Maintaining Engineering Ethics

Although engineering failures are rare, they tend to receive outsized attention from the public, and for good reason. Engineers often hold people’s lives and quality of life in their hands. Structures such as bridges, roads, dams, tunnels, and buildings sometimes fail. Software glitches cause large-scale communications meltdowns, materials and machines can break down, and consumer goods must sometimes be recalled. Few professions require as much knowledge, caution, and ability to make decisions under pressure as engineering. How do companies handle ethical issues and questions about judgment in engineering when they arise, and are young engineers entering their fields prepared to make tough decisions? Do women engineers face unique challenges in this arena?

Many professional engineering societies have codes of ethics for engineers. The National Society of Professional Engineers, for example, has a code that asks members to “hold paramount the safety, health, and welfare of the public; perform services only in areas of their competence; issue public statements only in an objective and truthful manner; act for each employer or client as faithful agents or trustees; avoid deceptive acts; and conduct themselves honorably, responsibly, ethically, and lawfully so as to enhance the honor, reputation, and usefulness of the profession.” Discipline-specific societies’ ethics codes call for similar behavior.

But Stephanie Claussen, Ph.D., assistant professor of engineering at San Francisco State University, and Raluca Scarlat, Ph.D., associate professor of nuclear engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, believe that is not enough — that ethics needs to be better integrated into core courses for engineers from the beginning so it becomes instilled in the profession. “It is fundamental because engineering is making decisions under large degrees of uncertainty with large gaps in knowledge,” said Dr. Scarlat, who holds a B.S. in chemical engineering from Cornell University and a Ph.D. in nuclear engineering from UC Berkeley. “Engineering often involves identifying problems that are poorly defined and managing risk. And all of that involves interfacing with society.”

For the past four years, Dr. Scarlat has taught Ethics, Engineering and Society as a professor (and before that as a graduate student), and the course has a long waiting list every semester. She said UC Berkeley may be one of the few institutions that offer an ethics course within their college of engineering. Although it is helpful when students have studied ethics in other disciplines and have been introduced to the general ideas, Dr. Scarlat said having engineering faculty teach ethics sends a strong message that the subject is important for engineers.

“I have heard from some students that they took an ethics class before but not in the College of Engineering, and maybe thought it was fun but didn’t think the engineering profession would actually value the application of the concepts,” she said. Dr. Scarlat believes early grounding of ethics in technical coursework is key to success later as a professional: “If you’re in a project meeting with other engineers, you don’t feel awkward then about discussing social responsibilities, versus not having the confidence to use ethical concepts in an engineering context.”

Dr. Claussen, who holds a B.S. in electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a master’s and doctorate in electrical engineering from Stanford University, said that in her work at San Francisco State University, she tries to incorporate discussions of micro- and macro-ethics into courses on circuits and electromagnetism. This might include considering where to site power lines in sensitive neighborhoods and helping explain their safety to the public, or considering chip-based medical diagnostic tools that can be used when working from home. “This requires consideration of other details, like privacy [or the] stigma that might be tied to certain diagnoses,” she said. “The students propose how they would change the design of their lab-on-a-chip system accounting for these various concerns.”

She also teaches the ethical ramifications of considering social justice issues in projects. For example, in one elective course, students had to propose a semiconductor device that accounted for a socially responsible choice of materials and method of manufacturing. “Even just connecting ethics to [more traditional courses] is seen as radical; people just don’t do it a lot,” she said.

Since 2015, Dr. Claussen, in collaboration with Purdue University, has been following early-career engineers, and has found that many don’t know what to do if they are faced with a difficult situation. “Often they don’t know whether the issue rises to the level of an ethical concern or how to report it,” Dr. Claussen said. “Having a system that’s really clear and [in which] people know what the process for reporting looks like, and know that their concern will be taken seriously, is important.”

