TECIS Inclusion and Diversity working group vision

There has been considerable focus on building inclusion and diversity into engineering careers and education, especially in developed countries, but despite this, the percentages for minorities remain unchanged over decades. The multi-cultural interaction of TECIS was a springboard for the launch of a working group to investigate the reasons for this lack of improvement. The genesis of this working group occurred in Sozopol, Bulgaria at the TECIS 2019 conference where twenty-three researchers from over ten countries came together to discuss the lack of women and other marginalized groups in engineering. The objective of this paper is threefold, to outline the future direction of the inclusion and diversity working group in TECIS, to support and foster greater knowledge of gender diversity in engineering education and to outline future research activities that could make a substantial contribution to our understanding of diversity issues in engineering in addition to making best practice recommendations that can be used in the engineering industry. The scope of this paper is limited to women in engineering. Future work will look at other inclusion and diversity issues in STEM.