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]

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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]

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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. This really helps to summarise and hopefully gives an image of the findings and the recommendations.

[Video shown]

That is the summary. We recognise, obviously, that this is really the first step in the process. The research and recommendations aren’t going to change the culture but we actually have to do something to make that happen.

Over the next 12 months...

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Over the next 12 months, here are some bullet points about what we are going to do across the programme that we run. That is to implement recommendations, not just from the Creating Cultures where all engineers thrive report, but also from the benchmarking that we have done with the professional engineering institutions.

Measurement is an extremely important element of diversity and inclusion. Having data-driven solutions to how you improve culture and how you address diversity is extremely important and so we want to do more around that as well. We are also looking at how organisations recruit and how they select.

The supply chain – how large organisations engage with their supply chain and how they get their supply chain to reflect the kind of diversity ambitions that they have - will also be a focus of the next 12 months.

We will also do some employee benchmarking. In 2015, we went out to employers across engineering and we asked them what they were doing on diversity and inclusion: how much money they spent, what their workforce profile looked like, and all that sort of thing. Next year, we will go back again and we will ask and we hope that a bigger number of engineering organisations will contribute to that piece of work.

The other thing we are going to do is to extend the work that we are doing to encourage graduates to transition to our Engineering Engagement Programme, to encourage graduates to transition into engineering employment.

That is just a flavour of what we will be doing in the next 12 months. If you would like to find out more about the programme, I’ll be around and networking, and there is our website link there as well. Thank you.

[Applause]

PANEL DISCUSSION

Sarah Sands: Thank you very much, Bola. We are all here to see how we can make engineering better in the society that it represents. We have a terrific panel now to discuss these issues. I will start with Dr Mark McBride-Wright, founder of EqualEngineers, who is chair and co-founder of InterEngineering, an organisation which connects, informs and empowers LGBT plus engineers and supporters. We will have a five-minute manifesto.

Mark McBride-Wright: A five-minute manifesto? Right! I did my PhD in chemical engineering and then started work professionally. I discovered that my professional engineering institution, the Institution of Chemical Engineers (IChemE), was doing work on gender but were calling that ‘diversity’. It occurred to me, in this room, when I attended an event with the Academy, that more focus was needed on sexual orientation. I therefore co-

5 founded InterEngineering, which connects, informs and empowers LGBT engineers and supporters - two aspects of identity came together in that room. I had never really thought about it in that way.

Fast forward to now, we have over 850 members and we are active in four regional groups across the country, and we want to expand. We also have an international impact. It is easy to get caught up in running the organisation but I had a moment last week which really brought it home as to why we set it up. There was an engineer who was working here, originally at a very prestigious institution, but he had to go back home to Saudi Arabia because his funding expired. It turned out that he was gay and he came out to his family but, unfortunately, he had to leave.

He had emailed me prior to going back to Saudi Arabia and I replied to his email: I remembered him, but then he turned up at one of our London events a couple of weeks ago. It turned out that he has now has indefinite leave to remain and has secured a position at a leading engineering contractor, and he was still questioning whether or not he was going to be ‘out’ at work when he starts in this new job. I said to him, “When you start in that job, you go in with that pride flag round your neck, with what you have been through to get away from that. We do live in a tolerant society here, and you should celebrate acceptance.”

That is just one anecdotal story around LGBT. Sexual orientation is still not for conversation in the workplace: people don’t understand sometimes. They confuse it with what you get up to in the bedroom, rather than just talking about the gender of your partner. People wouldn’t look at me, at a gay man, and think that I am pregnant right now – we have a surrogate carrying our first child. There are all these things in our culture, when we are friendly but unfamiliar with each other, and you need to try to create a culture where that can be unpacked, and the baggage that is being carried and hidden. Then, when we talk about productivity, that is what then enables people to be their whole self in the workplace, to talk around who they are, who they love, what they did at the weekend and what enriches their lives outside the walls of the family and of the workplace.

I am all about building bridges between different communities because I feel that, when we unlock that within one another, it creates a much better working environment. That is my role as a D&I practitioner now. I find that, with engineering, linking it to health and safety is the big leap forward. I did a 180 in my consultancy advisory. Focusing on different under- represented groups makes the majority of engineering not feel included when actually, if we lead with health and wellbeing, mental health – which affects you irrespective of your colour, class, sexual orientation, gender and so on – you then start to see the people who may be the white, male allies that we need to engage in the story, to see their diversity story. What makes

6 them different? What is their diversity story? When you lead with that, and then have whatever enablement you require behind that, you get a lot more effectiveness in your approach to D&I. I am trialling that right now, as I approach my consultant and one of my clients, and it is working very well. I think that is my push about what we need to do as a profession, and my angle running into engineering.

Sarah Sands: I love that ‘building bridges’ metaphor.

Our next panellist is John McCollum, Head of Engineering at BAE Systems plc, one of the UK’s largest engineering companies. John is passionate about attracting future generations of engineers into the profession and leads BAE’s efforts in the UK to make the company’s engineering workforce more diverse and inclusive.

