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Help inform our next campaign

Natalie Boon

Hi everyone!

Hope you're safe and well.

We champion equality, diversity and inclusion here at the IET - and frequently run campaigns to challenge outdated stereotypes and make our profession a more welcoming and inclusive place.

We're starting work on our next campaign - and we need your help!

Our focus for this phase is on how we can take real, tangible steps to unite our community to make engineering and technology a career path that is accessible to everyone.

So, what’s your experience? Tell us by adding your thoughts below.

We want to hear from everyone, and we mean everyone. We believe that continuing to thrive in this sector can only happen if we all connect and work together, and that means we need all viewpoints – positive, negative, and even the grey area in between!

So whether you have had good or bad experiences, whatever your background, and whether you identify with different protected characteristics or not – we want to hear from you.

And if you’re comfortable sharing your thoughts in a little more detail, we’re looking for a broad mix of individuals to be interviewed in the next few weeks. You can submit your details for consideration via this link.

And if you would prefer to remain anonymous but still have a viewpoint you’d like to share – no problem! You can send us your thoughts using this form instead.

Thank you in advance for your support.

Parents
  • Former Community Member
    0 Former Community Member

    A couple of things. Despite all the Excellent work done by WIE and others, it is really difficult to get young women and girls to consider engineering. Partly due to the dearth of physics teachers in schools, but that can be dealt with by simply requiring Maths level 3 qualification, but also with the general perception of engineering in the media.

    All the recruitment brochures and so on have women on the front, so that doesn't seem to make much difference

    I met a man in asocial situation and asked him what is occupation was, he told me he was an engineer. “really? me too!” I said, to the mixture of disbelief and fear on his face. turns out he sold lawnmowers to golf clubs, maintained them too. Now I would class him as a technician, along with the person who will someday respond to the following message on the hot pasty cabinet in my local co op. “ this machine is out of order, and engineer has been called to repair it”

    Technicians require some physical strength and agility, neither of these things are necessary for a graduate engineer. We need to change the perception by changing the vocabulary we use.

    BTW, one area that has improved in 40 years is in the area of misogyny. Maybe its respect due to my age, but I get hardly any comments around my my lack of skills/knowledge/authority being because of my gender, whereas they were commonplace in my twenties

     

Reply
  • Former Community Member
    0 Former Community Member

    A couple of things. Despite all the Excellent work done by WIE and others, it is really difficult to get young women and girls to consider engineering. Partly due to the dearth of physics teachers in schools, but that can be dealt with by simply requiring Maths level 3 qualification, but also with the general perception of engineering in the media.

    All the recruitment brochures and so on have women on the front, so that doesn't seem to make much difference

    I met a man in asocial situation and asked him what is occupation was, he told me he was an engineer. “really? me too!” I said, to the mixture of disbelief and fear on his face. turns out he sold lawnmowers to golf clubs, maintained them too. Now I would class him as a technician, along with the person who will someday respond to the following message on the hot pasty cabinet in my local co op. “ this machine is out of order, and engineer has been called to repair it”

    Technicians require some physical strength and agility, neither of these things are necessary for a graduate engineer. We need to change the perception by changing the vocabulary we use.

    BTW, one area that has improved in 40 years is in the area of misogyny. Maybe its respect due to my age, but I get hardly any comments around my my lack of skills/knowledge/authority being because of my gender, whereas they were commonplace in my twenties

     

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