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Role of Women in the Pursuit of NDE 4.0

The role of women in NDT or women in NDE is the focus of the gender diversity paper. This paper also covers nde 4.0, the ndt industry in general and women in STEM.


By Ripi Singh and Marybeth Miceli
 

This paper appears in the March 2021 edition of ASNT’s journal, Materials Evaluation as well as the ASNT blog, Pulse. In honor of Women’s History Month, we have included it here in its entirety.

This paper is intended to highlight roles that women can and likely will play in shaping the future of NDE 4.0, from execution to leadership levels as well as from development to transformation activities. As we build momentum toward adopting Industry 4.0 into the nondestructive evaluation (NDE) domain, we face multiple challenges such as technology standardization, talent and skills shortfall, massive transformation, and regulatory and certification standards (Singh 2019, 2020a). Many of these challenges are better addressed with a proper mix of gender in responsible teams.

Women in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) fields are a source of talent that can be harnessed as digitalization becomes a major part of the NDE sector. According to a recent Forbes article, traits like listening and empathy serve women well in “change leadership,” which is the ability to influence and inspire action in others and respond with vision and agility during periods of growth, disruption, or uncertainty to bring about the needed change (Lipkin 2019). While working the innovation value chain, emotional intelligence makes women better suited to capturing marketplace insight and easing friction in technology adoption, and a balance of gender in a team makes for more productive ideation sessions for effective problem-solving and objective execution. This paper presents literature research triggered by personal experience and substantiated by recent candid conversations with women leaders in NDE, to highlight the importance of a blended and balanced gender mix required for NDE 4.0.

Recap of NDE 4.0

NDE 4.0 has been defined as “cyber-physical nondestructive evaluation (including testing); arising out of a confluence of Industry 4.0 digital technologies, physical inspection methods, and business models; to enhance inspection performance, integrity engineering, and decision making for safety, sustainability, and quality assurance, as well as provide relevant data to improve design, production, and maintenance” (Vrana and Singh 2021). This definition is comprehensive enough to cover the why, what, and how of NDE 4.0.

The primary purpose of NDE is to determine the safety of an asset to its consumers/users, while keeping inspectors safe as well. In addition, economic drivers demand operational capacity and effective inspections. The four design principles of Industry 4.0 (Hermann et al. 2016) that have been interpreted for NDE applications and defined previously (Singh 2019) include interoperability, information transparency, technical assistance, and decentralized decisions. These would naturally require a digital twin with the ability to capture and leverage data directly from the manufacturing process to in-service maintenance in order to optimize maintenance, repairs, and overhauls over the lifetime of an asset, and even feed big data for design improvements.

The possibilities for cyber-physical confluence using various sensory systems provide numerous opportunities such as robotics and automation, augmented reality (AR), artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), big data and AI, digital image and signal processing, computer vision, and additive manufacturing (AM) (Vitale et al. 2019). Mobile devices have absorbed a large number of basic components (data processor, memory, video camera, display, two-way audio-video communication, data network, and so on), letting the NDE technology developer focus their attention on sensors and data-processing algorithms, making it a lot more affordable to create new inspection equipment and upgrade, automate, or network existing systems.

All of these possibilities open up a whole new paradigm, where NDE 4.0 provides an opportunity to choose quality (safety), speed, and cost, as compared to the traditional perspective that you can only choose two out of the three. That is why it is called the next revolution.

With the more recent challenges presented by COVID-19, where workforce social distancing has resulted in split-shift work as well as reductions in staff, NDE 4.0 introduces a fourth advantage—resilience. This benefit could be the most important of all because in our “new normal,” the resiliency of a company and its ability to quickly and efficiently bounce back from enormous challenges (pandemics, manmade and natural disasters, and so on) while still maintaining productivity and throughput is now paramount. Resiliency measures are an integral part of business continuity plans and can more easily justify NDE 4.0 technology and system integration.

The journey is neither linear nor easy. It is full of challenges including the implementation of high-performance computing systems, simulation capabilities, new technology standards and a different leadership mindset, agility, transparency, connectivity, and willingness to collaborate with intelligent systems (desktop as well as industrial cobots). A serious and visible gap is the need for a whole new skill set around information and communication technologies (ICT, not just IT), and more importantly, the willingness to accept that what we know today will likely be obsolete before we can establish ourselves as an expert.

