In keeping with our EDI Policy and the principles of Athena Swan, the RIED consortium believe it is important to maintain and share our gender data on a regular basis. An example of the data collected to date from all partner Universities and our Boards’ membership is shown in Figure 1.
Figure 1 shows the variation in percentage numbers of our members within the RIED Team and Board membership that declare themselves as female. Recognising the reduction in percentage membership in the early stages of the programme, we took action to remedy this and a better balance is shown from June 2023 as the team grew in size.
The variation over the first half of the Programme is also a consequence of the continued growth and change in membership of our team and boards from 15 and 21 people respectively at the outset, to the current number of 41 team members and 32 board members respectively (to December 2025). Unfortunately, our female membership at team level did fall as a consequence of a number of females who left the team following promotion and progression, along with the lower number of applications from females to join our RIED team at both PhD and Postdoctoral level.
The RIED Team female percentage, has increased recently to 17.1% and can be compared with industry data at 16.5% as published by the industry body EngineeringUK. This industry body includes over major 30 industrial members and is partly funded by a range of Professional Engineering Institutions including the IMechE, the Royal Aeronautical Society and the Engineering Council. Their report, “Women in engineering: Trends in women in the engineering workforce between 2010 and 2021” was published in March 2022 and can be found via the following link.
https://www.engineeringuk.com/research-policy/diversity-in-engineering/gender/
As EngineeringUK states, the UK’s engineering sector is considerably less diverse that the general population and whilst this follows STEM norms in our subject disciplines, we are not satisfied with our current balance and will work to continue to attract applications from a diverse range of people onto our RIED team. To do this, we will specifically look at the language used within our advertisements and participate in more outreach activities.
