It’s a man’s world, as the song goes. Men earn more than women, generally occupy the top jobs within corporations, and can expect to climb the career ladder more easily. If this is the case in business generally, diversity and engineering make particularly uncomfortable bedfellows.
It’s a real concern that, in an era when skills shortages threaten the growth and prosperity of engineering firms, one half of the population is effectively excluded from making up some of the shortfall. If you think “excluded” is too strong a word, consider that only 8% of the engineers working in the UK are female.
It’s a problem that most agree needs to be addressed, and there is a proliferation of initiatives by companies and organisations such as the UKRC aimed at improving on this lamentable figure. No matter what your view of the sexual politics, bringing more women into the profession would bring a massive business benefit.
Tim Solso, chairman and chief executive of engine and turbocharger engineering firm Cummins, is well aware of the challenge. Visiting the UK to speak at a conference organised by the Women’s Business Forum, Solso emphasised that diversity of the company workforce was an important subject to him – and had been so throughout his career.
“My commitment goes back to when I joined Cummins in 1971,” he says. The chairman at the time was Joseph Irwin Miller, a well-known industrialist who was instrumental in the rise of Cummins and a prominent civil rights leader. Miller had been involved with Martin Luther King Jr in the March on Washington and in registering African-Americans to vote.
Solso recalls: “When I came in I was involved in recruiting African-Americans to Cummins in southern Indiana where the Ku Klux Klan was active. So wherever I’ve been I’ve been involved in what’s now called diversity. Then it was affirmative action, it was equal employment opportunities – there were lots of different names through the years.”
So Solso and Cummins have worked to increase the number of female engineers at the corporation. The figure went up from 10% – already better than the average – to 13% over a 10-year period, Solso says.
He readily admits that the “figure doesn’t sound impressive”. But he adds: “On the other hand, if we hadn’t been doing extraordinary things, especially over the last seven or eight years, we wouldn’t have been able to do it. It takes an extraordinary effort and a lot of creativity.”
Part of this involves close links with universities and women’s engineering organisations and also the provision of scholarships for women. “If you do that type of thing you enhance your retention as well as attracting more people,” Solso says. One of the benefits of attracting more women into the business is that there is a pool for leadership positions, which in turn attracts more female employees.
The company currently has six female engineers who are technical leaders. All have the potential to become vice-presidents for engineering, Solso says. “But it’s not going to happen naturally – you have to work at it.” One of these women is “already the chief engineer for our heavy-duty engine – which is for one of our largest markets, trucks in the US and around the world”.
At board level, he argues that the male-female split should ideally be 50:50. Aside from equality, there are other benefits, Solso says. “My own experience is that when I’m in a room and there are women executives there the nature of the conversation and its quality and output is simply better.”
He adds: “If you get a group of people with very different backgrounds dealing with a problem and you give the same problem to a homogeneous group, the first group will come up with a better solution.
“Men need to see a critical mass of women in senior positions to understand how diversity can help the business, and in turn that helps to drive greater diversity.
Ultimately, if you’re an organisation with informal biases that prevent the hiring, promotion and retention of certain groups of people and you’re competing with an organisation that’s less biased, you will be defeated.”
How high does he rate Cummins among American corporations in the diversity stakes? “I would say that of industrial companies we’re in the top tier – there’s no question of that. If you consider all American firms, we’re in the top 25%.
“There are some other companies that have made more progress and you benchmark against them and share best practice.
“If you have an environment that treats everyone and their ideas with dignity and respect, and people feel they have the opportunity to grow and develop, that’s really healthy. And if people feel good they will be passionate about what they do, and that makes us successful.”
‘Firms need women’s viewpoint’
Alison Snell is head of Cummins Small Turbo and is one of those women in senior management positions of whom Tim Solso speaks.
Small Turbo’s products are aimed at light commercial vehicles with engines ranging from two to six litres. The business’s technical teams and programme managers report to Snell.
She agrees that the number of females working in the engineering industry is far too low. “I don’t know whether that’s because of the perception of the industry but I think there are a lot of talented girls out there who do very well in the sciences at school and for some reason don’t go on to pursue that afterwards. I think that having an engineering degree is widely acknowledged as having a very good degree whether you gain technical work or you don’t. I think it’s a real shame that girls don’t tend to pursue that option.”
Snell is a trained chemical engineer and has been involved in introducing new chemical processes and commissioning plant. She’s also worked as a management consultant and has run an aerospace repairs business.
“I hesitate to say women are better at this or that but I do think that it can’t be good for industry not to have their viewpoint.
“Really, you want as many viewpoints as possible.”
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