In the following sections, we look at how the gender divide started and how closing the gap can effectively reduce the pain and speed up the adoption of NDE 4.0.

Gender* Gap – Perception of Reality?

In this section, we will review how the roles of men and women in the workforce have changed throughout the industrial revolutions to today, as well as documented sex differences in human behavior.

(* Please note that the authors are aware that gender is nonbinary; however, for the purposes of this research paper, we are limiting the scope to traditional biological XX/XY groups. )

Industry 4.0 features women in NDE and Women in STEM. Gender diversity is also the focus of this paper from ASNT's Materials Evaluation.

Figure 1. The first industrial revolution initiated a segregation to protect women’s health from hazardous conditions; the second further stereotyped it; the third revolution started the reverse trend; and fourth requires a balance and blend.

Historic Evolution

Equality in the gender roles of men and women in the workforce and household has changed greatly throughout the industrial revolutions, especially in the United States (Figure 1).

Prior to the first industrial revolution, people lived in rural areas. Farming was the most common occupation for most families, as it was a reliable source of income. However, once industrialization occurred, many more job opportunities opened up for people. Naturally, families began to move to where the better jobs were and where the money was, which was primarily in urban centers. This trend of people moving from rural areas to cities is called urbanization.

While working on the farm, both men and women shared the responsibilities of the work fairly equally. Yes, they had different jobs; however, these duties were often intertwined, and the work women did on the farm was valued just as much as men’s work. However, after the first industrial revolution, the jobs of men and women began to diverge, both in function and in value. In the cities, men would go out and work tedious jobs, while the women typically stayed home with the children and took care of them, as well as cooked and cleaned. Though there are notable exceptions to this, such as the “Lowell girls” who were employed in Lowell factories because they could pay young women less than men, as machinery became larger and more capable, the industry shifted toward male employment.

The first industrial revolution also generally brought about poor working conditions: dark, overcrowded factories; machines that covered workers in soot; and little focus on safety (Zabbatino 2014). This led to accidents and disease. Whereas initially employers hired women because they thought they would be less likely to protest poor working conditions, they found this to be not true, and many women helped lead protests and movements to protect workers and child laborers. Female workers formed both the Women’s Trade Union League and the Women’s Bureau, which fought for shorter workdays and more safety measures (Cordery 2007). Unfortunately, this helped spur a trend of employers hiring fewer and fewer women. Certain industries, such as textiles, continued to employ women as workers, but the majority of factory and other urban-center jobs shifted toward male-centric roles.

The second industrial revolution further reinforced these stereotypes with the exception of the period during World War II. When the men returned home, post-war America enjoyed a thriving economy which allowed many families to live comfortably on one salary. Women were encouraged through the media and social norms to stay in the home and provide a safe place to raise a family (PBS n.d.). Unfortunately, this period started some trends that still affect us today; for example, unequal wages. Men and women became seen as separate entities, and a man’s work was considered to be more valuable to a boss than a woman’s, as she was paid much less. What began here has only grown into a bigger problem with time as women are still fighting for equal pay and respect.

The third industrial revolution, however, brought a bit of women’s strength back into the workplace with computers and the ability to work flexible hours and work from home. Additionally, the struggles of the middle class in the 1970s and 1980s necessitated many middle-class “homemakers” to look for paid work outside of the home. This trend continued, as the middle and lower classes continued to require two incomes to provide for their families. As more and more women entered the workforce, more infrastructure was put into place to better facilitate the two-income family structure (Cordery 2007).

The fourth industrial revolution can dismantle gender stereotypes altogether. Joyce Burnette (2008) showed that market forces—not discrimination, as it is now—were the largest driver in gender differences in occupations and wages during the second revolution.

In the first industrial revolution, craftsmen who were valued for their ingenuity and creativity were replaced by workers who were valued for their physical strength and quick acquisition of skills. Today, they are being replaced more and more by machines (particularly AI and robotics) that can handle repetitive tasks and do the heavy lifting in our factories. The fourth industrial revolution is therefore poised to eliminate the gender stereotypes created by the first, putting the emphasis back on human talent (ingenuity and creativity), and not on traditional masculine skills.

In the fourth industrial revolution, success is found in the on-demand production of customized things, and talent is becoming the most valuable asset. This may well be the antithesis of the first industrial revolution, where the mass production of uniform things drove success, and therefore physical strength was more highly valued than human ingenuity. In an economy based less on capital and more on talent, women are more likely to be treated as equals to foster an environment where there are fewer obstacles to hiring the right talent.