John McCollum: I would like raise three points. The first point, just talking generally in terms of the engineering sector now, is that for most companies within engineering, their heritage and their traditions set what their culture is. When you look at the majority of the large and small-to-medium enterprise engineering companies, certainly in the UK, many have been around for a great many years, through many generations. That generational effect plays a role in terms of how they progress with diversity and inclusion almost to the point where, actually, I think that is one of the biggest challenges, which is that it has to be able to reset that. I know that it takes some real, active interventions, in terms of how you improve the situation.

The other challenge that comes through is the fact around – as we heard from the work from the Academy – that engineers, and I am an engineer and so I can say this, can be friendly but they are not actually personable at times. Again, that is a challenge. My own personal experience is that engineers find it quite awkward to talk around diversity and inclusion – the vocabulary of it can be awkward at times for them.

What we actually need is stories. They need to be able to articulate some things, so they have that immersive experience. When you give them that, it actually becomes much easier for them to talk about it. One of the things you can do is certainly to increase the ability for them to say, “I was at an event and I had this conversation with someone. I heard this story that week” – and that brings it to life for them.

My final and third key point, in terms of a hypothesis so to speak, for anyone who recognises that as a scientific term, is that engineering has to lead the D&I agenda. It cannot come from the HR organisations. It is only when engineering leads it that you actually understand what the business case is behind it. Yes, we all want to see increased diversity, and we want to see more people entering into engineering, but it is also about things like the innovation. The fact that you have diversity of thought brings innovation and that is what really

7 brings power and that is what really excites me to say that it is not about the diversity numbers, but it is actually about the inclusion. You create the inclusive environment, which is truly inclusive for everybody, as we heard on the video, and that is what actually really empowers the teams coming through, with all of this group thinking, and that is what brings it forward. I think that is about creating stories.

My own personal experience is that I worked in the Middle East and I learned a great deal about inclusion and non-inclusion over there. Just as some examples, we recently held an inclusion event at BAE Systems, where a gay engineer said, “I have been working for this company for 19 years and I have never been able to be myself. Today, I am myself”. There was that force-field that that person put around them, which meant they couldn’t be themselves. It meant that they weren’t productive at all, and that was a very powerful story. It was so powerful that it moved most people in the room – many of whom were there to experience more around D&I – to tears. They haven’t stopped talking about it since and that is the type of thing that has moved our D&I agenda on further.

There have been similar things on Asperger’s and similar things in terms of whether you are the only white person in a room full of black people. I have done events here with 200 black people and I have felt really uncomfortable but, do you know what? The fact that I feel uncomfortable actually means that I am probably going to learn something by doing it. You have to break out of that and move into that space, and be prepared to take that stance. That is why I would echo to anybody that engineering should take the lead and go into that space.

Sarah Sands: Thank you. Our final panellist is Dr Nike Folayan, a Technical Discipline team leader, Comms & Control, WSP; Chair, Association for Black Engineers.

Nike Folayan: I think everyone has said what I was going to say, so I won’t spend a lot of time saying a lot of things. All I will say is that I founded, along with some other engineers, Association for BME Engineers (AFBE UK) 10 years ago. The first thing I will say is that it is refreshing to be in a room like this, actually talking about diversity because, at the time, I don’t there were many conversations around diversity – whatever diversity, whether it was gender or ethnicity. It was too difficult to have that conversation, so I am very pleased with the Academy for creating this platform for us to have these discussions.

I was thinking about this. I was talking to an engineer recently and he said something which struck me. He said, “Every time I have been to an interview with a hire manager, I haven’t got the job, but every time I have had an interview with a CEO of a company, I have

8 got the job.” I started to wonder why and that is because the CEO is after the bottom line: he just wants to make money and if he thinks you are qualified for the job and you can make him money, then you will get the job. The bottom line is that we need to get comfortable about talking about diversity: we need to understand that it is not about the numbers, as you said previously, but it is about skills and talent, which is something I have always said.

Part of the issue is that we all have biases and we recruit in our own image. The more diverse recruitment panels are, the better - and I am not talking about when they get to the interview but, even before they get to the interview. I recruit graduates in my job and I remember having some CVs and this particular one came from the University of Bradford. We were looking at a number of CVs and there was one from the University of Bradford and, as soon as someone saw it, they said “Oh, I can’t be bothered with that one! He looks really good but, you know, University of Bradford”. A lot of the time, even when we don’t know that we are recruiting in our image – and it is not even about the ethnicity or the gender or whatever – we do it.

It is about the engineering community being conscious of the fact that you cannot judge someone by which university they have been to, and you cannot judge someone by the name they have. If 26% of engineering graduates are from ethnic minority communities, and only 6% are in the industry – most of whom have come straight from overseas and got jobs – then there is some sort of bias. The sooner we stop acting as though there isn’t, the better for us.

