
so today. However, she never felt uneasy in an all-male-
environment. She became accustomed to being ‘surrounded
by boys’, as she was when studying at the University of
Toronto. She was among the few women who studied Electrical
Engineering and has made more male than female friends over
the course of a lifetime.
Ms Ng sensed a little bit of doubt from some of the veterans when
she first joined the company. There was a sense of uncertainty
as to whether a woman could do the job properly. “They didn’t
say it, but I could feel it,” she recalls. Trying to prove herself, she
doubled her efforts at work and successfully earned the respect
of her seniors and colleagues alike.
She easily blended into the team and claims that it is “nothing
special” being the only woman in the team or being the only
female manager in the department, and she puts this down to a
good team spirit.
Office and field
One challenge for women can be the field work. Before
she was promoted to managerial level, she used to spend
half of each day at worksites hauling heavy gear in stiflingly
hot temperatures. While building a primary substation, it took
her around 20 minutes to climb up stairs to the ninth floor
where her workplace was. The expansive ceilings meant the nine
floors were actually equivalent to more than 20 stories in
a normal building. All this while sharing the weight of carrying
a ‘test set’ that weighed the equivalent of two to three bags of
rice (about 15 kg).
Fortunately, Ms Ng didn’t let the hard work faze her. “I am easy-
going and outgoing, and I am able to do a job that I like, so I’m
not bothered by all these challenges.”
Another challenge she took on is an achievement that stands
today. She directed the implementation of the protection system
for a new primary substation in the heart of Hong Kong’s busy
and power-hungry Wan Chai District. It also serves the ‘Wall
Field work is women’s work too in the high-tech electrical engineering business.