And as people become the new competitive advantage, organizations will need to stop reinforcing gender roles to fuel an unprecedented race for the best talent. The most successful companies in the future may be those that truly eliminate gender stereotypes in favor of innovation and growth (Funna 2018).

The Labor Force Today

According to the B.A. Women’s Alliance (bawomensalliance.org/womeninstem), over the last five decades, women in the United States have made incredible strides in achieving equal representation in education and the workplace. Today, women earn 57% of all bachelor’s degrees and make up 48% of the labor force. Certain fields, however, have not seen the same growth as others. In particular, women are less present within STEM sectors. Only 12% of women’s bachelor’s degrees are in STEM fields, compared to 19% for men. Even more worrisome, after college, women in STEM leave the workforce in much higher numbers than their male counterparts: only 5% of college-educated women are working in STEM two years after graduation, and only 3% after 10 years. This phenomenon has been called the “leaky pipeline,” a metaphor that suggests women “leak” through various cracks along the professional development path from education to advanced careers. The B.A. Rudolph Foundation’s white paper titled “Solving for XX: Challenges and Opportunities for Women in STEM” describes the current state of women in STEM, identifies five critical points in which women tend to diverge from STEM fields, describes the factors that push and pull women out of STEM, highlights unique opportunities these fields represent, and provides recommendations for getting women to stay (Schaub 2017).

Research into the experience of women has found that women working in occupations traditionally considered to be masculine domains confront barriers that contribute to poor experience and to early departure. Many of these barriers are associated with masculine organizational cultures that do not offer flexibility, do not value female attributes, and associate females with having less ability or skill than males. Such belief systems, values, and resultant organizational practices have been linked to social exclusion, isolation, and gender management, which are hard for women to endure. Other significant problems women encounter come from the lack of “critical mass” needed to provide support, mentoring, role models, and leadership. (In other words, generally there has to be a certain number or percentage required before the system begins to make accommodations.) It has also been found that women who enter environments considered to be “hypermasculine” are confronted with discrimination, harassment, and violence. Therefore, it is vital to question how women negotiate these barriers (Bridges et al. 2018).

Female representation is not just a problem at the top of the company hierarchy. It remains an issue at each stage of the corporate hierarchy, with the odds stacked particularly high against Asian, Black, and Latinx women, as well as other women of color.

Early efforts by companies to improve female leadership focused on appointing more female board members. Yet McKinsey research quickly established that addressing women’s absence at the top could only occur by looking at their career progression (Devillard et al. 2018). It turns out that the underrepresentation of women is already a factor at the outset of their careers, and their representation diminishes with further progression along their careers. The odds of progression differ by industry. Some industries, such as technology, are particularly poor at hiring women in the first place. In others, women tend to get stuck at the middle- or senior-management level. The overall picture is nevertheless clear. The 2017 research on women in the workplace, which looked at 222 companies in the United States employing more than 12 million people in total, found that, on average, women held just 22% of senior vice president roles. No wonder the odds of reaching the very top are so slim. Women of color fare even worse (Devillard et al. 2018).

Anatomy Diversity

Sex differences in human behavior show adaptive complementarity: according to research, males generally have better motor and spatial abilities, whereas females have superior memory and social cognition skills (Ingalhalikar et al. 2014). Many social studies show sex differences in human brains but do not explain this complementarity. Authors modeled the structural connectome using diffusion tensor imaging in a sample of 949 youths (aged 8 to 22 years; 428 males and 521 females) and discovered unique sex differences in brain connectivity during the course of development. Connection-wise statistical analysis, as well as an analysis of regional and global network measures, presented a comprehensive description of network characteristics. In all supratentorial regions, males had greater within-hemispheric connectivity, as well as enhanced modularity and transitivity, whereas between-hemispheric connectivity and cross-module participation predominated in females. However, this effect was reversed in the cerebellar connections. An analysis of these changes developmentally demonstrated differences in trajectory between males and females mainly in adolescence and in adulthood (Figure 2).

Overall, the results suggest that male brains are structured to facilitate connectivity between perception and coordinated action, whereas female brains are designed to facilitate communication between analytical and intuitive processing modes.

The male and female brains react differently. This is the point of gender diversity and women in STEM. This article also covers women in ndt and nde 4.0.