Personally, I would suggest that if we link procurement with D&I, whichever diversity we want, we would get all sorts of diversity straight away because the bottom line is what really matters to most companies. If it starts to impact the bottom line, then people take it seriously.

The last thing I wanted to say is about transparency, which the slides have already indicated. Those three things are what I think would make a real difference to us.

Sarah Sands: Thank you very much for that. It seems to me that you understand logic and therefore you understand the logic of the position. We had nice little misunderstanding earlier, when I was speaking to Nike and to Mark: Mark said that he represented ‘the network’, and I took that literally, but he was talking about his social, human network. I then asked Nike, what do you do? She said ‘highspeed rail’ and meant Network Rail. In all senses, therefore, we understand about connectivity.

The other thing which seems to come naturally to you, but not so much in other professions, is teamwork. I have certainly seen that in my beloved Crossrail, where there is

9 such a sense of purpose and mutual respect. You all know that you are good at what you do and that you need each other, so that comes naturally. I guess it is that thing, as you said, about sticking to familiarity. I started the stereotyping this evening, by stressing that there was a sort of Scottish bias on this panel! You recruit what you know.

It is interesting to me at the moment, to see this huge debate about how we must treat people properly at work, and how to deal with harassment, and about the abuse of power and so on. You could see how engineering could become a model workplace environment and, as Bola mentioned, what if you led the way on this, as engineering has led the way in many other fields? As Mark said, if you can be in this inclusive environment, plus being really good at your job, that has to help productivity as well as employment.

The other point that interested me was when John talked about engineering somehow being associated with history and tradition, and yet it is so obviously about the future. What was that wonderful phrase you talked about – ‘horizon scanning’. That is an actual job – predicting the future, because it will be you who realises all of that.

I suppose it is then a matter of how you communicate all of that. I am interested in specific measures that you have been talking about, and also I guess the specific experience of the audience. We have a microphone: if anyone has questions to individual panellists or to all the panellists, then now is the time to ask them. Please would you say where you are from, or what your specialism is?

Colin Ledsome (Vice Chair, Institution of Engineering Designers): I decided I wanted to be an engineer when I was nine, and I am now 74. In all that time, a great deal has changed, phenomenally, unbelievably, partly due to outside influence but I think our main problem is that engineers are incredibly cautious and incredibly careful. They don’t like to get out of their comfort zone. I am a designer and I like pushing people out of their comfort zone, but that’s the way it goes.

If there is an existing group of engineers who have been there for a long time, and they all happen to be white males or whatever – I am choosing that at random [Laughter] – and if someone who isn’t a white male comes in for a job, the first thing they are going to say is, “Oh heck, this is going to upset the whole group, because we’re going to have to tiptoe around them carefully all the time, and be careful of what we say.” One or two of the nastier jokes that people would be saying would have to be looked at. Even though they may be very good at possibly doing the job that they want them for, they will perhaps choose somebody who may not be quite as good on paper, but who doesn’t make people feel awkward. That is normal, and that is human and that is the way we are.

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Diversity and inclusion are important but our biggest problem is that we don’t have enough engineers. There was the story about the CEO: the CEO is interested in the bottom line and he wants anybody who can do the job. He doesn’t care if they are green, blue or whatever: he just wants the job done. However, at the end of the day in engineering, the big question is, ‘does it work?’ If it doesn’t work, then they are not doing engineering very well.

Yes, it is a problem. It is not just our problem but it is a problem across the whole of society. One of the other many caps I wear is that I am archer. In our little archery club, we have had people of just about every type you could imagine, and we are only a little archery club. Archery is incredibly inclusive, as most sports are. I remember a very good black archer – and there aren’t that many around – was shooting with us, and a group of black footballers came past and one of them called over to him, “Hey, what are you doing playing a white man’s sport?”, and he said ”winning” and then had a rather heated discussion. It is a very, very complicated situation, but it is changing, day by day, week by week, year by year, and I think we are getting there. We all have to take part. When you say ‘inclusive’, you have to include all of those white male teams as well and get them involved. Get them to realise that what they need are engineers that do the job.

Sarah Sands: Thank you very much. There seemed to be two points there. There is a simple thing of supply and demand: are you actually rejecting people. You need them so much but does that extra vetoing, even if it is unconscious, come into it as much as it would with other professions where you have a greater supply? The other point is, how do you overcome that unconscious bias which, as you say, could just be ‘human behaviour’? How do you change human behaviour?

Mark McBride-Wright: I wish it was as simple as that, that people just want good engineers but, unfortunately, they are riddled with their own recruitment of their own type and that is why we have this perpetual kicking the can down the road of no change over time.

There are people who feel that they have to cover when they go to an interview and therefore not be their true selves. You have the whole issue right now around disabled people not applying for jobs, or not putting themselves forward in requesting reasonable adjustments.