Employers get serious

Many engineering companies have exactly these kinds of ethics and compliance programs, and some apply to have them evaluated and rated by a third party known as Ethisphere. For a fee, Ethisphere conducts qualitative and quantitative analyses of the programs and offers feedback for improvement if needed. The organization develops a list of applicants with the strongest ethics and compliance programs, which it calls the World’s Most Ethical Companies. Three of those companies — Parsons Corporation, Rockwell Automation, and AECOM — talked with SWE Magazine about their ethics programs and policies.

Parsons started in 1944 with a focus on global infrastructure — roads, tunnels, airports, and bridges — and has grown to include national security and cyber work, satellites, and space solutions. The company has a 30-person ethics office and has been on Ethisphere’s list for 14 years. “Our goal is to continue creating an open, transparent environment where our employees feel comfortable speaking up,” said Olivia Fines, Esq., Parsons’ chief compliance officer and ethics officer. “But if they don’t for some reason, there are many avenues. They can contact an ethics officer or the ethics committee; they can report a problem anonymously through our web portal or 800 number. The one thing we don’t want them to do is not report it.”

Fines said Parsons’s ethics officers are embedded across the enterprise and that if a report comes in that involves an engineering question, she immediately pulls in an ethics officer who is also an engineer. “It makes the investigation credible because I have someone with the experience to understand what it is we’re looking at and not make suppositions.” Investigations include performing a root cause analysis, and depending on the findings, making decisions about what can be done to remedy the issue, Fines said. “We investigate everything that comes to us. There’s nothing where we think ‘that’s just a nothing burger.’” Fines said that while the engineering field is still largely male-dominated, Parsons has made a concerted effort to bring in female talent.

“There can be a perception that women engineers won’t be taken seriously by male managers,” she said. If a woman engineer can’t approach her male manager with confidence, she can contact the ethics officers or use the web portal or 800 number, Fines explained. “Our legal team has a significant number of women on it, and a woman runs the ethics compliance program,” she said. “You can select a female ethics officer to report to and ask for a female investigator.”

This past year, Fines has conducted “road shows,” going to field offices and explaining how the company’s ethics program works and urging people to speak up. “After one of the presentations, a person from engineering came up to me and said, ‘You’ve really compelled me to speak up.’” Employees who report a problem are thanked and assured that an investigation and root cause analysis will be performed. They are also assured that no retaliation for reporting the issue will be tolerated. She urges engineers everywhere to push for transparency and ethical behavior.

“If something is close to your heart and you have the bandwidth, or if you’re willing to lend your expertise as an investigator or just step in and look at data and give an opinion, ethics programs can always use help.”

Rockwell Automation provides industrial automation and digital technologies and has been on the Ethisphere list for 15 years. Complaints and ethics issues go through Gary Ballesteros, J.D., vice president of law, chief compliance officer, and ombuds, a title modified from “ombudsman” to be gender neutral. Ballesteros, who has worked for the company for almost 30 years, said Rockwell was one of the first companies in America to develop an ombuds program.

“This was not anything corporate America had until the late 1980s,” he said. “We wrote a code of conduct that included a no retaliation policy and created this position of ombuds. My position is a completely independent office to be available to accept allegations of misconduct and then take action if I find wrongdoing.” He said disputes can happen at work, and there can be good-faith disagreements that can be resolved by managers. But anything that feels unethical, illegal, or immoral should be escalated to his office. He differentiates between good-faith engineering disagreements and ethical misconduct. “I’m not an engineer and would not be the right person to arbitrate a difference of opinion on whether a widget needs to include an additional part. I would say, bring this concern to me if someone is deliberately falsifying test results or hiding information from management.”

Ballesteros said Rockwell strives to create a culture in which speaking up is encouraged. “To do that requires a lot of conversation and communication and talking about it; there’s no single stronger tool in the workplace than your boss telling you over and over again, ‘I want you to speak up, I want you to challenge.’ We’ve got to create that culture,” he said.

