DIVERSITY | WOMEN IN ENGINEERING Gender % of membership 100% 95% Male Female 90% 85% 80% 75% 2011 David Stevens Kieran Thompson Keeping-in-touch days can help a new mother stay engaged with the workplace, adds Stevens. This can be supported by attendance at staff forums, CPD, professional networking and social events all of which help reduce the anxiety of returning to the workplace after a long time away. Employers should also consider helping with the cost of childcare during these events. Flexible working, compressed hours and working from home combined with other wellbeing and support programmes will help staff feel valued, and encourage them to stay with employers too, says Stevens, who believes gender-coded language is another hurdle that needs to be overcome. Employers should review workplace policies and job adverts for bias, as masculine language tends to put women off applying for jobs. Thompson adds: The aim should be to get to a socio-economic spread of people in the organisation, because as research shows diverse teams perform better. In its report Increasing diversity and inclusion in engineering a case study toolkit, the Royal Academy of Engineering (RAE) found that firms in the top quartile for gender diversity were 15% more likely to have financial returns above their industrys national median. 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 At the end of 2018, 10% of CIBSE membership was female, compared with only 6% at the end of 2011 Tiptoeing around the issues of inclusion and diversity is no longer an option, says Thompson the industry must change so we can fish from a bigger pool during times of talent deficit. The RAE report said engineering employers were projected to need 1.82 million skilled people from 2012-22, and 96% of its Diversity Leadership Group firms wanted to broaden their recruitment pool. How are we going to make construction an attractive proposition if we dont change internally? Leaders must lead by example, says Thompson. If people feel welcome and have a sense of belonging which comes from the top they will stay. CJ CIBSE RULES OF THUMB FOR WOMEN IN ENGINEERING Sara Kassam, head of sustainability at CIBSE, explains some rules of thumb for inclusivity. When I was working in a facilities team at a London university, I noticed that in project meetings for new buildings the majority of participants were white men. This got me thinking about how I was received and treated in such spaces. When I moved to CIBSE, I came into contact with many inspiring women engineers and, over the years, have built up a trove of stories, anecdotes, observations, comments and ideas about women in the workplace. From this sharing of experiences, I found that solutions were emerging about how to handle particular situations, which culminated in an event at CIBSE Build2Perform last autumn. The womens breakfast panel discussion, on making the working environment more inclusive, generated ideas for positive change that men and women can follow. Ive distilled some of these into adocument, Rules of thumb for women in engineering, which will be available online later this year. These rules of thumb include: When a womans idea is overlooked in a meeting, its the responsibility of men in the room to go back and say she said... Employers need to trust employees to do their jobs in a flexible way we need to measure outcomes rather than X days of work a week More diverse management teams make better strategic decisions and show increased profitability. 26 June 2019 www.cibsejournal.com CIBSE Jun19 pp24-26 Women.indd 26 24/05/2019 16:18