By Dr Keith Turner, Director, Springboard*
Women make up 50% of the population, 15% of the engineeringgraduates, but only 11% of the engineering workforce. We are missing out onhuge amounts of talent which is desperately needed in our workplaces. So whatcan we do about it?
In my experience, it is pretty rare to find deliberate discrimination towards female workers. Most professional managers I know are just trying their best to find the right people to do high quality work for their clients. But unconscious bias can creep in unseen. Everyone has got their own personal experience of life on which to draw, and this means that men and women naturally relate to the strengths that have helped them achieve their own successes. One of the key challenges to tackling unconscious bias is to open people’s eyes to the benefits of characteristics which they don’t have themselves. It can be remarkably difficult to persuade people to do this.
Here’s an analogy. Humans can see colours from red to violet. Bees have a spectrum shifted to shorter wavelengths, and can see from orange through to ultra-violet. As a result, many flowers have developed ultra-violet colours to attract pollinating bees. Now, if I choose a bunch of flowers as a gift for my mother, am I going to visit the shop armed with a UV light so I can pick one with beautiful UV patterns? Of course not. I am a human, and I am going to value the colours that I can see, especially those that my mother appreciated last time. Am I discriminating against bees? Not at all. In fact I like bees. They are good for the environment and make honey. It’s just that their view of my mother’s flowers isn’t relevant and so doesn’t even enter my mind. On the other hand, if I want to select a gift of flowers for my mother to put in her garden, then I really ought to give a bit more consideration to the bees’ visual spectrum. Otherwise, she’s going to have no pollination and a barren flower bed.
So to help companies gain the benefits of diversifying the workforce, one important thing people can do at work is to try to help future colleagues to understand the value of their individual strengths.
I personally have gone through a great learning curve onthis. Through various experiences and conversations, I have come to appreciatewith great clarity the strength diversity amongst the team adds to our business.In much the same way as natural selection does in nature, diversity adds qualityand durability to the solutions we produce. I reached a stage where I activelywanted to seek out that diversity. But how to do so was a remarkably difficultchallenge, which I now realise required two strategies. One is to help women tobe aware that any colleague is subject to unconscious bias, so they need tomake their strengths obvious. The second is to change the company’s approach tomitigate that unconscious bias.
The good thing about the first strategy is that it islargely under the control of the individual, so in the next blog I’ll talk inmore detail about how candidates can make their strengths obvious to interviewersduring the recruitment process.
Springboard is a technical consultancy which develops innovative medical devices such as auto-injectors, infusion pumps and electromechanical surgical equipment.Springboard works through all product development process stages: concepts, proof of principle in the laboratory, design for manufacture and verification. Through its strategic partnerships with broad industries and technical areas, there is opportunity to develop careers in project leadership, technical specialities, line management and sales.
Further information can be found at www.springboard.pro.
* Dr Keith Turner will be a guest panel speaker for the CamAWiSE “Men as allies – Approaching equality together”, 30 May 2019, in partnership with the Wellcome – MRC Cambridge Stem Cell Institute.
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