Figure 2. Neural connectivity in the human brain: (a) male; (b) female.

Role of Gender in NDE 4.0

In this section, we provide a literature review of research on the differing leadership styles of men and women and how they fit together into the innovation value chain.

At the Leadership Level

Barbara Trautlein (2016) asserts that each change agent has a basic tendency to lead with their heart, head, hands, or some combination thereof. Leaders who lead mainly from the heart connect with people emotionally (“I want it!”). Those who lead from the head connect with people cognitively (“I get it!”). Those who lead from the hands connect with people behaviorally (“I can do it!”). Her research indicates that men tend to lead change more with the head and women primarily with the heart, and that for women, hands are a strong secondary style. Said another way, almost half of the men surveyed led change by focusing on vision, mission, and strategy (head strengths). Almost half of the women, conversely, placed a premium on engaging, communicating, and collaborating (heart strengths), and almost a third of the women emphasized planning, tactics, and execution (hands strengths).

Note that it is not inherently better or worse to focus on heart or head or hands; the most effective change incorporates all three. The point is not for leaders of change—men or women—to change their natural style. The point, instead, is an awareness of our styles and the ability to adapt our behavior to incorporate other approaches to be optimally impactful across a variety of people and situations. According to Trautlein, when leading through change, men tend to display behaviors traditionally associated with strategic executives, concentrating on future vision and new business horizons. Conversely, women tend to center on supporting their teams to work together and to develop a detailed road map to achieve a change objective, functioning more like supportive coaches.

The uncertainty of Industry 4.0, the need to collaborate for technology integration, and changing workforce dynamics require leading by heart and hands. The research cited previously indicates that in this regard, women will have an edge in leading through digital transformation in this era of the innovator.

As an example, an organized response to COVID-19 required significant innovation and resiliency. The success of female leaders of different nations demonstrated this value in leading diverse teams to tackle intense challenges (Wittenberg-Cox 2020), and the authors propose that this offers a good parallel to the challenges of NDE 4.0, where there will be many “failures” before success. Additionally, where the resilience of systems will help to justify the incorporations of NDE 4.0 into corporate processes and business continuity planning, women in traditionally male careers have been shown in particular to exhibit the trait of resilience in order to prosper in their chosen field. Bridges et al. (2018) also pointed out that in order for women to succeed in engineering fields, their success is dependent on four aspects, including personal traits and ability, and also social and cultural conditions.

An economist from Carnegie Mellon found that teams that included at least one female member had a collectively higher IQ than teams that included only men. When Fortune 500 companies had at least three female directors, several key factors increased: the return on invested capital jumped over 66%, return on sales went up 42%, and return on equity increased by 53%. Gallup found that companies with more diversity on staff had a 22% lower turnover rate, and if an organization had a more inclusive culture that embraced women, it was easier to recruit a more diverse staff (Goman 2019; Anita Borg Institute 2014).

In the Innovation Value Chain

The innovation value chain has five major steps (Singh 2020b). The first half focuses on marketplace insight and ideation, which require heart skills (emotional intelligence and teamwork), traditionally considered female thinking processes; while the second half (qualification and execution) requires head skills, traditionally considered male thinking processes. A well-balanced team could help accelerate the entire innovation value chain (Figure 3).

Increasing women in STEM and Women in NDT is better for the industry. Gender diversity is very important for the ndt industry as a whole and nde 4.0.

Figure 3. A blend of women and men along the innovation value chain makes it stronger by matching skill sets with roles. The first half focuses on marketplace insight and ideation, which require heart skills (emotional intelligence and teamwork), while the second half (qualification and execution) requires head skills.

A 2012 study on women’s participation in IT patents found that patents with mixed-gender teams were cited 30% to 40% more than similar patents with all-male teams (D.H. Recruitment Services 2018). A London Business School survey of 850 individuals in 17 countries, in different industries, found that across the board, having a larger number of women on a team accounted for greater psychological safety, team confidence, group experimentation, and team efficiency. These benefits are optimal when teams are 50% to 60% women (D.H. Recruitment Services 2018).

As per a report from PwC (2017), more and more CEOs regard talent diversity and inclusion as vital to their organization’s ability to drive innovation and gain a competitive advantage. As businesses across the world inject greater urgency into their gender diversity efforts, there is an intensifying focus on hiring female talent. In fact, 78% of large organizations are actively seeking to hire more women, especially into more experienced and senior-level positions (PwC 2017).

