Pride not prejudice

Sometimes, changing hearts and minds over to a new way of thinking is as slow and laborious as a huge turning cargo ship. Towards the end of the past decade (hey, we’re in the Twenties now), an interesting snippet of news revealed the depth of prejudice about engineering. A prejudice that many are now working hard to overcome.

In November, the Royal Academy of Engineering (RAEng) ran an awareness campaign, This is Engineering Day, to change the misrepresentation of engineering on-line, celebrate the contribution of engineers and encourage more young people to consider a career in the profession.

To highlight existing stereotypes, the academy used an artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm focused on on-line image search results for ‘engineer’ to generate artificial images of what it learned a typical engineer looked like.

Nearly two-thirds of images generated were of a white man wearing a hard hat. Hardly an image to engender the next generation to pursue an engineering career and far from representative of engineers today.

According to the academy, every year the UK is short of around 59,000 engineers, while only 12% of the engineering workforce in the UK are female and 9% are from black, Asian and minority ethnic backgrounds.

Backing up these figures, a survey last year by EngineeringUK indicated that over three quarters (76%) of young people aged 11–19 and 73% of parents do not know a lot about what those working in engineering do.

As part of the ‘This is Engineering Day’ campaign, the RAEng joined forces with over 100 brands across the UK that depend on engineering – recognisable names such as Transport for London, Rolls-Royce and National Grid – to sign a pledge. Its aim is to increase public exposure to more representative images of engineers and engineering, and help create a new library of free-to-use images of engineers that better represent the profession.

The library could use a good dose of concrete engineering, so find out more at: www.flickr.com/thisisengineering. And the RAEng pledge is still on-line to see and sign, visit: https://bit.ly/2JBv1bj.

In any walk of life, removing outdated and narrow stereotypes depends on everyone speaking out; so it should be with the white man/hard hat view of engineering.

Engineers are the people who shape and make the modern world work, from designing and developing our infrastructure, homes and buildings to delivering our low-carbon future. And our concrete engineers help underpin the design and delivery of all these through their ingenuity and excellence with the second most used material on earth.

These are achievements to take pride in and celebrate. So let’s help remove past prejudices and let the upcoming generation know that by choosing an engineering profession today they can shape tomorrow.

Taken from Concrete February 2020. Visit: www.concrete.org.uk / https://bit.ly/2cjmEiM