A new engineering course at Charles Sturt University (CSU) is aiming to re-balance perspectives on engineering problems, by addressing the underrepresentation of women in the engineering industry.
According to Foundation Professor of Engineering at CSU, Euan Lindsay, good engineering at its core is about people and serving society — technology is a means of solving the problem, rather than the be-all and end-all of engineering.
"If you want to train engineers to solve problems for all of society, then you want to make sure that the people you are training are representative of all society, not just a particular subset,” said Professor Lindsay.
By advocating for a more balanced gender approach in its recruitment and training, Charles Sturt University says its engineering course will allow more balanced perspectives on engineering problems to better reflect the reality of engineering’s place in society. The result will be an expanding pool of engineering talent, and changes to the way all students, regardless of their gender, think.
Professor Lindsay said the underrepresentation of women in engineering is a well-known problem, and the importance of attracting women into STEM careers has received a lot of recent attention lately.
Rather than trying to encourage more women into STEM careers, Professor Lindsay says, Australian society needs to do less to discourage girls and women who are attracted to STEM fields like engineering.
"Talk to girls in Year 7 and 8 and they love maths and science, they think it's awesome. But somewhere in the next four years at high school, we repel them,” he explained.
“It's not deliberate, but we reinforce the message in the role models we show and the examples we use when we say 'this is engineering'.”
The new program at Charles Sturt University will take these issues into account, by building an approach that is aware of these barriers to entry, and which is friendly to women in order to welcome them to the profession.
"We need to capture the skills that women are traditionally good at, and remove the barriers that repel women out of engineering," Professor Lindsay said.
The main differences for the Charles Sturt University Engineering program is in the entry selection process. Whilst most engineering programs select students solely on their academic scores, particularly in the mathematics subjects, the new approach also takes into account other skills such as socio-technical capabilities.
The program will also seek to transform the way male students and faculty approach engineering.
“You need to build a learning environment that encourages all students to think about the issues facing all of society, not just the people that are like them,” Professor Lindsay explained.
For example, the new engineering building at the university will be designed to include families and children, allowing freshmen, particularly 18-year-old males straight out of high school, to think about more diverse uses of buildings.
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