An anecdote from where I used to work is that my manager fitted that stereotype that you mentioned. He had a sister who was severely disabled and both his parents passed away in a very short space of time and so then the care arrangements for his sister fell upon him and his other sisters. He had to spend a lot of time yo-yoing up to Yorkshire or Lancashire where they came from. If my former workplace didn’t have the flexible approach to working, then he wouldn’t have been able to do that. That was a reasonable adjustment for him to request, at the point of employment, when he’s already an employee.

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The point is that, at any point in our lives, we will all become disabled and require additional assistance to help do our jobs, to get around our cities, look after our children and take our dogs for walks or whatever. We therefore need to think beyond the present and where we are now, and into the future of what we will be, and recognise that we need that diversity. There are people at that point now who we to come into the profession and so you need to see beyond who you are and look into the future. I feel as though that answers the point.

Sarah Sands: That kind of empathy is very interesting, and seeing yourself projected [into the future]. I am just about to do a trip with our security correspondent, Frank Gardner, whom I know as a really good journalist. This is the first time that I have had to think logistically and, because we are going to the Middle East, where there aren’t ramps and there isn’t transport, I guess it is only when you are confronted with that way of thinking about someone you know.

Mark McBride-Wright: How can it be, in the Institute of Engineering Design, designing cities and say you have a project that comes in, which is around accessibility and getting from A to B with lots of hills when you are a disabled user. If no one in your group has that experience, then how are you going to get that diversity into the design? The likelihood is that you will not, so you need diverse groups in order to pull upon that.

I totally get it about pushing yourselves out of your comfort zone because with my new venture, EqualEngineers, which is my company for under-represented talent in the profession, I am now pushing myself to explore BAME diversity and disabled diversity, because those are things that I am not. By going through that experiential learning, it was the same with InterEngineering and transgender, because I knew nothing around transgender issues but I made an effort to learn and put myself through that experiential learning phase. I now feel that I can be a strong advocate for transgender rights. You have to put yourself in their shoes.

Sarah Sands: Nike, what about this idea that there is an innate caution in the character of engineers, which stops you recruiting in a creative way? Do you recognise that?

Nike Folayan: I do. I come from a long line of engineers. My dad is 76 and he is an engineer as well, so you can imagine his generation being as they were.

The truth is that engineers are not comfortable with being outside of their comfort zone. They are one profession that does not like to try out anything new, either because they are so safety conscious or because they are so cautious about making a mistake and they don’t want to be wrong. The only way we can do it is to focus not just on the people in the profession now but focus on the next generation.

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We have a programme called NextGen, which is based in Scotland. Most of the kids in the schools in Aberdeen that we go into are not black kids, but we go with a mixture of engineers of different genders and different ethnicities, so that they can become familiar with the fact that the industry is made up of different types of engineers. That is one way how we can push things forward, by showing the younger generation who are coming in that there is a mix of engineers in the industry. There are some people who will never be comfortable with having someone like me on their site. I remember working on Blackwall Tunnel: I was there for a year and one of the engineers said to me, “Oh, Nike, with your typing skills and my brain, we could go so far!” [Laughter] Thankfully, I wasn’t offended – I thought it was quite cute.

Rather than spending a lot of time trying to change people who are already set in their ways – although we can try – we need to focus on the new people coming into the industry and on how they feel about having a mix of people. You will find that most of the next generation actually prefer to have a mix of people.

Sarah Sands: I am still surprised by this suggestion that there is a conservatism, or a timidity. When I think of engineers in a Victorian romantic way, they seem to be the visionaries and also the problem solvers all the time, so that you have to think in a creative way. Do you think like that?

Bola Fatimilehin: I was going to say that the research tells us exactly what John said, which is that there is a strong attachment to tradition and, for the 7,000 engineers we spoke to, that is one of the themes in the engineering culture as they see it. There is your description of how tradition and culture build up: they do not build up overnight but it is a long time in development – probably since the Industrial Revolution. If we are going to change the culture that there is now, without a step change in the type of intervention, it will be very difficult.

One thing I mentioned was about measurement. There is something about organisations understanding and being curious about the people who work for them. One of the assumptions made by many people in organisations, who, as we describe in our research, all have the inclusion privilege – i.e., they are people who already feel included – is that it is meritocracy and that actually, if you are good enough, you will rise to the top and you will be promoted. Whilst there is a good deal of training going on around unconscious bias and all of those things, these things cannot co-exist: there is either bias, or there is meritocracy.

On your question about what’s in it to change – I guess it is the productivity of the company and the productivity of the UK, if those things are important. Those are the numbers that organisations should be looking at: how can we engage our people so that our

13 organisation becomes more productive? That will be through inclusion and it will be through measuring.

When I say ‘measuring’, just to give you an example, I used to work in an organisation who, again, said “Our recruitment practices are brilliant and we have a meritocracy here. They go through a process which gives us a very strong outcome.” We looked at some of the data around recruitment and we looked at who applied and who was shortlisted, and who was hired. We had data on disabled people who applied and got through; women; genders – men and women, and also ethnic minority people, but there was a different pattern for all groups.

