As a woman in engineering, I’m often asked to participate in outreach activities, speak at events, be included in marketing material and act as a role model for those who might not traditionally see themselves as an engineer. And for years, I’ve been okay with this. I’ve proudly participated in and championed the promotion of women in engineering. I’ve flown the flag, fought the fight, challenged stereotypes and endeavoured to empower young women.

However, as my career has progressed, my levels of responsibility have increased, as have the demands on my time. I’ve found myself beginning to resent the requests to be a role model. It has become a burden – another thing to feel guilty about not doing and something that either takes time out of my personal life (more guilt) or my working day. With the latter, this then reduces the amount of time that could be spent on furthering my career – an intersectionality that many minority engineers experience.

But I do want to be a role model. I think it’s incredibly important that children consider what career they might want to do in the future have role models to whom they can relate. We need a diverse range of role models who represent different ages, sexes, races, religions, disabilities and sexual orientations. There’s a plethora of research that shows that diverse teams are more productive, yet within the engineering sector in the UK, only 15.7 per cent are women and only 12.4 per cent are from minority ethnic groups, according to Engineering UK figures. So how do we promote minority groups while protecting their time and levelling the playing field for career progression?

So Unfair is an interactive theatre performance aimed at children aged 7–11, developed by award-winning theatre company One Tenth Human with funding from the University’s AHRC/EPSRC Joint Call – Impact Acceleration Account. It’s performed by one live, in-person performer (Daniel Bye), one live performer who appears via video (Toni-Dee Paul) and pre-recorded video call contributions from a diverse range of scientists and engineers, including yours truly.

Children explore how they can help to make the world a better place by participating in ‘an unexpectedly ridiculous adventure involving interactive engineering challenges, bad dad jokes and an extraordinary amount of molten chocolate’. The pre-recorded interactions are central to the show, culminating in a sequence where audience members use their newly learned structural engineering skills to help Toni escape from a lift by building a structure strong enough for Dan to stand on. Children interact apparently live with a diverse range of engineers who are very relatable, while the engineers are able to engage thousands of children with their work long after they’ve recorded a one-hour Zoom interview.

Early R&D for So Unfair involved workshops with 265 children and teachers at two different primary schools, one of which had a Pupil Premium rate of 38 per cent (the national average is 25 per cent), indicating very high levels of local deprivation. More than 100 of the children we reached received a hands-on engineering workshop as well as a work-in-progress sharing of a first draft of the interactive show; 158 only received the work-in-progress sharing. The initial workshops were 90 minutes long and very hands-on, co-delivered by Irene Wise (Lancaster University), Sarah Punshon (artistic director, One Tenth Human), Daniel Bye (associate artist), Toni-Dee Paul (associate artist) and myself. The workshops had a great response from the teachers, all of whom rated them as 10/10. After the workshops, almost 60 per cent of the children who took part said they knew ‘lots’ about what engineers do, compared to just nine per cent at the start. Children were more than twice as likely to say that they would like to be an engineer at the end compared to at the beginning. For the work-in progress sharing, 98 per cent of the Year 4 and 5 teachers who took part said they would attend something like this again, and gave scores of more than 90 per cent on most other categories, including, ‘It opened their minds to new possibilities’.

The show has since toured the country (including a stop here in Lancaster), and has reached over 1000 audience members during its 18-show run. The show proved incredibly popular amongst both adults and children alike, with feedback about the show being extremely positive. After experiencing "So Unfair", 74% of children surveyed agreed or strongly agreed that they knew “quite a lot” about what engineers do - a dramatic improvement from just 32% at baseline. We also expanded greatly on children's ideas on what an engineer does who they can be. Research indicates that if asked to draw an engineer, children almost invariably draw a man, often in high vis or a hard hat. By contrast, about 40% of the drawings children produced during our post-show evaluation workshop included people with identifiably female characteristics (skirts, curly eyelashes, long hair, names like “Alice”). Several drew people who were designing in a clean environment, such as on a laptop, in contrast to the established stereotype that engineering involves dirty manual labour. Several drawings featured multiple engineers working together, and one child specifically told our evaluator that “she’s working with her partner” - indicating the show’s message about teamwork had cut through.

Outreach is a great way to contribute to continuing professional development, particularly when it comes to developing skills in communication and promoting ethical and inclusive engineering. Children are amazing at asking surprisingly difficult questions that challenge you to think quickly and then respond in a way that they can relate to. I relish receiving questions such as ‘What have engineers designed to help palaeontologists do their job?’, which then takes you down the rabbit hole of trying to explain carbon dating, mass spectrometry or computer-assisted tomography to a five-year-old dinosaur enthusiast.

The disadvantage of the So Unfair model is that engineers can’t respond live to children’s questions, although the live performer-facilitator can. However, I’m hopeful that this model of using pre-recorded material as ‘live interactions’ provides another option for outreach, maximising impact with minimal time commitment, to showcase a broader range of role models – particularly those who represent minority groups. I hope that One Tenth Human's model can open the gate for more academics such as myself - who are juggling the commitments of their career with their desire to participate in outreach - to engage in a meaningful way a large audience without sacrificing masses of their personal or research time.

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