The RAEng marks INWED24 with annual leadership lunch

Hosted at Prince Phillip House in London, the Academy invited senior industry leaders and early career engineers to attend the event, providing a space for discussion and connection.

Rachel Skinner, Executive Director at WSP, was the event’s speaker. She shared her perspective on INWED, this year’s theme of ‘enhanced by engineering’, and the importance of equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) – in a discussion hosted by Academy CEO, Dr Hayaatun Sillem.

The Academy also presented their own theme for this year’s INWED – ‘diversifying the power of thought’ – which attendees were able to discuss at their tables and share with the room.

“For 11 years, INWED has been celebrating and raising the visibility of women engineers around the world, providing a platform to showcase the important contributions that they make in an industry where, unfortunately, women continue to be significantly underrepresented,” said Dr Sillem.

“We can see from the latest data that efforts to attract more women into engineering careers are having some impact – albeit, we would like this to go faster. The most significant drop in the data is between women aged 35 and 64, and that means that women with experience, who have already committed to work in engineering, are leaving the industry at a disproportionate rate – and a rate we simply can’t afford.”

With this, the Academy presented the findings of their latest ‘EDI engine: Evidencing the business benefits of equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) in engineering’ report.

The report provided evidence demonstrating the benefits of EDI for engineering businesses across four key areas: people, – for instance, that 82 per cent of women in engineering and construction report that the presence of role models informs their decision to join a company – products, partners and processes.

“We genuinely achieve inclusive engineering outcomes – the actual outcome for society – when our own engineering community best reflects the people for whom we’re trying to generate those outcomes,” explained Skinner.

“In whatever domain of engineering, its very tempting to take what we know worked last time, and copy and paste it. But that is totally not what we need in this space, right now, for the climate crisis, the biodiversity crisis, the equity crisis that we’re seeing. We have to get on the road with much, much faster change. To me, the way to change things the fastest is to change the minds of the people who are actually doing the engineering – and that, by definition, means opening the door much more.”

More information on the event can be found here.