You can probably guess that, for disabled people, you could barely see the line above the axis at the bottom, because there were so few people applying and declaring that they had a disability. As an organisation, you know what your challenge is – it is to get more disabled people to apply.

When we looked at gender, the proportions who applied showed a 1% increase in the proportion shortlisted, and a 1% increase in the proportion engaged. For that, you can see actually we were doing quite well in the recruitment process.

When we looked at ethnicity, I think there was about 30% in the African pool and that went down to 15% at shortlisting and then it halved again when it got to those who were recruited. That obviously doesn’t give you the whole picture but it is a starting point for a conversation that challenges the status quo, which is ‘it’s a meritocracy’.

Sarah Sands: We have talked about how you reform yourselves, in a way, in but how do you actually make engineers from people who weren’t engineers? I don’t know what your experience was when you were nine, but what made you want to be an engineer?

Colin Ledsome: I wanted to build things. I wanted to make things.

John McCollum: It was the slightly the same for me. It is a bit of a long story, but I think I electrocuted myself about 14 times. [Laughter] I wanted to know how electricity worked, so I took the backs off plugs and everything else and, much to my parents’ dismay, I was always tinkering and taking things apart but generally not being able to put them back together again at the time. It is that curiosity which is the natural trait of an engineer.

Going back to your point, Colin, I see a lot of engineers thinking about risk and the risk- averse elements, but what they don’t see sometimes is the opportunity. That is a particular profile of certain types of engineers. Our engineers are very process orientated and will therefore tend to follow process all the time: they will not feel comfortable about someone new coming into the team and so on. However, if you can break that down and if you can show them an example where suddenly they see the value of someone with a different background,

14 a different way of thinking, they will say, “That’s alright. I’d actually like some more of that.” So you have to find that way.

Part of it is to do with the generation and there is no doubt about that. I see it all the time still in BAE Systems. Yes, our recruitment processes, with graduates now, we have 30% women graduates, and 22% BAME, so we are really pushing along hard on that now. Do we retain them all? That is another debate to have, and we can talk about that further, but it is about trying to make sure that engineers see the value in terms of what that different thinking does.

The value for me, where I sit – and I talked about someone with Asperger’s before – is that when you have these personal experiences, when you suddenly realise that, when you ask someone who has Asperger’s an innocent kind of question - someone who is on the autistic spectrum, if you are not familiar with Asperger’s - if you come up with an idea to solve this problem, not only will they come up with one idea but they will probably come up with 20, compared to all the other individuals who perhaps do not have Asperger’s who will just come up with one. It is about seeing that, and using it as a strength: yes, they are different and yes, they might not have the same social skills and so on, but by golly, they will probably be the person who will come up with a fantastic idea, and you will leapfrog as a company as a result of that idea that they have had.

That is what you have to harness, and that is what you have to pursue by bringing in people from different backgrounds and so on. That is why the whole of diversity and inclusion is so important. However, it isn’t about the numbers game: yes, you need it, but you have to focus on the inclusion, otherwise you can bring the numbers in but they will not stay.

Sarah Sands: Could I just ask: you mentioned about the future generations, and that that is the way forward. There was a review of a book I was reading about technology design and one point that was made was that it is mostly being designed by young men and that therefore there was an inbuilt bias, so that what we think is the future, which will be progressive, may actually be more excluding. Is that a fear?

Nike Folayan: It is. I remember that I posted something on LinkedIn about the work I do and one of my very ‘geeky’ team members, whose research is on artificial intelligence, said “At least we don’t have bias when it comes to robots”. I then quoted the article and said, “Actually, there are racist and sexist robots all over the place!” [Laughter]. It is a concern.

What is also missing is that many people don’t relate creativity with engineering. Many people would rather be in the creative industry, because that is what they understand, but

15 engineering is just as creative. We need to find a way to bridge creativity and engineering because then we will have more women, and then we will have less racist and sexist robots.

Sarah Sands: Bola, do you have any thoughts on that, about whether artificial intelligence will make things better or worse?

Bola Fatimilehin: There already is emerging evidence about artificial intelligence, and that someone has to write the algorithm. If it’s a robot, someone has to decide how it behaves? Is it male behaviour or female behaviour? What voices does it have? Absolutely, we could just be propagating the problems.

Speaker (f): I represent Winchester Science Centre and Planetarium today. It is interesting to hear what a couple of people have mentioned about sparking curiosity. John said earlier that engineers have curiosity, and I think children have curiosity. The interesting distinction is that, past a certain age, we are losing the diversity amongst children who actually pursue an education and career in STEM subjects.

As an organisation, for us it is about recognising that there is that imbalance in the industry, across all of the science and technology areas. We are looking at how our organisation can create a more inclusive environment and we are very successful at encouraging – if you don’t know who we are, a science centre is a hands-on interactive space where people can explore through experimenting. We have science communicators delivering live shows and events, and we do lecture programmes for adults and all age groups. However, for us, we are very successful at bringing people in who have a confidence within the field – so, parents who already work in the industry are bringing their children in because they value it.

