Training Watchdog Engineers
Engineers are obligated to protect the public. Their institutions should help.
Opinion by Erin Cech and Cindy Finelli
It has never been more important for engineers to attend to the impact of technology on public safety, health, and welfare. Recent reports of algorithmic bias, drone-based surveillance, and emissions falsification (among other issues) underscore the potential harms of the socio-technical systems that engineers help to create and maintain, even while those systems offer crucial solutions. As technologies grow in complexity, laypeople are less and less able to understand, manipulate, and opt out of them. As a result, members of the public are increasingly reliant on engineers to serve as vigilant watchdogs who intervene when companies, governments, or social institutions design and use technologies in ways that endanger the public.
However, engineers may not take this responsibility seriously, know how to intervene when necessary, and be willing to act when circumstances warrant. Our National Science Foundation-funded research studies these watchdog commitments, asking whether engineering professionals and students recognize their public welfare responsibilities, are aware of strategies for intervening, and are willing to act when they see public welfare endangerments. We examine how the structure and culture of both the engineering profession and engineering education support or undermine these three steps.
Although past research suggests that engineers may distance themselves from public welfare responsibilities and that institutional spaces like engineering education tend to de-emphasize such obligations, little empirical investigation has focused on engineers’ public welfare responsibilities. Our multimethod study considers factors that impact watchdog commitments across three levels: professional culture, institutional contexts, and professional identities. We are conducting both a representative survey of US engineers and a series of longitudinal interviews that follow a cohort of electrical and computer engineering [ECE] master’s students into the workforce. Using insights from these data, we will design and assess a novel graduate seminar course to train engineers in their public welfare responsibilities. The efforts not only attend to engineers’ abstract perceptions of such responsibilities but also investigate their recognition of how these duties play out in their daily work, awareness of intervention strategies, and intended and actual interventions.
We are in the early stages of this research, but already the need for it has become clear. In our pilot survey of employed engineers in the US, for example, half of the respondents agreed that “raising concerns about diversity undermines one’s credibility as an engineer,” and 72 percent agreed that “technical skills are more valuable in STEM than social skills.” Less than a quarter of employed engineers who completed our survey had received training on ethical and professional responsibilities to public welfare in their engineering education, and only 28 percent had received training on the policy implications of engineering design in either their workplace or their professional societies.
Early interviews with engineering master’s students show similarly worrying trends in recognition of, and willingness to engage with, public welfare responsibilities. For example, when asked whether it is engineers’ responsibility to consider social inequalities in their work, a 24-year-old ECE master’s student replied that engineering is “neutral” and does not “necessarily have anything to do with the evolution of society.”
He added, “It’s how humans use technology that matters. [It] is not about the technology itself as inherently maybe racist or sexist.”
Engineers have a responsibility to actively consider how the socio-technical systems in their purview may negatively or unequally impact the public. Our project is developing a theoretical framework to understand how engineers recognize, strategize, and act as public welfare watchdogs, and we are working to identify factors that shape these outcomes. This research will help engineering educators and leaders revise training efforts and accountability infrastructures to equip engineers to be more effective public welfare watchdogs. In turn, research-informed engineering courses can enhance professional responsibility training among students. Beyond engineering education, employers and professional societies need to promote public welfare responsibilities and provide opportunities for engineers to come together for collective statements or actions in the interest of protecting the public good.
The role of engineers as public welfare watchdogs lies at the heart of their ethical responsibilities as professionals. Engineering education, the engineering workforce, and engineering professional societies must take seriously the training of engineers not only to recognize these responsibilities in the abstract but also to act on them when necessary.
Erin Cech is an associate professor of sociology and (by courtesy) mechanical engineering at the University of Michigan. She is the author of The Trouble with Passion: How Searching for Fulfillment at Work Fosters Inequality (2021) and Misconceiving Merit: Paradoxes of Excellence and Devotion in Academic Science and Engineering (forthcoming 2022, with Mary Blair-Loy).
Cindy Finelli is a professor of electrical engineering and computer science and (by courtesy) higher education at the University of Michigan, where she also is director of the engineering education research program. She is an ASEE Fellow.