A recent episode of CSIA’s podcast: Talking Industrial Automation, featured E Tech Group’s Director of Operations, Cassy Gardner. A decade of experience in engineering, sales and project management in the Life Sciences field has allowed Cassy to leverage her engineering and MBA degrees to help clients achieve their automation goals.
On the podcast, Gardner discusses how she came into the field of automation, citing a professor who inspired her during her senior year and connected her to the automation professionals at Banks Integration, which later became a part of E Tech Group.
Let’s look at some of the questions Cassy tackled in her podcast interview and her main talking points:
Q: What kinds of trends and challenges are you seeing in industrial automation right now?
- Engineering labor shortages. Partners, clients, and other automation firms are having a really hard time filling positions with the right type of talent.
- Company visibility. We’re competing with giants like Apple and Google for the same talent, but are largely referred only by word of mouth within the automation industry.
- A lack of emphasis on diversity, equity and inclusion in recruitment practices.
Q: What is DEI and why is it important?
- Diversity, Equity and Inclusion
- Another letter being added on is Belonging
- It’s about people from different backgrounds having equal opportunity to share their skills and perspective. This in turn improves design and engineering because you’re harnessing diverse points of view and skill sets. DEI measures improve the quality of a talent search.
- Diversity: having a wide array of perspectives and backgrounds
- Equity: fairness – being thoughtful in policies, procedures and vocabulary
- Inclusion & Belonging: going past people showing up – making sure people feel like they are a part of the organization/project/story
Q: What do you mean by diversity? Engineering is a male-dominated field, but are there other things diversity applies to in the field of industrial automation?
- Women are the most obvious lack of representation in the industry, and E Tech Group is striving to get to that 50-50 representation.
- Other groups marginalized in the industry include non-binary people, trans people, people of color, people with disabilities, immigrants, LGBTQIA+.
- Different experiences provide different lenses through which to view engineering concepts, and when these diverse experiences aren’t represented, engineering companies are missing out on innovation and advancement opportunities.
Q: What are some consequences of a lack of DEI?
- An illustration: The Crash Test Bias
- Crash test dummies have been designed to emulate the average male body. This has resulted in a less safe experience for female drivers. A study showed that a female driver or front passenger wearing their seat belt is 17% more likely than a male to die when a crash takes place. Another study showed in a frontal crash, a female is 73% more likely than a male to be injured.
Q: How can promoting DEI help in engineering and automation specifically?
- Ethics: New perspectives and points of view help the field advance.
- Finances: McKinsey Report on how DEI measures affect a company’s bottom line:
- Companies in the top 25th percentile of gender diversity on executive teams were 25% more likely to have above average profits than companies in the 75th percentile.
- Companies in the top 25th percentile for ethnic/cultural diversity outperformed companies in the 75th percentile by 36% in profitability.
- Industrial automation impacts millions to billions of people’s lives, so embodying these values can have a big impact on a lot of people.
Q: What does a focus on DEI look like?
- Being thoughtful about policies and taking time to take a step back and look at who you’re missing out on.
- Reflect on the makeup of your company: what are your stats for who you’re hiring? Are there trends in compensation?
- What policies or procedures do you need to change to better reach out to others?
- Recruitment is where it starts. Word of mouth doesn’t create the best recruitment strategy for diversity – it needs to be an active and purposeful search.
- Providing employee resource groups for traditionally marginalized groups – safe space and community specific to a group’s needs can improve DEI measures and feelings of belonging.
Q: What about the claims that there just isn’t diversity in the STEM pool no matter how hard you look?
- At the collegiate level, this is changing, and different universities vs colleges will look different demographically. Look for universities focusing on improvement in opportunity via DEI.
- Do you even need someone with a college degree? Or can you expand your search?
- Do you need a 15-year experience engineer? Or can you hire someone less experienced and train them?
- There are organizations focused on recruiting marginalized demographics for STEM education at the collegiate level and bring them into the automation space.
- Remote work widens the net of potential talent. E Tech Group is hiring more broadly since the pandemic because of this.
Q: For people who want to know more about DEI in automation engineering, where should they start?
- Find DEI influencers like Lily Zheng
- Resources on DEI policies and statistics, like Feminuity
- How To Be an Anti-Racist
- Yallomation, a non-profit, volunteer-run resource for students to network with industry professionals, founded by Cassy and a few other automation professionals. They provide virtual office hours for students to connect with professionals, ask questions, form connections, and even get recruited.
Q: What is E Tech Group doing to improve DEI?
- Examining hiring practices and focusing on employee retainment by addressing specific needs
- Re-evaluating our policies and vocabulary
- Participates in Yallomation’s platform – Cassy says most of her volunteers are E Tech Group employees.
- Moving the needle towards proportionally-accurate representation