Empowering Women Leaders Working Group

Mission

EWLSE’s vision is to champion a world where women and are men equitably represented as leaders in systems engineering. Our mission is to create an open systems engineering environment welcoming to all; promote the demonstrated value of women as systems engineers and leaders; engage women and girls in engineering and systems engineering at all levels of education around the world; and enable increased participation and retention of women in systems engineering leadership.

Scope

EWLSE’s scope is to broaden awareness of the current state of women in leadership, remove obstacles for women seeking engineering related leadership roles, collaborate with professional societies, industry, government, academia, and individual advocates, and celebrate the benefits of diversity throughout our culture. Ultimately, we want to integrate efforts to raise international awareness of the value of women leaders in engineering and systems engineering; develop and promote successful strategies for women navigating the systems engineering leadership journey across cultures, geographic locations, and domains; and drive the evolution to an open welcoming professional environment where institutions stimulate motivated and qualified applicants to seek leadership opportunities in systems engineering. What success looks like:

• The systems engineering environment is open to all:
  1. Boundaries and partitions that limit success are removed.
  2. Women are and know they can aspire to be leaders in systems engineering.
• All systems engineers are highly valued:
  1. Diverse leadership styles are respected and included.
  2. Systems engineering leadership reflects the community.
• Women and engineering go hand-in-hand:
  1. At least half of graduating engineers are women.
  2. Female engineering graduates choose an engineering career.
  3. Women and men equally share technical leadership.
• We collaborate as equals:
  1. Women and men have a seat at the table.
  2. Cross-cultural collaboration is the norm.
  3. 3. We work together across domains to build a solution for all.
• Mentors and enablers are part of the culture:
  1. Only knowledge, skills, abilities, and attitude matter.
  2. There is engagement at all levels of education. 
  3. Diversity, equity, and inclusion are integral to the foundation of systems engineering.

Goals

Our working group goals include the following:

• Highlighting INCOSE Leadership:
  1. Identify and pursue international opportunities.
  2. Nominate and support women as board members, directors, chairs, fellows, pioneers.
  3. Support INCOSE TLI members.
• Collaborating With Others:
  1. Connect with academia.
  2. Network across INCOSE sectors and chapters.
  3. Reach out to other societies and groups.
• Building Mentor/Mentee Relationships:
  1. Support INCOSE mentor and mentee matching.
  2. Support to women pursuing leadership roles.
  3. Encourage pursuit of SE competencies.
• Celebrating Women:
  1. Demonstrate impact of women in technical leadership.
  2. Share success stories of empowered women.
  3. Publish works that showcase women.
• Raising Awareness Through Research:
  1. Advance related gender and diversity research.
  2. Share research findings on status and progress.
  3. Invite researchers to showcase their work.
• Ongoing Outreach for the Future:
  1. Mentor systems engineering practitioners.
  2. Raise awareness of diversity goals across INCOSE sponsored global events.
  3. Support initiatives to build a better world through a systems approach.
  4. Showcase people who are making a difference in the world.
  5. Work to achieve gender parity in systems engineering leadership.