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We champion equality, diversity and inclusion here at the IET - and frequently run campaigns to challenge outdated stereotypes and make our profession a more welcoming and inclusive place.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

  • 0

    Andy Millar: 

    Oh dear, I think I need to go and find the last of the afternoon sun after all that…

    Wait ten years and you'll be praying for the monsoon….. no, wait, sorry, that's another thread ……..  :-)

  • 0

    After 35 years working in an almost totally male environment (across two very different engineering industries) I have spent the last 5 years working in an environment where 50% of my close colleagues are female. I have also spent many years trying to recruit professional engineers, and finding (like many others) that it is extremely difficult to find good staff. 

    So why (rhetorical question) do we seem to go out of our way to discourage 50% of our potential engineering resource? 

    Speaking to my female colleagues, and others I meet (e.g. I am pleased to be a Mentor in the excellent Women in Rail programme) most or all have absolute horror stories to tell of the way they have been treated through their careers. I see one of my close colleagues, who is doing much of the engineering on our projects, left out of emails and sidelined in conversations. I see another, an FIET who is not just senior to me but a senior figure in our industry, who is ignored if there is a man (e.g.  me) with her - begging of course the response from me “you need to talk to her, she's the boss!!" And so on.

    Yes, as per the post above, many people in the UK don't see a problem. Because if you're a white male then you don't have a problem. Except for wondering why you can't find enough good engineers to recruit…

    Some people make better engineers than others (and remembering that the term “engineer” covers a huge range of skills and attributes). Some people have different sex, gender, race and ethnicity to others. In my personal experience, which is pretty wide in the engineering field by now, the graphs of these two areas are orthogonal. But the prejudices in our industry (again speaking w.r.t the UK) on all these issues are huge.

     

    I came into engineering because I was interested in creativity, innovation, and exploring all possible approaches for solving problems. What I found, and seem to have spent the rest of my career battling against, is significant sectors of the profession obsessed with maintaining the status quo…the absolute opposite of what had attracted me. 

    Oh dear, I think I need to go and find the last of the afternoon sun after all that…

    Wishing you all the best with this initiative…keep at it!!!!

    Thanks,

    Andy

  • 0

    James Smith: 
     

    Given responses to previous posts in this community I feel we need to discuss why we need these initiatives - it is not universally accepted that there is even an issue, let alone a need to take action.

    In the 1970's, one-third of the graduate students in math at my British undergrad university were women. I wondered why so few, given that over half of people are women. Then I went to University of California, Berkeley, known for its progressive attitudes to women and minorities – and it was one in ten. At the same time, computer science was starting up at UCB and well over half the upper-division students were women. But look at Silicon Valley nowadays and it's wall-to-wall bros. 

    I have thought, for fifty years now, that there are social reasons for such things that we do not necessarily understand well. And if we did understand them, we'd probably all have a more productive life all around. Who to inquire after them and try to figure them out but the professional society? I think the IET has to ask, and regularly. 

  • 0

    James Smith: 
     

    Given responses to previous posts in this community I feel we need to discuss why we need these initiatives - it is not universally accepted that there is even an issue, let alone a need to take action.

    But how would you know whether or not there's a need to take action if you don't ask if anybody has a problem?

  • 0

    Given responses to previous posts in this community I feel we need to discuss why we need these initiatives - it is not universally accepted that there is even an issue, let alone a need to take action.

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