Campaign calls for diversity in engineering

The field of engineering is, proportionately speaking, low on women, ethnic minorities and the disabled. Ergo, the Royal Society of Engineering has launched its Diversity in Engineering Campaign, fronted by none other than the recently-honoured Professor, Dame etc Wendy Hall of the University of Southampton.

Here are some pertinent stats from the university's site:

•Women – who now make up over 45 per cent of the UK labour market, but make up fewer than 6 per cent of engineering professionals

•Ethnic minorities – 80 per cent of the ethnic minority population in the UK is aged 16 to 35, providing a significantly increasing proportion of the workforce in the future

•People with disabilities: around 18 per cent of the working population have a disability

So, a much-needed campaign, headed up by a serious campaigner. Over to Dame Wendy:

"It is vital for the UK that we recruit the brightest young people into engineering and science," she says, "including new talent from families and schools who might never have thought about engineering as a career. The financial turmoil and the recession actually give us a huge opportunity to entice people who have studied engineering and science away from the City and back into innovating for the future, which is where they are badly needed."

It all dovetails quite nicely with another campaign, started by Open Rights Group founder Suw Charman-Anderson, to institute Ada Lovelace Day in honour of one of the pioneers of programming. Charman-Anderson hoped to sign up 1,000 bloggers to write about Lovelace on the 24th of March - she already has a hundred over target, and we're more than two months away.