Engineering: issues, challenges and opportunities for development ...

ENGINEERING: ISSUES CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES FOR DEVELOPMENTcal procedures, with participation by professionals workingin geographically and sectorially sensitive areas. This conceptbecame the basis for the development of a supply-side initiativefor the consulting engineering industry called a BusinessIntegrity Management System (BIMS).BIMS recognized that many consulting firms were doing theirbest to define and implement anti-corruption policies. However,such approaches tend to be piecemeal. What was missingwas a process that connected and transformed isolated acts ofintegrity assurance into a complete system, with formal proceduresto identify potential risks, prevent and combat corruption,and implement policies for every project throughoutan organization. The FIDIC BIMS guidelines published in 2001provided a set of tools and a process-based approach for managingan organization’s integrity, and by 2007 a FIDIC surveyfound that there were seventy-eight member firms reportingthe implementation of a BIMS that followed the guidelines.The consulting engineering industry has been well aware thatit was not alone in addressing corruption. Supply-side initiativesnow range far and wide across many industry sectors.More recently, FIDIC has proposed a Government ProcurementIntegrity Management System (GPIMS) for the integrityof government procurement processes for consultingservices. GPIMS accommodates the fundamental principlesof a government’s legal system and satisfies the protocols forthe government procurement anticorruption policies of theOECD’s Principles for Managing Ethics in the Public Serviceand of the United Nations Convention against Corruption.Steps for designing Business IntegrityManagement Systems1. Formulation of a code of ethics.2. Formulation of a business integrity policy based mainly onthe OECD Anti-Bribery Convention and FIDIC’s code of ethics,that must be documented, implemented, communicatedinternally and externally, and made publicly available.3.4.5.6.7.8.Appointment of a representative, generally a senior memberof the organization’s management staff.Identification of requirements for the BIMS that should focuson the processes which are vulnerable to corruption.Analysis and evaluation of current practices.An organization should use tools to support the planning andimplementation of its BIMS, notably: a code of ethics, an integritypolicy; the definition of roles, responsibilities and authority;integrity procedures for the main business processes; andenforcement measures.Documentation: a BIMS must be well documented in order toprovide evidence that all processes that may affect the businessintegrity of the services offered have been thoroughlyanticipated.Review of current practices by establishing actions to be takenin case of failure to comply with the Business Integrity Policy.4.7Women and gender issues in engineering4.7.1Women in engineering:Gender dynamics andengineering – how toattract and retain womenin engineeringWendy FaulknerFor nearly three decades, governments and industries acrossthe industrialized world have sponsored efforts to increase therepresentation of women in professional engineering, recognizingthe (largely) untapped pool of talent amongst women.These efforts have had some impact, but engineering remainsa heavily male-dominated occupation in most countries.There is clearly room for improvement – not only in recruitingwomen into engineering, but also in retaining and promotingthose women who do enter the profession.Some of the issues are well understood. For example, the poorwork-life balance and a lack of family-friendly policies in manyengineering organizations are known to contribute to the disproportionateloss of women from the profession. But thereare also more subtle dynamics at play which tend to makeengineering organizations more supportive and comfortablefor men than women. These dynamics were investigated inan ethnographic recent study in the UK. 61 The two-year study61 This study was conducted between 2003 and 2005 with funding from the UK Economicand Social Research Council (ESRC ref: RES 000 23 0151). I gratefully acknowledgethis support, and also the time and patience of all those engineers and theiremployers who agreed to participate in the study. A full research report can be foundat http://www.issti.ed.ac.uk/publications/workingpapers (Accessed: 16 May 2010). Seealso Faulkner 2005 and 2007 for early academic publications of findings.196