You might know that New Zealand’s workforce of engineers and architects is male dominated. But do you know the true extent of this imbalance? Women make up only 14 per cent of Engineering New Zealand’s membership. Only 20 per cent of all registered architects are female. If engineers and architects want to understand our clients – and deliver what they really want and need – then this just isn’t enough. 

The business benefits of greater diversity are clear. McKinsey research from 2017 shows that having more women leaders than average is strongly correlated with profitability. When McKinsey ranked companies by the number of women in their executive teams, the top quartile were 21 per cent more likely to outperform the bottom quartile. A Westpac report last year indicated a 50–50 gender balance in management roles could boost the New Zealand economy by nearly $1 billion. 

So, Engineering New Zealand and the New Zealand Institute of Architects have come together to fire up the sector and create real momentum for change. 

There’s a full spectrum of awareness in the industry: from incomprehension to the commitment of those leading the pack. The Diversity Agenda is about raising awareness but it’s also about more than just talk. We have a clear, concrete goal to bring 20 per cent more women into engineering and architecture roles by 2021.

We’ll do this by galvanising our professions to tackle diversity head on. We’re asking firms to come on board and sign up to take action. More than 50 firms have, so far, made public commitments to keeping more women and promoting diversity in our professions. It’s an impressive list; check out the roll-call of our Founding Partners and Change Makers at diversityagenda.org. 

These firms will start by sharing benchmark data. They’ll commit to following a tikanga that includes making diversity everyone’s responsibility, addressing unconscious bias and measuring performance on quality of achievement not hours in the office. They’ll also be reporting publicly on their progress.

The Diversity Agenda will support our Founding Partners and Change Makers to share ideas and best practice. We’ll be running workshops, and developing and sharing resources through diversityagenda.org for everyone to use. And we’ll be helping to keep diversity on everybody’s minds.

In the first week after our launch in mid-April, our social media campaign reached more than 13,000 people. Diversityagenda.org features women and men telling their stories, on video, about diversity and what needs to change. They talk about engineering and architecture adopting more-inclusive working practices and creating a culture where everyone feels they belong. 

Women don’t suddenly decide to leave engineering or architecture. It’s more like death from a thousand cuts, where every new piece of exclusionary language, every inappropriate joke and every poorly timed meeting adds up. Inclusion is about changing your language so that it includes everyone, making genuinely flexible work possible for people who are parents or caregivers, and not discounting people working part time from career progression. And it’s about the thousand little things that you do right, as part of your organisational culture, to make everyone feel valued and welcome.

From Engineering New Zealand’s point of view, to deliver on our promise of engineering a better life for New Zealanders, we need a profession that reflects our community. This means both retaining the women we have and attracting more women into a profession that is much more creative and diverse than you think it would be.

Change takes courage and it needs to be led from the top. That’s why The Diversity Agenda focuses on each firm making a public commitment. Collective action is the only way to create real, sustained change in a way that shifts the dial.