Gender and diversity

The Special Interest Group on Gender and Diversity aims to support engineering education and engineering professions in a gender balanced and inclusive way. Our vision is to create and foster environments where every individual is respected and no one feels marginalized.

Our work is mainly focused in two areas: 1) Identifying best practices to attract and retain women and other underrepresented students in engineering higher education; 2) Promoting scholarly research on gender, diversity and inclusion in engineering education.

We hold special sessions on gender and diversity at the SEFI Annual Conference and strive to continuously integrate questions of gender, diversity and inclusion into all facets of the conference and council meetings. The Group aims to work synergistically with other Special Interest Groups in order to advance critical understandings of diversity and inclusivity in engineering education.

Specific Goals for Coming Years

• Contribute to mainstreaming topics of gender, diversity and inclusion into all special interest groups and identify relevant cross-sectional topics – For example, with the special interest group on Engineering Education Research, as well as with the editorial board of the European Journal of Engineering Education.
• Broadening and deepening the approaches and concepts used in engineering education research on gender and diversity, and efforts to promote inclusive engineering
• Contribute to a European network of SEFI members who systematically exchange information on gender, diversity and inclusion.
• Collaborate with other European and International networks to promote inclusivity in engineering education.

Join the special interest group (email: i.direito@ucl.ac.uk)