We recognise that, within our catchment – perhaps within an hour and a half’s drive of where we are – there are some pockets, just geographical areas, that are not coming to our centre. For us, we want to say that, actually, it is no good just waiting for people to come to us, but we have to go out and recruit directly. We feel that we have a responsibility to go into communities, working with schools: we are not there to provide a formal education but, if we can spark curiosity and build people’s confidence – and children’s confidence in science and technology – then we will have a much better opportunity for them to feel that it is a subject that is for them. We need to work harder together as an industry and through educational informal learning, to showcase people from all ethnic backgrounds and all diverse communities.

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We are looking to do a major project called ‘One in five’, looking at people with disability and recognising the contribution that disabled people make within the field, and being able to provide role models for children, so that they understand that anybody can pursue a career in these areas. It is also to celebrate the work of STEM in improving people’s lives across the world. That is something that we are working on at the Winchester Science Centre and we want to lead in our sector. Basically, we are open to working with industry to help us learn and help us to achieve our goals. How do you see that, with very young children? For us, our age group is pre-school right the way through to 11 or 12, so it is primary school aged children.

Sarah Sands: Is there an age where you see that children have that spark of curiosity and then it drops off? Is there something we should be doing within the education system to retain that curiosity?

Bola Fatimilehin: It is not just curiosity but it is also about stereotyping of who does what in life, which also quashes it. I have a nine year old, a 13 year old and a 17 year old, and I can remember when I passed the Ben10 duvet cover - for all those who don’t know about it - from my son on to my daughter, she said to me, at the age of five, “Ben10 is not for girls!” Already, she had picked up that message. You only have to walk into a nursery, where children are looked after, to see (a) that it is all staffed by women, and (b) there is the ‘home corner’ and the ‘building corner’.

Yes, inspiration is one thing and, again, that is partly down to who is in your family to inspire you. Many people come into engineering because they have a father or close relative who is an engineer but actually, if you want to drive more people into engineering, we need to spread that out a bit more. We need to try to do something to stop the gendered nature of jobs, because it is not just about engineering: women go into nursing, men go into engineering. We don’t challenge enough, and schools don’t challenge enough, over the choices that school children make around things like work experience. Girls are encouraged to go into hairdressing and do their stint, doing something typically - but perhaps we should take a tip from Sweden or one of the Scandinavian countries, where they actually challenge the girls to go into do work experience in areas that aren’t typically female, because then at least people try and it keeps the inspiration alive.

Colin Ledsome: But do they get the boys to go into hairdressing and cookery?

Bola Fatimilehin: I would like to say that I know the answer to that. It cuts both ways. There was some really interesting research done by the Institute of Physics, where they looked at gendered subjects in schools. They looked at science – they looked at physics and biology. They looked at economics and sociology, and they looked at maths and English, and you can guess how those are gendered. They found that – surprise surprise – it is the culture

17 of the school. These gaps between those two subjects – where there was a big gap between physics and biology, there was a big gap between economics and sociology. So there is something about the culture of the school, and the things that the school themselves do, which encourage that kind of thinking, which makes people challenge, and the teacher encourage both boys and girls to do either subjects.

Sarah Sands: John, how would you change the culture of education?

John McCollum: There are a number of issues here. There is the social conditioning, which Bola has just talked about, and Disneyland has a great deal to account for with this in certain ways.

We know that we are going to have a massive shortage of engineers and we need 150,000 every year for the next five years, just to sustain what we need in the UK. There are not enough people coming through STEM at the moment.

We reach out to the schools now as a company, with our school roadshow in association with the Royal Air Force and Royal Navy. It reaches out, and this year we did 420 schools with 90,000 children, but that is just the tip of the iceberg and we cannot get to enough individuals.

How we connect in schools is a challenge. We use STEM ambassadors through our own companies to get to schools but it is also about how we support the teachers because that is where we miss a trick in this country. If you can imagine school teachers, running whatever curriculum subject they are doing, if they can connect to an engineering company, somewhere local, and that company can come and lend them support with classroom resources and put effort to it, suddenly they would have the ability to be able to connect the curriculum of the school to industry.

It always amazes me when I have conversations with teachers. They say, “Well, I’m teaching this in the curriculum but I have no idea what that actually means in the jobs out there.” Well, we do that – we can show you how that connects to it. If we could connect all of that up, with what we are doing in primary schools and beyond, it would be a real strength for the country. It has been tried a few times and I don’t think it is easy, but it is a great opportunity to try to do something in that space.

We definitely still see – and we know, for example, women, going through the schooling system but, as they move into A levels and then going to university, they sway away then from the engineering roles. Again, some of that is constructive because, yes, it is how they see the world, while some of it is about the educational establishments and how they are bringing that element as well. There is a whole piece around the educational organisations, and the

18 industry, and schooling – and all of those have to come together and tackle this jointly, in a much more orientated and aligned way.

