Gender and engineering

I've just been to a course production team meeting for a residential school in engineering and very heartening it was too. Plenty of good ideas and overall commitment. One thing which emerged, mainly due to the paperwork that we have to complete, is the degree that we need to consider diversity. While TXR174 has a much better gender balance than many other technology courses, it is likely that TXR120 will suffer in comparison. This means that we need to make a big effort to redress this.

The issue is about accessibility and the perception of accessibility. It could be argued, probably convincingly, that including the word engineering in the title is a mistake!

I think I need to arrange at least half a day workshop where we can review our work to check that we are doing what we can to avoid rebuffing women.