Our students are diverse in so many ways. One of those ways is gender, with increasing numbers of students identifying as transgender or non-binary. While there are many opportunities to update the engineering curriculum to support these students, one place where gender bias can be explored and discussed is in an ethics module. There are myriad sources of ethics case studies and prompts. Examining case studies and discussing decision making in the context of an ethical dilemma is a common approach to teaching these. 

This card is for instructors of engineering ethics who want to go deeper than simply applying a professional code of ethics to a scenario. The approach described here could be used in any ethics course, but it is probably more effective in later courses when a cohort (and some trust) is already built.

Ethics instruction often has two parts

1) exploration: evaluating case studies to discuss ethical solutions to an ethical dilemma, often with a professional code of ethics or other moral/ethical frameworks as a basis.

2) assessment: responding to an ethical dilemma with a reasoned course of action, while offering alternative courses of action. 

This card does not deal with this instruction necessarily, but introduces a way to (first) remove gender bias from these activities and (second) to include gender as a topic of further discussion. 

While the goal of ethics instruction is to encourage ethical behavior, there has been doubt cast recently about our ability to do this through ethics instruction. Ethical reasoning requires a process of consideration of an ethical dilemma to arrive at a judgement (or course of action). Identifying this course of action and then following it are different things. Students can develop an ability to determine a course of action, but ethics instruction does not necessarily translate to ethical action, as many authors have found. Regardless of all this, we as instructors can be more ethical in our approach to instruction, by offering ethics prompts that promote inclusion by way of omission; specifically promoting gender inclusivity by omitting gendered language in our assessments. 

From an entrepreneurial mindset perspective, this engaging approach sets up a scenario by which we can invite a more diverse group of students into a conversation (connection), expose and consider potential implicit bias (curiosity), and provide a basis for further discussion of gender in engineering (creating value).