Sarah Sands: Nike, do you think Disney has something to answer for? What about engineers rather than princesses?

Nike Folayan: I have tried to be a girly girl, now that I’m older, but I’ve never really been a girly girl.

Sarah Sands: What toys did you play with?

Nike Folayan: I like Lego. I always loved Lego – but mostly it was about breaking the radio, and I broke a TV once as well, and I didn’t put it back together. I like the stories, but I connected more recently with Lion King and things like that, rather than with the actual princesses. Apart from the fact that they were all white, I could never really see myself in any of those. I agree that they have a lot to answer for, definitely.

Sarah Sands: What about you? How do we get that diversity of thinking into pre-school age and upwards?

Mark McBride-Wright: I think it’s about connection with the influencers to those children. My problem right now is that, if it is a girl, trying to steer my mother-in-law away from wanting to just ‘pinkify’ the house - it is unbearable. Of course, she knows all of this – “Mark might want to bring up his child gender neutral.” I tried to buy pyjamas for my friend’s birthday party – for a two-year old girl – and I said I wouldn’t buy anything pink, but it is so hard that it is impossible. I ended up buying ‘Holly and Ben’, or ‘Ben and Holly’, because that was the theme of the party, and had them delivered. It is really hard.

My niece wanted a trike for Christmas and so I bought her that as well as a construction set, and she used the little fake construction tools to help me use the Allen key to put the trike together. I just think you need to engage with kids and cultivate that curiosity, because I think it is around the age of six when they start to see that gender focus of roles and say “I can’t be that, because that’s for that gender and I’m not that gender.” There is an element of training people who are not in STEM about the issue that the industry faces and why it percolates down to all these micro-messages that they are fed at a young age.

Sarah Sands: Is there anything the government could do in a centralised way, or is it really back to the schools for this?

Mark McBride-Wright: We need joined up working between the Department for Education, with all the great and incredibly exciting infrastructure projects and larger engineering projects that we have happening next year. Next year is the ‘Year of Engineering’ and one of the things that we are planning on doing at EqualEngineers – and I can talk to you

19 about this afterwards – is that we are partnering our first event with ‘We The Curious’ in Bristol. The focus of that event will be to - they sound like they are the equivalent to yourself in the South West. They are putting on an exposition where companies come in and showcase some fun experiments about engineering. We will specifically target lower socio-economic background schools – schools where the kids are unlikely to have the biased privilege of parents who are in professional jobs and so on.

I can’t remember what event it was, or who it was, but I remember a bit of advice – I think it was from the Social Mobility Foundation – where they say, “If you are in your organisations, and you are organising that impromptu internship or one-week work experience for your neighbour’s daughter or son, then invite a kid along from the local school that you are not connected with, who doesn’t have access to those vehicles in those areas. It is through widening your own mindset beyond the people who are in the organisation now, that you will start to bring more people into the fold of engineering.” Then if everyone does that, you will have magnification.

Sarah Sands: We have time for one more question and then we will have drinks and networking.

Speaker (f): Good evening. I have been a civil engineer for 30 years now, so I have lived with this system and so I realise how it all stacks up. I am really interested in the issue John mentioned, about telling the story. What happens is that people can connect to a story and, if you are in a position – I was in a position where I was managing 200 technicians and when I first turned up as a black woman, managing them, they thought, ‘No’. And then they opened the boot of my car and I had a huge sub-woofer in the back and they couldn’t quite relate – [Laughter] They got used to it, and I was able to tell the story. There is the point about also being a woman, and I was able to relate to them in many different ways.

My question is, how do we get engineers who don’t really like to talk, to begin to tell a story? That makes us human. As much as we are really cautious, we are still human and it just helps us to connect. Any thoughts?

Sarah Sands: This is a nice way to end, if each of you perhaps could tell a story – and engineering story, or a story about an engineer. Do you have a story that brings engineering to life?

John McCollum: I’ll give you a story. I started doing some external mentoring with an individual who basically had taken a career break for a period of time, to bring up her children. She had been out of the industry for 10 years. She was a very senior individual,

20 director level, a very capable engineer. She had been busy during those 10 years, an elected school governor and so on, and she had made lots of contributions, but she couldn’t get a job.

I spent some time with her and said, “How can you not get a job? It must be quite easy, surely?” I had no appreciation of just how difficult it was. We spent some time looking at her CV and started talking around it. I was giving her mock interviews and thought, ”She’ll smash this!” I got to the point where I realised what was actually happening. Although she was applying for everything, nothing was happening in terms of response.

