Engineering news
The engineering sector must make greater efforts to attract lesbian and gay staff, diversity lobbying group Stonewall has said.
Stonewall has developed a global workplace equality index - a benchmark that assesses how gay-friendly international employers are. But only six out of 319 participating companies operated in the engineering sector.
“That's a tiny proportion,” said Vignesh Ashok, policy and research officer at Stonewall. “There is a vacuum, a real absence of data from engineering firms.”
Ashok said the average rank of the engineering firms that had responded to its survey was 205th. “That makes engineering a low performing sector. It is failing to reach out for diverse talent.”
Stonewall's findings were revealed at an event organised by the Royal Academy of Engineering (RAE) focussing on the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transexual community (LGBT) within the engineering sector.
Philip Greenish, chief executive of the RAE, said that the industry needed to ensure that consistent strategies were in place to support LGBT staff.
Greenish said: “If we are going to fix the talent pipeline, we must be open to everyone. We must ensure that barriers are removed, be they implicit or real.”
The RAE event featured presentations from gay and lesbian engineers. Emmeline Tang, a senior electrical engineer with Arup, said she had encountered discrimination within academia, but that Arup had proved itself to be an open and enlightened employer.
Tang said: “Arup has an LGBT network in place. It is not just paying lip-service to the issue. It cares for staff and for diversity.”
Meanwhile, Kirsty Bashforth, group head of organisational effectiveness at BP, said the oil and gas giant was on a journey towards implementing a cross-company LGBT strategy. “We are not there yet,” she admitted. “We are still trying to normalise the conversation.” She said that BP was committed to ensuring that all staff felt comfortable within their working environment.
However, Bashforth admitted that in some countries where it operated, people who were lesbian and gay faced hostility. And she said that that caused difficulties, under some circumstances. “We have a duty to ensure that we are not putting staff in positions of hardship,” she said.
Arup has dealt with such scenarios by implementing a policy that ensures that LGBT employees do not suffer an adverse impact on their career if they refuse to work in a country that they felt discriminated against LGBT people.