Hundreds of businesses sign pledge to change engineering image problem
Over 100 organisations, including the BBC, National Grid, Facebook and Rolls-Royce, have signed up to a pledge to help change the online image search results for the word ‘engineer’, as an AI programme scours the internet and decides that a typical engineer looks like a white man wearing a hard hat.
Led by the Royal Academy of Engineering, the pledge, which has been signed by The Engineer, aims to address the misrepresentation of engineers and engineering online and in popular culture. It will do this by actively increasing the public visibility of more representative images of engineers and engineering.
The pledge has been launched on This is Engineering Day – a national awareness day held during Tomorrow’s Engineers Week to celebrate the unsung contribution that engineers make to our lives.
To test the representation of the profession online, an AI machine learning model, otherwise known as a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN), analysed over 1,100 images of engineers sourced online, and generated images based on this given dataset. The images generated by the GAN showed how narrowly an engineer is typically portrayed online: the majority of the generated images were of a white male wearing a hard hat.
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