Learn to go alone

Rose Mary Farenden, a senior executive with the Ford Motor Company, has revealed what life was like as the only woman in the mechanical engineering class at Queen's University, Belfast, in the early 1980s.

In the course's first days, the class marched together from one building to the next. Ms Farenden, trying to blend in, followed as the group turned to enter the building, then turned again.

"I looked up to discover that I had followed the entire group right into the gents. From then on, I never was one to follow the crowd," she says.