Connection to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals

	Education creates opportunities for people to rise above poverty		Inclusive STEM education aims to eradicate the gender gap in STEM careers
	Education helps to provide for the good health and well-being of those who have it		Inclusive STEM education’s goal is to reduce inequalities in education availability and quality
	Inclusive STEM education will increase quality of education programs as a whole		Betterment of STEM education increases people’s knowledge of how to counteract climate change

High Level Overview of the Canadian Engineering Grand Challenge

In the 19th century, Horace Mann famously dubbed education “the great equalizer of the conditions of men”. While the veracity of that statement has been debated over time, the fact of the matter is that education creates opportunities and possibilities that would have been otherwise out of reach. These opportunities in engineering are currently in the hands of predominantly male students. As of December 2020, only a fifth of newly licensed engineers identified as female. Not only women, but Indigenous people are also underrepresented in engineering. Lack of representation in the workplace can make it more challenging for young engineers of minority groups to engage with and reach their full potential in their careers. As instructors, it is important to understand and acknowledge the barriers that students might be facing and do what we can to help them overcome them. In order to bridge these gaps and make engineering a profession for all, Canadian engineering education programs of all levels need to become more approachable and inclusive as we move into the future. 

Example Connection to a Sustainable Development Goal

CEGC 6: Access to Affordable and Inclusive STEM Education maps to several Sustainable Development Goals, where an example of one of the connections is to SDG 4 – Quality Education, which has a goal to “Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all” [2].

Figure: Infographic on Sustainable Development Goal 4 [2]

Keywords: diversity, implicit bias, multi-disciplinary learning, accessibility, higher education enrollment, affordability 

Across engineering disciplines in Canadian universities, there are large differences in the participation of women with programs such as environmental and biomedical/biological being close to parity. In contrast traditional engineering disciplines such as mechanical, electrical, computer and software engineering are typically closer to 15%. A key factor related to this is that in high school, women are much less likely than men to take the required science courses (math, chemistry and physics) to ensure they are engineering ready and able to apply to study engineering at a post secondary institution. Of these required high school courses, physics has the least participation amongst men and women and the largest gender gap [4]. This is a critical issue in terms of economic growth for Canada and a recent McKinsey report [5] stated that Canada’s key inequality indicators are women in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) education and the STEM workforce of which engineering is a significant part. Another group of people who are significantly underrepresented in Canadian engineering programs are Indigenous students; while Indigenous peoples make up 4.9 per cent of the Canadian population (Statistics Canada, 2017), they only account for 1.2 per cent of total undergraduate enrolment in engineering programs [3].