Written by Lucy Sutcliffe
As we start to look ahead to the second half of the 21st century, a recurring, well-debated, worry for engineers is that there is a very real, very big skills gap in the industry. Looking at the data that we have available today, there are simply not enough people either considering it as a potential career in school, or already in training. Many within the industry have already acknowledged that perhaps it is societal misconceptions about what it is to be an engineer that is leading to the dwindling numbers in the market. Therefore, with steely determination we have started to update our public image and shine a light on what being an engineer really means, and what sort of person would suit, and enjoy, the job. One theme in this area that has sparked an interest is the idea that engineering is in fact one of the caring professions, and that we should use this label to market our industry to future talent.
Whenever I have heard discussions about this topic it is often in the context of international development and climate action. And it was in October 2018, when attending the very formative Global Engineering Conference in London, that I had a conversation with someone who first planted the seed that engineering might be considered a caring profession. They said that engineers “are looking after the planet, just like nurses look after patients”. This conference focussed on the impact that engineers can, and must, have on progressing the Sustainable Development Goals. It is very hard to argue with the claim of this delegate when considering that many brilliant engineers were at the conference to present work that was directly aiming to mitigate some of the devastating effects of climate degradation and improve the lives of those who suffer due to global inequalities. These engineers really did care about other people, the planet, and the future. And I would not be surprised if they already did consider themselves to be working in a caring profession. I have no doubt that, with such excellent brand ambassadors, coupled with the increased societal awareness about the environment, these engineering roles will continue to attract kind, emotionally intelligent and determined individuals without too much trouble.
But these people only represent a very small part of the industry. What about the majority of engineering jobs in the UK? These are the varied roles that the rest of us work hard in, and typically involve working with clients to satisfy their business needs. Does a software engineer at a corporate bank demonstrate as much altruistic care in their job as a water engineer redesigning sanitation systems in a refugee camp? By looking closely at the definitions of care, caring professions and engineering we can start to see how these parts of the industry are more aligned that it might seem at first, and build on the idea that engineering is, in fact, a caring profession.
So, what really defines a caring profession? Barbara Barnum, an American nursing educator and writer, taught her students that care is defined by patient-centric actions, emotions, and attitudes. If we replaced the word ‘patient-centric’ with the word ‘client-centric’ in that definition, perhaps we could be quoting verbatim the business strategy of a lot of engineering (and non-engineering) organisations. We can also take another example of a definition of the word care – from the political scientist Jean Tronto – which is “the activities we do to maintain, contain and repair our world”. I do not think that I need to point out the significance of that definition for engineers as these verbs are the central actions in our jobs. But, for some, trying to conclude that that engineering is indeed a caring profession from these comparisons is a little subjective. So, I also want to introduce the idea that the fundamentals of the process of engineering design itself align with the concept of ethics of care.
Carol Gilligan, an American feminist psychologist, initially developed the concept of ethics of care in the 1980s. This is an ethics concept in which decisions that we make are based on our human relationships. She proposed this as an alternative to some of the other established ethics concepts at the time where decisions were deemed to be made based on rules and rational reasoning[1]. It was originally posed as a feminist theory (with Gilligan arguing that caring is more characteristic of women) and was certainly not without its critics. However, more recently psychologists and sociologists have advanced it into a gender-neutral concept. Tronto also developed the ideas by identifying four phases of care, which she saw to be the steps that an individual goes through when exercising care ethics. These phases were:
- The recognition of a need (attentiveness)
- A willingness to respond to it (responsibility)
- Sufficient direct action to help with it (competence) and
- A reaction to the care process from the recipient (responsiveness).
Only when all the phases are completed in an approximate context would we see good care, argued Tronto. She referred to the completion of the phases as the ‘integrity of care’ [2].
