Despite the fact that leading figures in the engineering community have called for the hard hat to be banned from promotional and educational material, it remains dominant, giving the wrong impression of the role according to Sainsbury Management Fellows' (SMF) 2016 Hard Hat Index.

The Index was compiled by tracking the number of advertisements and articles that feature hard hats in 17 engineering publications from May 2015 to April 2016.

Although this is the fourth year in a row that the data has been tracked, the use of hard hats in the engineering media is as high as the previous year's Index, with 257 images appearing in the 17 titles monitored over 12 months. This figure is the highest since the Index was launched in 2013.