I therefore started doing some digging and asking people I knew, what is going on? I put her CV in front of people I knew within agencies, a recruitment head, headhunters and so on and they said, “Ten year career break – we can see it”. She had had a bit of a career break: we weren’t hiding it, but equally we weren’t broadcasting it. They said, “John, we will not touch that person. We will not touch them.” I asked them what they meant by that, and they said they wouldn’t take the risk: “Unless our client specifically says to us that they will welcome a returner, someone who has been out of their career for less than two years, we won’t bring them in, because our clients do not appreciate us doing that.” I just couldn’t believe it.

It got me so passionately enthused over it all, and I thought to myself that we had to do something about this. We went through a returnership programme. Some of you may have come across returnership programmes. It was nothing to do the industry I’m working in, it is in engineering, but it is not the defence side of things. The great news is that, after nine months, she actually has a fantastic job now. However, this made me so infuriated with anger that our recruitment systems and the whole thing is stacked against returners that I have said that we will create our own returnership programme within the company now. That is the story that I bring to engineers, to say that actually because I have had that immersive experience, and I know fundamentally not just about the unjustness of it, but the fact that it can happen in today’s world – because that talent is still out there.

How many more people are out there, who would come back into engineering if they were just given that opportunity? There is some research which says that there are at least 75,000 engineers out there in today’s world who, with just a little support around returnership, could come back into engineering. However, unfortunately, many will not come back because the support is not there. That is the bit that I am driving to move forward.

Sarah Sands: That is a pretty good story. I liked the bit about you digging to find the answers.

Nike – do you have any insights or epiphany?

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Nike Folayan: There is a story about a young man named Aaron. When we set up AFBE I thought, I can’t preach lessons about helping young people without actually having a young person I was helping personally myself. So I took up the challenge and I went to our local Croydon supplementary education project. I said, “I’m an engineer, and I want to mentor a young person.” They said, “Oh, here’s Aaron. He’s an interesting young man.” So I said yes, definitely.

I walked into the room and said, “Hi. I’m Nike and I do this. I’m an engineer. Do you want to find out about what I do?” and he said, “I don’t care what you do!” I thought, okay – “So what would you like to talk about?” And he said he was only there because his mum asked him to come, but he didn’t want to be there. So I took my bag and I walked out, and that shocked him. He couldn’t believe that someone would just do that. His mum said, “Are you going?”, and I said yes.

The next week, this time he seemed a bit calmer and curious to know who this crazy woman was, who had just walked out on him. We then started a conversation and I started talking to him. I found out that he was being bullied at school, because he was much bigger than the other kids. I asked him what he wanted to do when he grew up and he said he wanted to be a bus driver. I asked him why, and he said it was because his uncle was a bus driver, and so on. So I said, “How about if you had a business that had lots of bus drivers?”, and he liked the idea of that. We started this conversation and then I found out that he was being bullied at school and then I wrote to the school and said that I was his mentor and that I would like to come in. As soon as they heard that somebody external was involved, he stopped getting detentions, for some reason, and the school started investigating and realised that he was the one being bullied.

The long and short of the story is that he went to college and studied, and he is an electrician now. So it does work. If you have a local school or a local centre, and you could change somebody’s life, just by doing something useful. That is my story.

Mark McBride-Wright: I have more of an observation. I look around the room and I know some people in this audience. I have now heard – have you noticed, we have all had a theme in the way we have answered a question, or posed a question? We have actually had three separate stories shared from the floor, and we have all shared stories, and that is indicative of who we are as people. There are other people in the room whom I have met at other networking events, with whom I have exchanged stories. I guess my advice would be to tell your story. What we could do for the profession is to find a way to enable everyone to tell their story on a shared platform, which is then accessible in some way – although I don’t know

22 how they do that. Yes, share your story, and network and exchange things together, and really capitalise on the connections that you make tonight.

Sarah Sands: That is what I hope you will be doing. Bola, the last word?

Bola Fatimilehin: Mine isn’t a story in the traditional style, but just about a conversation I have had with many people – a similar conversation, when I started working in diversity and inclusion within engineering. Before I came to the Academy, I worked at the BBC, and the stories about diversity and inclusion were very different. The story that was repeated a great deal went something like this.

“Okay, so what are we going to do around diversity and inclusion? I think that, first of all, we need to look at the women and we need to change things for women. Once we have solved that, we can move on to the other diversity areas.” I would look at them and ask, well, how long have been working on women? It was probably 20 or 30 years, so at what point would we get to the other categories. [Laughter] So then I said, “Okay, so let’s stick with women for a moment. In your head, this image of a woman – what does she look like? Is she black? Is she a lesbian? Does she have a disability?” I would be met with stares, and I would say, “Well, women are not a single point of identity. We all have an age, we all have ethnicity, and we are all differently abled. Therefore, if you are not looking at all of these things at once, you are not actually addressing all the women either.”

That is my message: if we really want to do diversity and inclusion, we have to look at everybody, otherwise someone is being excluded.

Sarah Sands: Thank you so much. I have learned a great deal and I hope you have too. I hope that your networking now bears fruit. Thank you very much to the excellent panel and to the organisers of this great place, to the Royal Academy.

[Applause]

[Ends]

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