D1nz, Dawn Fitt, David Plummer and PeterRT have all brought up a major issue which has not been raised so far, namely the status of engineering as a career. I don't have a solution, but I do have a perspective, having worked in engineering (academic and industrial) in five European countries and California.

In the US, the engineer is the guy who drives the train. In the UK, there is the guy who oils the joints on the wheels at the terminus. Both of these are appropriate uses of the term, and they won't go away. But this stereotype is by no means the sole problem, because in the US engineers of our sort are more highly valued than they appear to be in the UK. Let me talk about the US and Germany.

When the Bay Bridge broke during the 1989 SF earthquake, and the elevated freeway collapsed in Oakland, the people called in to investigate and fix were the top engineering labs in the country, and they were all associated with universities. It is not as if anybody thought they didn't exist. The Bay Bridge shifted on its foundations - one tower structure was displaced. It was analysed, along with the earth movements, redesigned and replaced inside a month - this a two-story five-lane freeway. Front page news, nationwide (actually worldwide). That is MIT for you, plus all the companies who did it (including the designer-builder of the new mascot, mounted on the side to protect the bridge and its users from subsequent such misfortune :-) ). That is how engineers attain their status in the US. 

The Oakland freeway collapse was a different, and more subtle, matter. It was built on silt deposits in the usual raft-like manner, and encountered resonances that were not foreseen. Most of the freeway was very rapidly demolished and the ground turned into a wide grass strip (a process itself recognisably overseen by engineers), one pile structure was left standing for experiments, and the techies simply worked on it until they nailed the phenomena underlying the collapse. That involved months worth of operating and monitoring sophisticated equipment right in the middle of a poor neighbourhood of town. And of course regular pictures and stories in the local newspapers (and the nationals when the results became available). 

Whereas in Britain the only place you see electrical engineers, say, is in the pages of the E&T.

In the US, there is the qualification of “Professional Engineer” (PE), and you are actually legally barred from describing yourself as an engineer unless you are one. You can do engineering work as an engineering faculty member of a university. But most of them are not PEs. You do need a PE formally to sign off your work. PE is a qualification by examination of the engineering societies. You are also designated by state. You may be able to call yourself an engineer in Texas but not in Oregon.  

In Germany, the recognised qualification is an engineering degree from a tertiary education organisation (University and “Fachhochschul", now called “University of Applied Sciences”), namely Dipl.-Ing., M.-Ing. or Dr.-Ing. In most larger engineering companies, you generally can't get into management unless you have a doctoral degree. And engineers are indeed as highly valued as doctors, lawyers and other professionals whose career requires a tertiary-education qualification. There are special forms of company organisation for such professionals: doctors can individually open a Praxis, lawyers a Kanzlei and engineers an Ingenieursbüro. So there is significant social-structural support. There are Ingenieursbüro everywhere, for example, who perform road-accident analysis, for insurance companies and court proceedings; others who perform building damage assessments for similar purposes, and so on. They are different from the electrician companies who come in and wire your house. And there are different professional societies. The German electrical engineering professional society, VDE, is different from the electricians professional society, the ZVEI.

Britain is somewhere in between the US and Germany as regards professional qualification. Part academic (like Germany) but part guild-run (as in the US). 

Part of the reason, I suspect, for the higher status of engineering in the US is the US “can do” approach to technology. The Bay Bridge is a large structure, larger than any in Britain. It was fixed in a month. Also in Germany. During the recent floods in the Eifel, a key bridge in Bad Neuenahr-Ahrweiler was taken out on the evening of 2021-07-14. Despite major destruction of the approaches on both sides, the Technisches Hilfswerk had a new one up and usable inside a week. When I was in Scotland, a bridge near Gleneagles on the Stirling to Perth line, one of only three north-south routes in Scotland and the key part of the Glasgow-Inverness-Aberdeen connection, was taken out during a winter snowstorm. Small structure. Six months later, still broken.

I've said my bit on women in engineering, and won't repeat myself. But I will observe, contrary to the suggestion of one contributor, that supporting women and minorities in engineering or indeed any other profession has little to do with being “left”. Consider the talented chemist Margaret Thatcher, or the talented physicist Angela Merkel, both politicians of the right and both – obviously – highly supportive of women professionals, Frau Merkel in particular.

Peter Bernard Ladkin: 
 

 

I've said my bit on women in engineering, and won't repeat myself. But I will observe, contrary to the suggestion of one contributor, that supporting women and minorities in engineering or indeed any other profession has little to do with being “left”. Consider the talented chemist Margaret Thatcher, or the talented physicist Angela Merkel, both politicians of the right and both – obviously – highly supportive of women professionals, Frau Merkel in particular.

 

You are purposely misrepresenting anything I have said, again, to discredit me.

A couple of threads here-

Primary schools - I've taken or helped take  a glider/sailplane to a local primary school a couple of times now.  The kids are usually fascinated as they've never been close to an aeroplane.  Interestingly it's usually the girls who ask the sensible questions as the boys struggle to get past the “what if the wings fall off?” stage.  Later on in gliding clubs women are in the minority and I suspect the reasons are going to be similar but hard to pin down.  There's certainly a degree of “I never thought it could be for me”.

