CHAPTER 27 - Holding Their Own in a Man's World

Summary

“I wanted to see if I could handle a full building contract from piling to completion as a main contractor.”

— Rosaline Ng Siew Lay, CSE Pioneer

ROSALINE NG SIEW LAY REMEMBERS the scene vividly. She was a lady engineer boss in the foreign land of Indonesia. There were 2,000 local workers holding placards and shouting at the top of their voices demanding for better pay. They looked menacing –– these burly and rugged men towering way above her. The spunky pioneer did not shy away. “I put myself in their shoes, calmed them down and settled the dispute,” recalled Rosaline.

Overcoming challenges and breaking new ground is a constant theme in her career. During the recession year of 1985, Rosaline started off as a site supervisor with Teamcon, a contractor. Her monthly pay was a paltry $1,000 but that did not deter her. “I used it as a platform to learn,” she said. Rosaline proved herself and rose all the way to become a project director.

That was just the beginning. In 1998, she was headhunted to join Environ. Eager to push her boundaries, she jumped at the opportunity to build an eight-storey office building with two basement car parks. “I wanted to see if I could handle a full building contract from piling to completion as a main contractor,” she said.

She did but the satisfaction was temporal. When the familiar itch for uncharted waters returned, she moved to a firm which sent her to Jakarta to build a small shopping mall. Her good performance gained her the trust of her bosses. She was entrusted with prestigious projects such as the Sun Plaza Shopping Mall in Medan and Bulgari Resort and St. Regis Resort in Bali. From there she went on to build a coal-fired power plant in a gold mining site in central Kalimantan. Currently, Rosaline is in Singapore with Cityneon, a public listed firm. She handles all its projects at Universal Studios in Sentosa.

Rosaline's breaching of the glass ceiling is a testament that women are equal to men in the demanding world of civil engineering. There were 27 lady NTI pioneers in the civil engineering course. Fourteen of them became technical managers, structural engineers, project engineers and consultant engineers.