Today we received the Prof. Susanne Ihsen Award for Best Paper on Diversity and Inclusiveness!

I’m both delighted and surprised that our gender and diversity group’s work won this very high honor at the closing ceremony of SEFI, the European Society for Engineering Education, at its 2021 conference.

Before explaining what we did, I’d like to give special recognition to Dr. Inês Direito for leading this project, bringing our authoring team together, and helping ensure we got things done! It’s a pleasure watching you achieve new heights in your work as chair of the Diversity, Equality and Inclusivity Special Interest Group of SEFI!

Inês made a video introduction to the paper:

Here’s the abstract:

Significant efforts have been made to promote gender equality in higher education (HE) in Europe. Examples include the establishment of the Athena Swan Charter in the UK in 2005 and the 2019 launch of the Irène Curie Fellowship scheme by Eindhoven University of Technology. But which initiatives address broader diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) challenges in HE? And which are specifically focused on engineering education? This exploratory study aims to improve our understanding of the ways in which a set of European HE Institutions engaged in engineering education address DEI at an organisation level, and how this is communicated within the public domain. The analysis of online data provided by a purposive sample of institutions is guided by the following research questions (RQ): 1. How is DEI addressed and defined in institution-wide strategic frameworks? 2. How many institutions describe having an institution-wide DEI organization? 3. What specific policies around DEI are being developed, and what areas are mentioned, defined, and prioritized? 4. What structures and resources noted as part of their DEI activities are specific to engineering faculties and departments? 5. What engineering-specific DEI initiatives exist that are not available in the public domain or are not written in English? Our sample is composed of the host institutions of the authors of the paper, and represent different European countries: Belgium, Denmark, France, Ireland, Portugal, Switzerland, and the UK. The findings of this exploratory study will be used to inform the design of a large-scale survey to identify DEI practices across the SEFI community.

And the APA citation is:

Direito, I., Chance, S., Clemmensen, L., Craps, S., Economides, S., Isaac, S., Jolly, A-M., Truscott, F., & Wint, N. (2021). Diversity, equity, and inclusion in engineering education: an exploration of European higher education institutions’ strategic frameworks, resources, and initiatives. The 49^th Annual Conference of the European Society for Engineering Education (SEFI 2021), 13-16 September, Berlin, Germany.

You can download the paper here, because the full proceedings will not be posted online until October.

Many thanks also to the members of Best Paper awards committees, who are tasked with reading many papers and attending all the related presentations. It’s a great deal of work and we appreciate the time and effort that these dedicated folks contribute!