![Women might be more attracted to engineering as a career if specific branches, like robotics, were mentioned more often.](/content/dam/images/g/s/m/5/s/b/image.related.afrArticleLead.620x350.gsra31.png/1479863158141.jpg)
Sorting sexism from political correctness is a veritable minefield for executives, especially in an age of outrage incontinence.
Social media makes it easy to publicly call out transgressions and one recruitment agency found a recent job ad it had posted attracting attention on LinkedIn for all the wrong reasons.
The ad for a local structural engineering firm said the business needed a technical “go-to guy” for the staff in the office. Anita Curnow, executive director access and operations at VicRoads, reposted the ad, which shamed the recruiters and sparked a lively public discussion.
The post reopened the language debate started by former army chief and Diversity Council head David Morrison that executives shouldn’t be writing emails prefaced with “hey guys”.
“Shame on Aspect Personnel and its client for this job advertisement,” wrote Curnow. “Surely you could come up with a more gender inclusive way to say ‘go to guy’ … It leaves me highly cynical that you would seriously consider a woman! We need to do better than this, engineering industry!”
Unconscious bias
Morrison maintains that such language smacks of unconscious bias. “There might be people who go, ‘That’s what I say all the time and I don’t mean it to be in any way disrespectful,’ but it’s not what you intend, it’s how you are listened to,” he said.
The recruitment firm was contrite: “It certainly wasn’t our intention for anyone to feel excluded,” Aspect responded on LinkedIn. “We’ll be remedying this example as well as ensuring that, in the future, our ads are written in a way that encourages everyone who is qualified for a role to apply.”
Stephen Durkin, chief executive of Engineers Australia, says unconscious bias is a serious and significant problem for the profession given 87 per cent of working engineers are male.
Language isn’t the only thing deterring women from entering the profession, says Durkin. Part of the problem is that parents still think of engineers as people in hard hats and fluoro vests stomping around construction sites.
High status
The modern engineer is as likely to be working in high tech or thought leadership, he says. In Germany and France, engineering is as high a status profession as medicine and law. If Australian parents held it in equally high esteem, more girls would be encouraged to enter the profession, he says.
Curnow believes the right role models would help girls consider engineering as a career. She also thinks that talking about specific types of engineering, such as robotics, makes parts of the broad discipline more appealing to women.
In the meantime, she is proud to report that 13 out of the 22 intake for VicRoads’ graduate program are female.
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