Talk alone is not enough, though. “We have a strict no retaliation policy. If you do speak up and want to report your boss for doing something wrong, we will watch that very carefully to ensure that after you speak up, there is no retaliation.”Recently, Ballesteros investigated an employee complaint about an engineer failing to conduct a final test in a rush to ship a product. “Along with a lot of other companies, we’ve had supply chain issues with COVID-19, with delays in obtaining the supplies we need to build our products. We feel that pressure to build and ship, get it out the door right away,” he explained. “But if we skip that step, it’s unethical and violates our policies and processes. We’re guaranteeing to our customers that we’ve tested these products. If we skip that step, we’ve broken our promise.” In the example he gave, the engineer was ultimately fired.

Leaders set the standard

It’s not just ethics officers who can and should uphold the industry’s standards; every engineer has that responsibility as well. Sathish Murugaiah is a geotechnical engineer and project manager with AECOM, a multinational infrastructure consulting firm that has been on Ethisphere’s list for seven years. He said the few women engineers he has worked with have been comfortable raising concerns. Murugaiah, who holds a B.S. in civil engineering from the University of Peradeniya in Sri Lanka and an M.S. in geotechnical engineering from Washington State University, said that as a manager, his approach when an engineering dispute arises is to go back to his team and have the group analyze it together. In one situation, an analysis report did not meet the expectations of an expert engineer who was acting as a senior reviewer.

“We did a deeper dive and held a brainstorming session,” said Murugaiah. “We had the team explain the things they did, the assumptions they made.” After a sensitivity analysis was done on a specific assumption, the team homed in on the problem and were able to fix it.

Murugaiah said that he hasn’t yet experienced a failure in the field, but that if he does, his approach as a project manager will be to keep an open mind and bring the team together to discuss the cause of failure and how to find the most efficient way to remedy the problem. He believes the team approach is best and aims to avoid pointing the finger at individuals for mistakes, which can cause people to react defensively.

“Whenever you have to handle a difficult situation, you need to think about the person receiving the message and how they feel and how you can better deliver the message. In my experience, everyone understands needing to bring in an expert or senior reviewer.” Murugaiah said that the engineering training he received as an undergrad was theoretical and more applied in graduate school, but that none of his studies included ethics.

Have the conversation

In Dr. Scarlat’s engineering ethics course at UC Berkeley, students bring news articles to class every Friday and analyze them using the concepts they have read about that week in the course. This fosters conversations and sharing skills so that later in their careers, when new challenges come up in product development, for example, those conversations are possible. Her goal is to have “open conversations as a team about topics that are challenging and about ethics,” and to create “the habit of thought and reflection.”

Dr. Scarlat said that although it is important for engineering students and engineers to resolve known issues, it is just as important to identify emerging issues — issues that weren’t necessarily an issue in the past — such as privacy in apps or software, for example. “What are the values embedded into this technology? Are stakeholders consulted in defining those values, and how do we know we are servicing society? What are the power structures that are shifting as a consequence of this technology and how do we counterbalance that?”

She said engineers need to have “many, many conversations [that] are really important in shaping how we do our work as engineers. So for example, is the burden of proof on safety or harm, collective or individual risk, or distribution of risk? Having that vocabulary embedded into engineering analysis is critical, even before talking about issues.”

Dr. Claussen said that in her longitudinal research she has not seen a huge difference in gender in how early-career engineers think about ethical dilemmas. “But I wonder if women are to some degree more interested in issues like this and more willing to engage with them,” she said, adding that it could make women more willing to speak up.

She also sometimes worries — and has discussed with her academic colleagues — whether students might take her ethics discussions less seriously because she, as a young woman, is leading the conversation, especially if she is the only professor talking to them about the subject. “Ethical considerations are integral to the work we’re all doing, but I don’t think we’ve done well educationally, and as a result, it hasn’t trickled into the industry enough,” she said. “We need to find a way to convince our engineering students of how critical it is.”

Dr. Scarlat said change is always hard and is a little harder when the effort is coming from an underrepresented group. She too has felt the pressure of being a woman in a male-dominated field, but she tries to compartmentalize that pressure from the engineering questions she is pondering. “I think we have to hold our ground; I think we have to do what we think makes sense for our discipline and then be open to being wrong about it, [and] open to defending it,” she said.