Today is International Women in Engineering Day (INWED).  I have written previously about the lack of progress in achieving gender equality in the engineering profession in most Western countries (see ‘Reflecting on the lack of women in engineering’ on March 16^th 2022) and the seismic shift in attitudes required to increase the number of women in engineering at all levels (see ‘A big question for engineers’ on June 8^th, 2016).  I can see signs of change locally.  My research group has hovered around an equal number of men and women for some years.  In the School of Engineering in Liverpool four women have been promoted to be professors in the last four years – though at a reception following an inaugural lecture given by one of the pair of women who were the first female professors in the School, I was gently admonished by a senior female colleague in another school about why it had taken so long.  Of course, she is right.  Progress is very slow and we need to do better.

Simone de Beauvoir wrote in her book, The Second Sex first published in 1949: ‘Representation of the world, like the world itself, is the work of men; they describe it from their own point of view, which they confuse with absolute truth.’  More than seventy years later, this still appears to be true, at least in the engineering profession who are responsible for the technology everyone uses everyday.  About twenty years ago, the then President of the US National Academy of Engineering, Bill Wulf said, ‘As a consequence of a lack of diversity [in engineering] we pay an opportunity cost, a cost in designs not thought of, in solutions not produced’.  However, diversity on its own is not enough, we have to be inclusive and treat everyone equally – as we would like to be treated ourselves.  If we do not engage women in the engineering enterprise then we ignore 50% of society’s intellectual capital and we cannot hope to solve the challenges facing society, in part because we will be confused about the truth.

Thank you to my two guest editors who reviewed this post for me.

Photo: Author’s research group in 2022.