Tronto especially focussed on the importance of the two phases, responsibility and competence, and in an engineering context her argument in this area suggests that a designer is required to recognise that their societal responsibilities go beyond just contractual arrangement and obligations. She believed that a competent designer would go further than just ‘taking care’ of their part of a problem and passing it on with no concern about outcome or end result’. If an engineer did attempt to do the bare minimum without care about the result of their piece of work, then the final solution would likely be an unviable and uncoordinated offering, especially when working in a multi-disciplinary team. This is a profession with teamwork at its heart. Because engineers are required to inherently work in a responsible and competent way, Tronto would argue that they are also working in a caring way.
Other academics have also aligned these phases of care with the intrinsic processes that engineers follow during a design development. These processes have been transcribed by several different authors, (e.g., Dym, Atman et al., Dieter) as a series of steps, which often form the backbone of university engineering design courses. One of the examples where steps within the engineering design process have been matched up with the four phases of care, and the overall ‘integrity of care’, is presented below. Here Pantazidou and Nair have aligned Tronto’s work with Dieter’s engineering design process[3]. They have also linked the phases more generally with the steps needed for problem solving.
Figure 1 a) Ethics of care b) mapping between steps of Dieter’s design process and components of ethics of care c) mapping between problem solving steps and ethics of care
In this framework, the final iterative processes that involve design changes and ensure efficiency have been linked with the concept of ‘integrity of care’. By doing this the authors are implying that without this iteration step the engineer has not provided a good level of care. As engineers we certainly do iterate our design solution, to save on material and budget, and to limit the amount of embodied and operational carbon. By working in this diligent way, engineers are, these social scientists would argue, working in a caring way.
This modelling of the design process is thought-provoking for engineers who might be unfamiliar with the areas of research that social scientists carry out about our profession, but this framework and logical mapping is a clear tool for communicating how the ethics of care can be considered a fundamental part of the job. Of course, real life projects have twists and turns that mean that following through the phases of care might not flow in a chronological order, and Joshua B. Kardon, a practising structural engineer and academic, has suggested that, from his experiences, instead of a taking a direct one-to-one mapping approach, we can consider that all the care elements exist and can be assessed for all engineering tasks and design stages[4]. Likely as more professionals consider the implication of the ethics of care within their own roles, then the definition and frameworks will be developed, although all with Carol Gilligan’s original ideas as a basis.
Thinking about caring in the context of an engineering role inevitably leads us to the question, how can we better ensure that engineers have sufficient personal judgement needed to go about their work in a caring manner? The professional codes of conduct do not shed much light on how we might proceed with this, and instead it would be better to include ethics of care, either directly or indirectly, into school and university curricula. Frameworks, like the one created by Pantazidou and Nair, are intended for a classroom setting, and can be used alongside varied case studies which have a focus on community and empathy, rather than on an individual’s heroics, and examples of more diverse role models that represent a more socially minded image of the industry, rather than ‘celebrity’ engineers from the Victorian ages.
The ideas presented by the academics need to be continually reviewed and fed into by industry engineers to help verify their findings. However, the argument that engineers are inherently caring through the way that we carry out our work does stand up, and it seems appropriate for someone to identify as working in a caring profession when they have engineer in their job title. Acknowledging that engineering can be considered to be a caring profession; marketing it as such, and updating engineering teaching material to reflect this, will open the industry to far more people. There is undoubtably a heavy weight on the shoulders of today’s engineers as we assess the work we need to do to make a positive impact. A steady flow of caring, conscientious individuals eager to join this profession will help future generations of engineers make the world a better place.
[1] Gilligan, C. (1982). In a Different Voice. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
[2] Tronto, J. C. (1993). Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care. New York: Routledge.
[3] Pantazidou, M., & Nair, I. (2013). Ethic of Care: Guiding Principles for Engineering Teaching and Practice. Journal of Engineering Education, 88(2), 205-212.
[4] Kardon, J. B. (2005). Concept of “Care” in Engineering. Journal of Performance of Constructed Facilities, 19(3), 256-260.