How to humanise engineering education and why we must

Since Caroline Criado Perez’s book Invisible Women was published in 2019, here at the University of Southampton’s School of Engineering we have been considering the gender data gap in transport research, and how to close it. Transport is, after all, a highly gendered domain and is our research group’s focus. The working group we set up was aimed at influencing transport research design and reporting practices. 

Of course, research is not the only, nor perhaps even the most important, academic activity that suffers from gender inequity and imbalance. This won’t be news to most readers. As with so many of society’s challenges, education is key.

There is a substantial and persistent under-representation of women in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). In the 2021-22 academic year, 69 per cent of STEM students at UK universities identified as male. Although the gender gap differs in amount by nation, its presence and direction are ubiquitous. 

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We’ve seen many interventions over the years, from university-targeted frameworks such as Athena Swan to longstanding efforts to enhance girls’ underlying interest in STEM subjects. Although success is being seen in some of the fundamental sciences (for example, maths and physics), these approaches have proved unhelpful in addressing the especially pronounced inequities in engineering and technology subjects. We need engineering-focused solutions. We need to incorporate more social sciences into engineering courses.

Engineering is about more than just building things. It is about solving human problems. It is about the people for whom systems are being designed and built as much as it is about the “nuts and bolts and calculations”. Engineering education requires more than the training of technical competencies. This has been recognised in the UK Engineering Council’s latest accreditation requirements for engineering degrees. 

Many have argued that greater focus on the social relevance of engineering would attract more women into the field and would sustain women’s motivation to pursue engineering. But how do we go about doing this? 

Thankfully, we already have a subdiscipline, with its own UK chartered institute, that deals expressly with the topic: human factors and ergonomics. Ergonomics (to use its shorter title) sits in the interdisciplinary space between the engineering and human sciences. We are not just talking about the ergonomically designed keyboard here, with its curving hand and wrist support, but of cognitive and systems ergonomics. These help us understand how we design and build things that match the way people think, and how we structure and organise large, complex systems in a way that ensures they successfully contribute to a happy, healthy, sustainable society. 

Since around 2009, at Southampton, we have been teaching cognitive and systems ergonomics in a module taken by third- and fourth-year engineering students. For many of them, it is their first exposure to this human-in-the-system perspective, and I am often asked if we run a master’s course (to which I answer: not yet). Postgraduate ergonomics degrees are undoubtedly useful, given they offer an appealing route into the engineering workplace for many women; however, this approach does not do enough to address the broader engineering gender challenge. We need a transversal approach whereby these perspectives are embedded across core undergraduate engineering modules.

Researchers in the broader pedagogy field have long argued for this approach to gender mainstreaming; however, there is resistance to incorporating a gender perspective across modules and programmes. Our own ongoing research with HE students and educators is suggesting that integrating ergonomics materials across engineering subdisciplines could present a way to bypass some of this resistance while indirectly contributing positively to gender equity in engineering (with the side-effect of producing more rounded engineers). 

How we do this could follow the way the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals are already being incorporated into engineering education (that is, through direct reference to the social importance of the topic being discussed in a given lecture or tutorial). Although it may feel forced to discuss the human or social implications of some topics (for example, in basic maths classes), this is likely to be the exception rather than the rule. There are more modules that relate to systems that will involve humans in some way than modules focusing on first principles. Guest lectures, delivered by chartered ergonomists, could be included in many programmes. We could also provide training courses for educators on the societal relevance of engineering. These have been shown to help. 

Of course, to do all this we are going to need greater representation of chartered ergonomists in engineering faculties. This represents a barrier in financially challenging times for the HE sector. That said, considering the updated accreditation requirements and the continued need for solutions to the overwhelming gender imbalance, the cost should be viewed as a necessary and beneficial investment, not an expense. At Southampton, we are still on this journey. Our ergonomics module is available to students from across engineering disciplines, we have begun to incorporate ergonomics content into other modules, and we are working towards a master’s programme. However, we are still far from fully embedding social science principles across relevant teaching. The journey continues. 

Finally, some reading this will likely be thinking that this is all nonsense and that it simply perpetuates the entirely fallacious “men are technical and women are social” dichotomy. We should be emphasising the capacity for women and girls to succeed in maths, physics and the other “hard” aspects of engineering, not pandering to stereotypes. While I agree that the situation has been entirely socially constructed, current approaches are not working fast enough. If bringing more social sciences into engineering helps get more women and girls interested in engineering, and at the same time produces better engineers, why wouldn’t we give it a try?

Rich McIlroy is a senior research fellow at the University of Southampton.

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