I thought that my stay in London last week would provide a safety zone, but it wasn’t to be. While reading the local paper over morning coffee, I came across an article that discussed the need for more diversity in engineering in the U.K.
Naomi Climer, newly appointed head of the Institute of Engineering and Technology, decries the fact that only one out of every eight applicants to U.K. engineering programs is female. She doesn’t make the case that more qualified females are being denied admission in favor of less qualified males. She just says that there simply are not enough women in engineering, and the answer now has to be……wait for it….. quotas.
So far, so predictable. But what really caught my eye was her statement on why having more diversity is better: ” Diversity is good for the bottom line because mixed teams, whether of race, gender or age are naturally more creative and therefore better able to come up with solutions for the problems engineers face.”
That got me to thinking about the three decades I spent in the chemical industry, where we grappled with any number of product and process engineering challenges. I was trained as a chemist, and worked closely with all types of engineers – chemical, mechanical, electrical and structural. For the life of me, I cannot remember one time when any of these engineers (male or female) cried out that if only we had more diversity in the meeting room, we could solve the problem at hand. What we needed was simply good, creative technical skills.
I am frankly more sympathetic to the ruminations on the issue voiced by Eileen Pollack in her New York Times commentary this past Sunday. Maybe women can be made to feel more welcome in the technical disciplines, but let’s not make the leap that says that diversity in and of itself provides for better problem solving.