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Royal Academy of Engineering DIVERSITY AND INCLUSION: CAN THE ENGINEERING PROFESSION RISE TO THE CHALLENGE? Tuesday, 7 November 2017 WELCOME AND HOUSEKEEPING Dr Hayaatun Sillem Deputy CEO and Director of Strategy Good evening, everybody, and a very warm welcome to the Royal Academy of Engineering. For those of you who do not know me, my name is Hayaatun Sillem and I am the Deputy Chief Executive here at the Academy. I am delighted to have you here, joining us tonight for this incredibly important topic. As well as being the Deputy Chief Executive here, I am very proud to be the Diversity and Inclusion champion for the Academy. We are really delighted to be partnering this event with BAE Systems. BAE Systems and the Academy share a passion for promoting engineering excellence and a passion for improving the diversity and inclusion within our profession. It is such an important topic tonight. We are also really honoured that we have a wonderful compere here – Sarah Sands. I am sure that many of you will know who Sarah Sands is but, for those of you who do not, she is the editor of the Today programme, which really forms the start to the day for many of our thought leaders, policy makers and decision makers in the country. We are really delighted that Sarah actually had a hand in arranging for our President, Dame Ann Dowling OM DBE FREng FRS, to be on the Today programme this morning, talking about diversity in engineering. That is great, and we just want more of that. Our thanks go to Sarah for being a long-standing champion for diversity in all its forms, and also for science, engineering and technology, both here and also with the London Evening Standard, where Sarah was the editor previously. We have a very good cast list here tonight. I will not detract from all the wonderful things they are going to say, but my role is merely to give you the housekeeping notices. [Housekeeping notices: No fire alarm scheduled – procedure for evacuation given; mobile phones to be switched to silent; feel free to tweet, to #EngDiversity, as shown on screen] With minimum ado, let me hand over to Sarah. [Applause] 1 OPENING REMARKS Sarah Sands Good evening, and thank you so much, Hayaatun, for your very warm welcome, and to the Royal Academy of Engineering and to BAE Systems, for making this event possible in these wonderful surroundings. I note that you are a neighbour of the Foreign Secretary and I think it may be safer here. [Laughter] The hashtag for tonight’s event is #EngDiversity, so please feel free to tweet during the evening. The subject really is that only 9% of UK engineers are women and only 6% are black or minority ethnic, but EngineeringUK estimates that the profession is short of up to 20,000 engineers a year. We had, as you say, Dame Ann on the Today programme and the first question John Humphrys asked was, “Why are women not becoming engineers?” In that great honesty of hers, and she couldn’t answer that and she said, “I don’t know why, because obviously it is a great thing to be!”. It always seemed to me to be self-evident too, when I was editor of the Evening Standard: my absolute favourite invitation was to go and look at Crossrail – that was always the most exciting perk of the job. So it was with a slight stab of envy when George Osborne took over the paper - the only one who loved hard hats more than me. He is extremely happy there. Since then, certainly the media has a role in this case of celebrating this – it is nice to have one thing to celebrate at the moment. I am doing my best on the programme and the first thing I did when I arrived was to set a really fiendish maths puzzle, knowing that the presenters would never be able to solve it. Each day, they have their heads in their hands, complaining about the puzzle, but “out there, people can do the puzzle”. I feel that we always opinionate to this higher cause, which are people who can do maths, and who can do science, who will become engineers. Apart from this, I was at the CBI yesterday was talking about future-proofing jobs and how to get through Brexit and so on. Everyone was saying, we just need engineers – not just for infrastructure but obviously also for artificial intelligence. If there is a job that you wanted to put your children into, it should so obviously be engineering. It really is about proselytising and getting that message across, because the message itself seems to be absolutely clear. I would now like to introduce Bola Fatimilehin, Head of Diversity and Inclusion at the Academy, who will give us an overview of an important survey that the Royal Academy of Engineering undertook, with some surprising findings. [Applause] 2 INTRODUCTION TO CREATING CULTURES WHERE ALL ENGINEERS THRIVE Bola Fatimilehin Head of Diversity & Inclusion, Royal Academy of Engineering Thank you. I would like just to extend a warm welcome and say it is really great to see everybody here this evening – thank you very much for coming. I am Bola Fatimilehin and I am Head of Diversity & Inclusion here at the Academy. Aside from sharing the results of the survey, which I will do in a short while, I will show a short three-minute film, which was actually showing as you entered the Academy. If you didn’t have the chance to see it when you came in, I will show that to you in a minute. Before that, I will just give a little context around the work that we do on diversity and inclusion. We have been leading a very ambitious programme to increase diversity and inclusion right across the engineering profession. We have been doing that now and we are in the sixth year. Sarah has already said that we have a skills gap and, aside from that, if that isn’t enough of a driver for people, then I think I can also mention the words ‘innovation and creativity’, that will be mentioned. There is also something that we have talked about a great deal in the last couple of weeks or so, which is productivity – and the productivity of the UK and how it is not actually as high as we would expect it to be in comparison, say, to other European countries. So diversity and inclusion is really important for engineering. Diversity and Inclusion programme What are we trying to achieve? We have a very broad vision for our programme, which is about a profession that inspires, attracts and retains people from diverse backgrounds. We are really looking at people from all backgrounds – women, ethnic minority people, lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender(LGBT) people, disabled people – anyone with the skills and the aptitude to be an engineer. Those are the people we want to encourage, and we are doing that by leading the profession. We want to challenge the status quo as well – that status quo around the numbers has been around for quite a long time, and so we need to look behind that. What are the policies, the procedures and the structures in engineering that are possibly acting as barriers to driving up the numbers? We need to do something about that. As I have said, the programme is really ambitious. We are a small diversity team within the Academy and the way that we have leveraged our influence is by partnering. We partner with employers: BAE Systems are very, very keen supporters and I think they have been with us from day one. We have around 60 other engineering employers who are actively involved in partnering with us. In addition, there are the 35 engineering institutions and also lots of third 3 sector organisations, like the Engineering Council and EngineeringUK, and Tomorrow’s Engineers. That is the ambition that we have. Influencing progress through .... Following on from that, I just want to highlight five things that we have done, although I won’t go through all of them. If you look up there, there is the diversity and inclusion toolkit that we developed, which was really to raise the profile of good practice across engineering. There is a progression framework that we actually used over the summer, inviting the professional engineering institutions to tell us about their work on diversity and inclusion, so that they could benchmark against each other, and also so that we had an aggregated picture around what professional engineering institutions are doing. We have an Engineering Engagement Programme, which actively encourages engineering graduates to transition into engineering employment. In the middle there [on slide], within the Academy itself, obviously we cannot lead without demonstrating good practice and so we have internal action planning to help progress diversity and inclusion within the Academy itself. I have left that corner image there on the slide, which says “understanding culture and inclusiveness”, because that is the research that we launched in September this year. As we extended our programme out from looking at diversity and under-represented groups, we were really keen to understand what is the culture of engineering, and how inclusive is that culture? We therefore collaborated with a number of engineering employers and we delivered some research which is captured in here. We had 7,000 engineers who responded to the survey which drove the research, perhaps some of you here responded. Creating cultures where all engineers thrive Obviously, the research comes with findings and recommendations and this is the point where I show the two-minute film.