The Sustainable Development Goals encapsulate development opportunities for communities around the world. Realising these opportunities will be complex and will incorporate, to some degree, appropriate and effective engineering and technology design, implementation and decision making. To be most effective it is important that the ‘engineering team’ has the motivation, capability and ethics to contribute to this multifaceted work as well as reflect the diversity that is seen in community. Research shows diverse teams have improved decision making and more innovative and accurate thinking due to the wider range of team members’ experiences, approaches and strategies [1,2]. As engineering is a profession that requires tertiary education, recognised by professional associations, to practice, it is the responsibility of universities to appropriately prepare students for their roles in sustainable development and encourage appropriately diverse cohorts.

Despite heavy investment by multiple stakeholders, initiatives to attract more women to STEM subjects have so far failed to deliver a significant increase in the number of female engineering students in Australia. In the decades between 1996 and 2015, there was less than 2% growth in enrolments of women as a proportion of Australian domestic engineering undergraduate students. The current enrolment rate of Australian women in engineering is only 15% [3], one of the lowest of OECD countries [4].

Humanitarian Engineering Education (HEE) transcends disciplines, attracting students across engineering [5] who are interested in using their technical skills for the benefit of society [6]. A number of universities have introduced HEE units or minors. These attract a higher proportion of female students than traditional units [5,7]. NGO's working in HEE, such as Engineers Without Borders, also report that their humanitarian engineering opportunities for undergraduates attract a high proportion of female students, up to 45% [6]. However, many questions remain such as, does HEE increases the proportion of female students overall, or just redistributes female students between units, disciplines, or institutions.

Supervisors

Margaret Jollands - Senior Supervisor (margaret.jollands@rmit.edu.au)

Nick Brown - Joint Senior Supervisor (nick.brown@rmit.edu.au)

References

[1] Rock, D. & H. Grant. 2016. Why Diverse Teams are Smarter. Harvard Business Review Nov 04, 2016. https://hbr.org/2016/11/why-diverse-teams-are-smarter?referral=00563

[2] Chen, L., Le, K., Mollross, I., Pearson, A.. 2017. Women in Engineering. Melbourne: Engineers Australia.

[3] DET. 2018. Student Data. Higher education statistics Student Data. Australian Government Department of Education and Training (DET). https://www.education.gov.au/student-data

[4] OECD 2017. Education at a Glance 2017: OECD Indicators, Table Chapter C: Access to Education, Participation and Progression; C3.1 Share of new entrants to tertiary education, by field of study and gender (2015) p282, OECD Publishing, Paris http://doi.org/10.1787/19991487

[5] Skokan, C. K, & Josink, J. 2005. “Gender Participation in Humanitarian versus Traditional Multidisciplinary Senior Design Projects”, ASEE Conference, Portland

[6] Stoakley, A., Brown, N., Matthee, S. 2017. The role of a humanitarian focus in increasing gender diversity in engineering education. In G.Town (Eds.). Proceedings of the 28th Annual International Conference of the Australasian Association of Engineering Education, AAEE2017, Manly, NSW: Macquarie University

[7] Smith, J., Anderson, B., Brown, N., Colley, A., Stoakley, A. & Turner, J. 2017. The Rise of Humanitarian Engineering Education in Australasia. In G.Town (Eds.). Proceedings of the 28th Annual International Conference of the Australasian Association of Engineering Education, AAEE2017, Manly, NSW: Macquarie University.

Want to learn more?

For specific questions about the project and funding opportunities, please contact:

Nick Brown - nick.brown@rmit.edu.au