Date & Time:
14th April 2026
Location:
Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
Venue:
Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
Overview
The WOMEN IN ENGINEERING (WiE) conference is a policy relevant, outcomes-driven leadership forum, not a symbolic diversity session. It will highlight how women engineers, technologists, entrepreneurs and policymakers are directly shaping Saudi Arabia’s infrastructure, energy systems, cities, climate strategy and industrial ecosystems under the Kingdom’s pathbreaking Vision 2030.
The conference explicitly addresses:
- The structural gaps in workforce participation, leadership progression and workplace design
- The economic case for gender-balanced engineering teams
- The technological leadership of women in sustainable construction, HVACR, digital buildings, energy transition, and megaproject delivery
Every government official, developer, EPC head and manufacturer attending should leave with one clear takeaway, “If we do not structurally enable women in engineering, we are structurally limiting Saudi Arabia’s innovation capacity.”
Rationale for THE WOMEN IN ENGINEERING CONFERENCE
WOMEN IN ENGINEERING (WiE) at The Great HVACR Fair 2026 is positioned as a national competitiveness and development platform, not merely a diversity forum. It is designed to demonstrate how women engineers are becoming critical technical leaders in Saudi Arabia’s infrastructure, energy transition, smart cities, climate resilience and industrial localisation under the country’s Vision 2030 framework.
The platform will examine how structural enablers, governance systems and workplace design directly influence engineering productivity, innovation capacity and national economic outcomes.
Saudi Arabia is undergoing one of the largest infrastructure and industrial transformations in the world. Delivering Vision 2030 successfully requires:
- Advanced engineering leadership
- High-performance multidisciplinary teams
- Deep-tech industrialisation
- Climate-resilient infrastructure
- Smart, data-driven built environments
Women today represent a rapidly growing technical workforce across these domains. The Conference aims to examine systemic workplace, mobility, leadership and policy frameworks, and seeks to understand if they limit full technical contribution in any way whatsoever.
The WiE platform has, therefore, been created to:
- Provide women with an equal platform in strategic engineering discourse
- Shift the conversation from representation to structural enablement
- Deliver actionable recommendations to government, regulators and industry
Key Objectives include:
- Positioning women engineers as core national development assets
- Highlighting women’s leadership across:
- Energy transition
- Climate-resilient urban development
- Smart buildings and AI-driven infrastructure
- Giga-project delivery
- Industrial innovation and entrepreneurship
- Identifying policy, governance and workplace mechanisms that enable high-performance female technical leadership
- Aligning corporate inclusion strategies with national engineering productivity goals
Key Topics
The following topics are globally benchmarked subject areas (Singapore and The Netherlands have climate-resilient urban programmes led by women engineers) with clear relevance to Saudi Arabia’s mega-infrastructure programme…
- Engineering greener cities under Vision 2030 – women as urban climate strategists
- Architecture of equality – designing workplaces where women engineers thrive
- Women driving the energy transition – from grid to gigawatts
- Climate-adaptive architecture & HVAC Load engineering
- Smart buildings, digital twins and AI-driven operations
- Women STEM entrepreneurs and deep-tech founders
- Engineering the talent pipeline – from classroom to construction site
- Women leading megaprojects in Saudi Arabia – multidisciplinary systems integration
- and more …
Delegates
Why attend?
The WOMEN IN ENGINEERING (WIE) Conference presents an…
- Opportunity to meet and discuss with top-level women engineers in multiple disciplines across Saudi Arabia
- Opportunity to listen to presentations and panel discussions on a unique topic that has high impact on socio-economic and sustainable development initiatives tied to engineering disciplines
- Opportunity to view technological and engineering-related exhibits and displays and develop a granular understanding of how they tie up with the needs of infrastructure and superstructure projects in Saudi Arabia
Speakers
Dr. Eman M. Alhajji
Chief Executive Officer
The Golden Ratio Holding Institute for Research, Development and Innovation.
Surendar Balakrishnan
Co-Founder & Editorial Director
CPI Industry
Engr. Alshaima Abdullah
Chairperson
Saudi Women Engineering Society
Eng. Javeria Asad
HVAC Technical Sales Manager
Windmason Arabia
Keeva Duffey
Global Sr. Advisor Sustainability
ChildFund International
Frédéric Paillé
Co-Founder & Commercial Director
CPI Industry
Sponsors & Partners
STRATEGIC KNOWLEDGE PARTNER
STRATEGIC KNOWLEDGE PARTNER
STRATEGIC HVACR RECRUITMENT PARTNER
OFFICIAL PUBLICATION
Testimonials
Here's what participants, attendees and sponsors think of CPI Industry Conferences...
An interesting gathering of industry professionals with great insights
- Omnia Halawani, Co-Founder & Co-CEO, GRFN Global
Getting better every time with technology upgrades and innovative mindsets... connecting the giants in one platform
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CPI is always ahead of the curve when it comes to raising key topics that will promote fruitful discussions between various stakeholders.
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