Explore Our Past and Upcoming DEI Events: Celebrating Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
June 26th, 2025: DEI Meet-up at WESC2025
At WESC2025, we had an in-person meeting with the following outcomes:
– Turn the “Voices of DEI Community” into a group that only meets up at EAWE events.
– Consider setting up a “peer support group” as part of the community.
– Suggest “purple points” at events.
– Make it more clear how the findings of these meetings are used in the DEI Committee.- Ensure a high(er) visibility.
– Ensure the safety of minority groups at EAWE events.
– Create suggestions for diversity-sensitive performance metrics.
January 17th, 2025: DEI Meet-up online launch
At this meeting, we heard from Sandrine Aubrun and Abbas Mehrad Kazemi Amiri about their recent experiences. Some insights we had:
– We found that different people have different experiences of learning a new language and living in a different culture. Some of us found it difficult when colleagues always spoke the main language in the new country (because we couldn’t understand), and some of us found it difficult when they DIDN’T (because we couldn’t learn). We discussed the importance of talking openly (and perhaps with humour) about the situation.
– We discussed whether we should “take things personally” or not, when we observe discrimination against us. Some of us thought that we shouldn’t, and some of us thought we should. However, we all agreed that it is helpful to define concrete ways to improve things with non-violent communication.
– We also all agree that it is important to “call out” obvious discrimination, when we observe it. This is not always easy, but using non-violent communication was again suggested as a useful technique to do so.
May 2024: The EAWE DEI Committee at TORQUE2024
At TORQUE2024, Sarah Barber had the pleasure of moderating a panel discussion during the conference opening session on the topic of “How could wind energy benefit from encouraging traits such as empathy, emotional intelligence and collaboration in everyone?”. After an introduction to the topic from Sarah, four members of the wind energy research community, Amy Robertson, Offshore Wind Group Manager at NREL, USA, Simon Watson, Professor of Wind Energy Systems at TU Delft, NL, Wout Weijtjens. Senior Researcher at VUB, BE and Tuhfe Göcmen, Senior Researcher at DTU Wind, DK, discussed the questions “How do you think wind energy could benefit by encouraging traits such as empathy, emotional intelligence and collaboration in everyone?” and “What ideas do you have for encouraging these traits in everyone?”. The discussion was very well received by the audience! Later on in the week, we ran a workshop aiming to get inputs from conference attendees about what the DEI Committee should be focusing its efforts on. Some suggestions included building up a community of people sharing personal stories, introducing a mentoring programme, providing information, facts and advice, as well as running awareness training and self-assessments.
September 2024: The EAWE DEI Committee at the PhD Seminar
At the PhD Seminar in 2024, James Gilbert from the DEI Committee lead a DEI workshop, in which some initial results of our DEI Survey were presented and discussions about the direction and strategy of the DEI Committee were discussed.
May 2023: The EAWE DEI Committee at WESC2023
At WESC2023, Sara Fogelström and James Gilbert lead a DEI workshop during the event. In this workshop, we asked some questions about demographics and about what we can do to increase inclusion at EAWE. The answers were used to help us design the DEI Survey, which we ran in 2024.
Between 2022 and 2024, we ran regular webinars in order to raise awareness on various DEI topics:
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