For software engineering, in all the companies I've worked in, women have been in the minority.  Some have been very good, some less so.   In practice, gender doesn't matter but the larger the pool of good engineers we have the better.   The emphasis is on good here - I've definitely come across programmers who have negative productivity and really shouldn't be allowed near a computer.  There's nothing about being “woke” or politics here - it's just hard to get good people.

Out of interest I just looked it up:

woke

adjective

aware, especially of social problems such as racism and inequality

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/woke

woke

2. ADJECTIVE

Someone who is woke is very aware of social and political unfairness.

www.collinsdictionary.com/.../woke

(The OED, which I'd usually go to first - showing my own prejudices there! - only seems to be available online through subscription.)

Given those two definitions I would certainly like to be, and would aim to be, woke, although I suspect I - like most of us - am mostly not as aware of such issues as I could be.

I suspect different people here are using the word to mean different things, so personally I would strongly suggest we stop using it at all in this thread and each spell out what we actually mean for the avoidance of doubt. (Actually it isn't a word I'd personally use, for precisely that reason of ambiguity. An ambiguous word, or more accurately in this case a word that appears to change its meaning depending on the audience, is a pretty useless word.) 

Thanks,

Andy

Isn't that what they are suggesting doing?

“I feel we need to discuss why we need these initiatives.”

I too was a Maths (Mathematical Sciences) Graduate, but in the 1990s.  The split between Male and Female was not noticeably skewed, and ethnic origin was not something I could comment on as it really wasn't an issue and I can't even picture how it looked.

I completed a MSc in Cyber Security last year and my class was more than 75% “ethnic minority” and less than 10% female with only one woman.

Personally, I think these diversity issues are created by an overwhelming desire to be seen as awake to these [non-] issues, which are actually creating the opposite situation, which could be called “white unprivileged”.

Perhaps all that we need to ensure is that memberships/attendances profiles fit closely enough to the social profiles of of those who apply for/work in the various areas of interest.  I would then say it is likely more down to getting coverage and exposure across the field rather than any ethnic or gender “privilege”.

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

Simon Barker: 
 

Rob Eagle: 
 

I quite agree with you Matthew, the IET is more like a student union these days with their relentless ‘Woke' nonsense, I am seriously thinking of not renewing my membership and leaving after 30 years, I don't recognise it anymore as an engineering institution.

I'm sure the IET will carry on fine without you.

Rob Eagle:
 

Simon Barker:  What an unpleasant thing to say to a fellow engineer.

As I have stated before on this thread, I find that left leaning people, people who feel that they occupy the moral high ground, are the most intolerant of other people’s opinion.

Rob,

None of us might like it, but Simon's post is factually correct. Any of us can leave if we don't like what “the IET” (whatever we take that to mean) is doing, it won't make a blind bit of difference to the IET (well, to be precise it will make 1 / 168,000 x 100% difference).

Heaven knows, I spent 10 years avoiding joining the (then) IEE because I perceived it - rightly or wrongly - as a club where I would not feel comfortable being a member. It seemed to survive alright without me. And since then have often felt like leaving for similar reasons. (I suspect for reasons diametrically opposed to yours, but of course I don't know that. And it's quite possible that if "the IET" is annoying both of us then then it's probably doing the right thing!) 

Now, until recently, my problem was that I didn't have any other choice to maintain my professional registration (I, and I believe you as well as I think you work in the same field as myself and Peter, could now maintain it through another relevant institution if I wished). But I would hope the IET would completely ignore that and concentrate on the profession as a whole.

Including canvassing the widest range of views possible, which as SMW says is exactly what they are doing here. But of course it's up to individuals whether they engage with that process, however those who don't engage can't complain about not having their opinions listened to.

My bigger concern is, and has always been, the huge percentage of the engineering profession who do not consider the IET, or any other PEI, worth joining - there are far more engineers in the UK outside the PEIs than inside them. That suggests to me that we may well have a diversity issue ourselves, that it is possible that people who join PEIs (and remain in them) are the type of people who join PEIs, not necessarily representative of the engineering profession.

That said, I had better disengage from this myself as it's a busy week in the day job coming up…

Thanks,

Andy

Just wanted to keep this separate from my above post: I took part in one one of the interviews as part of this work on Friday afternoon. It was excellent, I would really really recommend anyone interested in this issue (from ANY point of view) to respond to Natalie's post above, I'm not sure if there may still be time to take part?

Thanks,

Andy 

Gillacey: 
 

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

I agree it definitely does seem to be improving, from the other side as a male I have the dubious pleasure of hearing the “locker room banter”, and it has changed hugely over the last 40 years - the length (so far) of my career.  Nice to have a bit of optimism for a Monday morning, thank you ?

But in my experience not quite there yet, it still does seem to depend on which field / sector you work in. In my field, the rail industry, the attitude in the offices has changed hugely, I understand that the attitude on site sometimes less so.  But of course that's the aim of this work, to try to find the reality behind this anecdotal opinion.

 Thanks,

Andy