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Strengthening diversity and gender equity at IAHR

Oct 30, 2020

 IAHR task force on Strengthening Diversity and Gender Equity

The recently created IAHR task force on Strengthening Diversity and Gender Equity seeks to emphasize the consideration of differences between people, ensuring that these variable attributes and characteristics are highly valued in our association. Having a strong diversity of members united in IAHR will enrich the common goals that are achieved when multilingual people, of different ethnicities, ages, gender, educational level, and cultural heritage come together.

Interaction between different people in our events, magazines, and workgroups enhances our ability to work in a diverse environment, with different styles, cultures, and personalities. The objective of our association is to attract and retain talents, professionals, and both young and experienced researchers, finding a common place to share.

In particular, IAHR wants to encourage the participation of women in engineering and a balanced membership is one of its strategic priorities, with the aim of having more women participate in the technical committees, divisions, and boards of the IAHR. Approximately 23 per cent of the members of the IAHR are women. However, its geographical distribution is quite unequal: Latin America is the region with the highest proportion of affiliated women (27 per cent), while women from the Middle East and Africa are the least represented (15 per cent and 11 per cent respectively). In the younger generations, the gender distribution is more balanced (67 per cent are men and 33 per cent are women), but in recent years there has been very little increase in the number of women affiliated. IAHR wants to change this to further strengthen the potential and leadership position of the association.

Bringing diversity to the association is not a trend to follow or a quota that we must meet. Nor is it just a social responsibility to embrace diversity in the international mission that we have. We intuitively know that it is a path we must travel. The benefits of diversity are immense. Diversity improves interactions, associative culture, and talent involvement, and creates new communication opportunities. A proportional representation between genders, regions, ages, and interests within IAHR would be more realistic and would more closely reflect the composition of the engineering community as a whole. Therefore, the IAHR working group on strengthening diversity and gender with a focus on gender equality aims to increase the number of women members from 25 per cent to 33 per cent in the next five years, while increasing the ratio of women to men in divisions and committees.

We are a group of people who work together to achieve scientific and technical goals. And as a group, we do much better when we are diverse and share our talents.

 Task force members

Silke Wieprecht


Silke Wieprecht

University of Stuttgart

 Germany 

Chair

Jing Peng


Jing Peng

IWHR

China


Amparo López


Amparo López

Polytechnic University of Valencia 

Spain

Damien Violeau


Damien Violeau

EDF

France


Ioana Popescu


Ioana Popescu

IHE Delft

The Netherlands


Dalila Loudyi


Dalila Loudyi

Hasan II University of Cassablanca

Morocco


David Ferras


David Ferras

IHE Delft

The Netherlands



IAHR is aware that gender diversity often remains a struggle. This is why IAHR endeavours to identify women leaders, help develop the skills of young women members and recognise their contributions. We invite you, women, to become part of the IAHR community and help increase the visibility and representativity of women engineers! 

 Interviews with IAHR women

“We currently have about 25 per cent women in the association. So, within the next five years in IAHR, we can and want to reach the number of 30 per cent women that work in the engineering sciences on the whole. But this should also be reflected in the leadership teams…” Gender equity within IAHR is one of the main concerns of Silke Wieprecht, vice-president of IAHR and chair of the task force. 

David Ferras, vice-chair of IAHR technical committee on Education and Professional Development, interviews Silke Wieprecht.

>> Access the full interview

Other recent interviews:

 Projects and activities

 Related IAHR journals and articles

Hydrolink

HydroLink is the primary magazine of IAHR. It brings you the latest news in the world of hydro-environment engineering and research and provides a platform for reporting on IAHR activities and gathering news from our members. Hydrolink publishes articles on projects, research, and new methods and tools of interest to the hydro-environment engineering community. A special issue of HydroLink has been published on the occasion of the 85th anniversary of IAHR in September 2020. In this issue, six leading women members share their thoughts on progress towards greater diversity and gender equity within the association and in water issues:

This article, published in issue 2/2017, analysed the gender situation at IAHR in 2017, compared it with similar organizations and analysed the challenges women engineers regularly face.

New section in Hydrolink:

Publication of bios of great women hydraulicians in Hydrolink:

Newsflash

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