Government adviser urges diversity push in engineering

Greater diversity of experience and thinking must be brought into the engineering profession to help combat pressing societal challenges including climate change, the government’s Chief Scientific Adviser has said.

Addressing an event to mark the launch of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers’ 175th anniversary celebrations, Sir Patrick Vallance said: “We know that big, difficult problems cannot be solved by monolithic thinking; they cannot be solved by monolithic groups that all look the same, have the same background, have the same belief structure, the same knowledge base.”

He pointed out that only 12% of the UK engineering workforce were made up of women in 2020 and similar difficulties are being faced in relation to the recruitment and promotion of engineers from different backgrounds.

“We don’t have as much diversity as we need,” Sir Patrick said. He described the problem as a societal issue rather than one which the government alone could solve.

“You ask any child about those global challenges and they want them to be sorted out, they’re interested in it and they want to see a solution to that, and actually they know there are practical solutions to it,” he told the event. “That’s exciting, and that’s something people want to get involved with.”

But he added: “Very often, I think what’s happening is that engineering isn’t positioned quite in that way, so people end up thinking of engineering as something different – separate from that – rather than a problem solving answer to the major societal challenges.

“I think we’ve all got to work to get this right, to get teachers and others encouraging as many to get into this field and into science, and I do think that’s possible,” Sir Patrick said. “The numbers are all moving in the right direction – but it would be nice if they moved a bit faster.”

Regarding the climate change challenge, the Chief Scientific Adviser said new ways of trying to solve problems relating to carbon emissions are needed. “But it’s worth remembering that if you haven’t invented and discovered it now, the chance of being able to deploy that, at the scale required in the time required, is very low,” he pointed out.

He emphasised the need to focus on solutions that already exist and to work on large scale deployment of existing technologies, while also supporting the development of promising new routes to emissions reductions and growing industries such as renewable energy.

Systems engineering and systems thinking “have got to be central” as engineers mitigate and provide adaptations to climate change, he added. “We’re not going to be able to tackle these things that as a society we care about, and we need to care about, without really understanding how we come up with engineering solutions.”