UC hosts national workshop on diversity in engineering

Kermit Davis, PhD, CPE, an associate professor in UC environmental health, attended the session as President of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society. He reported back to his society on many of the NAE’s discussion points. Based on insights from this workshop, they have developed several initiatives to for their members.

For example, Davis coordinated a plenary panel on diversity that included speakers with expertise in gender, minority and sexual orientation. Doug Mitchell from National Public Radio was the moderator.

The society has also established affinity groups to create a support network and to engage a more inclusive audience in events, mentoring, and communication. “I consider these groups to be the basic foundation of engagement efforts in our society,” says Davis. He reports that their women’s group is “well established” and that they are in the process of developing groups for members who LBGTQ and for races and ethnicities underrepresented in engineering.

These groups provide fertile soil for growth, but Davis acknowledges that current barriers are not easily dismantled, even with the best of intentions. “From a society-wide perspective, there are two major challenges. First, we need to get better at being open about those challenges, and support our colleagues from underrepresented and/or marginalized groups,” he says.

Second, Davis highlights the catch-22 of the STEM world: The inequalities and underrepresentation within STEM fields cannot be mitigated unless both individuals and organization invest in creating pathways for all professionals to connect in meaningful ways. However, those pathways will not be effective or meaningful without input from current professionals in the field.

“Equity and inclusion in professional societies are limited according to the number of underrepresented that are in the profession, as well as in the professional society itself,” he says.  To achieve a more representative membership, individuals and organizations must facilitate a welcoming space for innovation and encourage diverse perspectives in the STEM fields.

The Proceedings-in Brief from the workshop have been published and are available online at the National Academy of Engineering’s website: Engineering Societies Activities in Promoting Diversity.

The workshop is the third of a series of meetings on topics prioritized at a national NAE workshop in 2017.  The first and second sessions were hosted by University of Southern California and Georgia Tech, respectively. The other meetings considered the design of a joint societies’ student competitions focused on the Grand Challenges for Engineering, the role of societies in defining “impact” on the engineering profession as a criterion for assessing faculty success, and how engineering societies can help better align academia and industry.

For more information on the NAE workshop, please contact Ken Jarboe, NAE Senior Program Officer.

Featured image at top: A student in the WISE program in a lab. (Photo/UC Creative Services)