Talk by Genie Guest Professor Claudia Eckert

Be yourself – be an engineer: personal strengths in an interconnected engineering eco system

During the life cycle of a complex product hundreds and often thousands of engineers need to work together. This requires a mixture of disciplines, skills and experiences as well as a mixture of personal strengths and transferable skills. Universities often think of engineering knowledge – inline to prevailing philosophical thinking – as something personal that a person possesses. However, in complex engineering projects nobody has all the knowledge, and organisations need to assure that there are no gaps in the knowledge as well as sufficient overview to link this individual knowledge and understanding. In practice this can be difficult for a number of reasons. The tools, methods and approaches that engineers use are often not very well connected throughout the product lifecycle, so that engineers need to put considerable effort into bringing different perspectives together. Much of this coordination and alignment effort requires skills that are not taught as part of engineering degrees. Engineers therefore have to fall back to their personal soft skills. Anecdotal evidence would indicate that this is the strengths of many female engineers, in particular as analysis of student projects shows that the female students are often the ones who coordinate teams or communicate information. Similarly women often appear to be attracted to engineering through values as opposed to a fascination with gadgets or technology. In engineering companies there are also many roles where these values, such as suitability, justice, or inclusion are particularly important. The related activities like as design for circular economy, ethical supply chains or good user face design as also part of the wider design and development of complex products. This talk argues that we should celebrate the personal strengths and believes of our female engineers, because they make a huge contribution to the development of complex engineering products.

As evidence has accumulated that the low numbers of women in engineering are not the result of inequalities in aptitude or preparation in foundational skills such as math, researchers have focused increasingly on attitudinal and psychological variables: the “fit” between engineering and women’s career goals and interests, women’s self-concept and confidence in engineering-related skills, the effects of stereotype threat, sense of belonging, etc.

Claudia Eckert is a guest professor at the Department of Industrial and Materials Science, funded by Genie, and this talk is part of the series "Women in Engineering" and is organised by Genie representatives at IMS together with Chalmers' DEI committee.

Speaker Bio

Claudia Eckert has been Professor of Design at the Open University since 2013. She returned to the OU in 2008 as a senior lecturer rafter nearly 10 years in the Engineering Design Centre at the University of Cambridge, where she was a senior research associate and associate director,  leading the design process improvement group, which developed tools and methods to support the development of complex engineering products working with companies manufacturing helicopters, jet engines, cars and diesel engines.

Claudia completed her PhD in 1997 at the Open University on “Intelligent Support for Knitwear Design” and then worked at the OU as research fellow studying sources of inspiration in the knitwear industry. She studied mathematics at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich and philosophy of the Munich School of Philosophy, and has an MSc in Applied Artificial Intelligence from the University of Aberdeen.

In most countries, women still represent less than 20% of the engineering workforce in industry and academia. The DS is launching a series of online talks to encourage women to explore opportunities for careers in engineering, fostering diversity, innovation, and equality in the field.

Women from academia and industry will describe their experiences and efforts to encourage more women into an engineering degree, and subsequently into engineering leadership. These talks are motivated to inspire change and provide insight into creating inclusive environments.