Equalities @ EECS

The Women’s Engineering Society, Wikimedia UK, The Institution of Engineering and Technology, the Electrifying Women Project and Archives For London are creating an online “wikithon” to add articles about extraordinary women in engineering. It will teach how to edit and create articles and encourage participants to celebrate the achievements of women in engineering on the Wikipedia platform. It will take place at 13:30 BST June 24th. You can join through Eventbrite:
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/extraordinary-women-in-engineering-a-wes-wikithon-tickets-57696650234

Just a short post today to add to Monday’s about the parents and carers network:

https://equalities.eecs.qmul.ac.uk/2020/06/08/qmul-parents-and-carers-network/

There is also a slack channel for parents and carers in EECS to exchange ideas and support.

https://join.slack.com/t/eecsparents/shared_invite/zt-e361dfpz-2K5EXlEARvgOQRo8gqWuZg

Dear EECS Students and Staff,

Here in the School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science, we stand in support of and solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement and those peacefully protesting following the horrific killing of George Floyd in the US. We have all been shocked and saddened by the death of George Floyd and the historic and ongoing racism and anti-Blackness in the US, the UK, and across the world. We want to share in expressing our condolences to all those affected, and in condemning incidents of racism and hate crimes. We stand with and support our Black colleagues, students, friends, and family.

We recognise that the systems and underlying attitudes that led to George Floyd’s death are not unique in either time or place: racism, anti-blackness, and inequality are unfortunately found across the UK.  We recognise the distress that this incident has caused to staff and students, particularly Black staff and students, and that this stress is compounded by the ongoing global coronavirus pandemic which has also disproportionately affected Black and ethnic minority people. As a community, we commit ourselves to caring for each other and to being open to talk, listen, and learn about these issues.

Many will also want to express solidarity with those taking action at the moment. You can join us in finding out more about the #BlackLivesMatter movement and how we can support it by donating, educating ourselves and others, as well as self-care and support for Black communities here:

https://blacklivesmatters.carrd.co

We recognise that it is not enough to be non-racist, we must be anti-racist. 

Support is available for students and staff who have been victims of hate-crime here:

https://reportandsupport.qmul.ac.uk/support/what-support-is-available-for-hate-crimesincidents

And general staff support here:

http://hr.qmul.ac.uk/wellbeing/mental-wellbeing/employee-assistance-programme/

Although we are striving for equality within the School, we recognise that more efforts are needed going forwards to recruit, mentor, support and promote BAME academics, technical and professional-services staff.  EECS is committed to progressing equality, diversion and inclusion. Our Equalities Committee has been working to address inequalities within our School and we will use our next meeting to reflect on how well our Action Plan addresses race equality and identify further avenues for promoting and supporting diversity and inclusion for all our staff and students.

An article published on the Guardian describes how women’s research has been adversely affected by the covid-19 lockdown.

In April Dr Elizabeth Hannon, deputy editor of the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, noticed that the number of article submissions she was receiving from women had dropped dramatically. Not so from men.

“Negligible number of submissions to the journal from women in the last month,” she posted on Twitter. “Never seen anything like it.” The response was an outpouring of recognition from frustrated female academics, saying they were barely coping with childcare and work during the coronavirus lockdown.

Link to full article.

STEMettes are running a series of online events presenting female role models, focussing on a different role model each week (we are now at the end of Week 6: Katherine Johnson week):

As more of us are home, and many schools will be closed over the next few weeks, Stemettes are joining you online – to keep you inspired, motivated and learning. Each week we’ll run 3 events across Zoom, Youtube Live and Instagram.

Find more info here: stemettes.org/onlineevents/.

International Women in Engineering Day is now in its seventh year, the 2020 campaign will be a year that is very different to the norm and we’re asking for your help to achieve this! INWED is an international awareness campaign which raises the profile of women in engineering and focuses attention on the amazing career opportunities available to girls in this exciting industry.

 

In 2020 we’re want to reach as many people as possible. If you have friends, relatives or colleagues in other countries we’re asking you to aim to involve them in your celebrations, They don’t need to be engineers, just appreciate the contribution that women engineers make. INWED HQ in the UK is now based from home, but we will still be planning our virtual activities to celebrate the day and will continue to co-ordinate your celebrations through our official INWED Activities page. We hope you will join us once again to celebrate the outstanding achievements of women engineers throughout the world. Taking place annually on 23 June, it’s your day, so get involved and help us #ShapeTheWorld this year!

Jobs.ac.uk is hosting a new women’s career event on 28 March 2020:

We are delighted to welcome you to our inaugural event, Women in STEM Careers 2020, hosted by jobs.ac.uk. At a time when women only account for 22% of the UK STEM workforce ^[1], the need for accurate representation within these sectors is increasingly high. As a result, there is a vast amount of opportunities being created for women who either wish to begin their career in STEM or progress from their current role. Our event aims to promote these opportunities by connecting attendees from across the UK with a selection of publically funded and charitable status organisations who are actively seeking to recruit talented women.

For more details and registration: https://blog.jobs.ac.uk/women-in-stem/

Carnegie UK Trust, Operation Black Vote and UCL Centre for Longitudinal Studies have published a report on Race Inequality in the Workforce: Exploring connections between work, ethnicity and mental health.

Quoting from the report:

In this report, we present new data from Next Steps, a longitudinal study of the ‘millennial generation’ in England. The work reveals persistent issues around the relationships between employment, ethnicity and mental health and underlines that there are enduring inequalities in the workforce between ethnic groups. We find that Black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) young adults continue to be at a greater risk of being unemployed than White young adults and that BAME groups are more likely to be in some form of precarious work. The evidence also confirms significant links between employment status and mental health, whereby being unemployed, a shift worker or on a zero-hours contract are all associated with a significantly greater risk of having poor mental ill-health at age 25.

The full report can be found here.