According to research from McKinsey & Co. published in 2018, gender diversity on executive teams is strongly correlated with profitability and value creation (Hunt et al. 2018).

All of these reports point out that innovation thrives better with gender diversity. Thus, it follows that the next industrial revolution and NDE 4.0 will evolve faster and better with the inclusion of both genders in appropriate proportions. Within Industry 4.0, three out of the four guiding principles mentioned previously require a significant amount of emotional intelligence, soft skills, and resilience, thus providing a natural advantage to women.

How to Inspire Gender Neutrality

Studies have shown that parents start reinforcing gender stereotypes when their children are just two years old (Martin and Ruble 2010). As an example, parents take their kids to gender-specific lanes for toys. Boys are exposed to cars, play guns, and other toys that promote competition, excitement, danger, and spatial and math skills. The girls’ toy lane has dolls, dollhouses, and dress-ups that generate nurturing, domesticity, physical attractiveness, and verbal skills. And this continues for many years until the brains are wired. We as parents may not appreciate the psychological studies that suggest most children develop the ability to label gender groups and to use gender labels in their speech between 18 and 24 months. This knowledge of basic gender information was related to increased play with strongly stereotyped toys (Martin and Ruble 2010).

Mattel’s “You Can Be Anything” campaign targeted to girls offers doll accessories such as safety goggles, laptops, and humanoid robots. Debbie Sterling, founder and CEO of GoldieBlox, is on a mission to inspire girls to love STEM with her line of toys designed to develop an early interest in engineering and confidence in problem-solving. LEGO advocated gender equality in toys in 1974 with a letter to parents, saying that the most important thing is to “put the right materials into children’s hands and let them create whatever appeals to them: a bed or a truck. A dollhouse or a spaceship” (Withnall 2014). Qubits construction sets are another good example of gender-neutral STEM toys.

Innovation necessitates diversity, and it is important to start building those skills for all ages: preschool, school, early social, college, and then the workplace. Roles at home and in the workplace should be tied to skills and interests in a gender-neutral manner in order to make the best use of the talent pool.

Gender Acceptance in the Workplace

For companies to hire more women in top management, they need to create a culture of open and constructive feedback, invite women leaders to review and revamp processes and systems, and acknowledge the unique qualities both genders bring to the workplace.

Due to their resilience as well as the physical attributes of their brain function, women are well-suited to lead us into and through the fourth industrial revolution. While getting more women into STEM and NDT needs to start at childhood, NDE 4.0 cannot wait for next generation to grow up. A conscious effort must be made now to take advantage of the skill sets in the talent pool in a gender-neutral manner. Pull is coming from market forces—there is just not enough talent pool to choose from, and leadership needs to open their minds and accept that women can do the job. Push has to come from company policies on gender diversity, retraining, intentional innovation groups, and focus on resiliency, justifying a move toward NDE 4.0.

A note on gender-neutral language: Now that we have established the need for female leadership and participation in innovation, we should also reinforce it in our daily language.

George Bernard Shaw said, “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” The gender-neutral statement would say “person” instead of “man.” Gender-neutral language takes conscious effort. Consider this recent example from SpaceX, which uses “crewed” instead of “manned”: “The dummy is part of a full suite of sensors aboard the uncrewed mission, which will produce data that SpaceX and NASA will rely on for future, crewed missions” (Bartels 2019).

Going Forward

NDE 4.0 is taking place all around us. It is a serious confluence of digital and physical technologies for ensuring safety of infrastructure, assets, and inspectors. It will change technology, applications, and business models. It requires a new set of trade skills, a blend of a logical-emotional mindset, and an agile leadership. All of this makes gender balance critical to successfully go through the massive transformation associated with the fourth industrial revolution. It requires a commitment from leadership in the near future and parental involvement for a long-term sustainable solution. It also presents a real opportunity for the NDE industry to harness the resources and talents of traditionally underrepresented groups, which have learned the importance of resilience in their careers and how to translate that to systems and company resilience to better adapt to volatile environments.

The research cited in this paper, along with validation via the interviews summarized herein, shows that women are well-suited for leadership roles through the next industrial revolution(s). These women leaders must not suppress their innate abilities to “fit in” in a male-dominated field but utilize them to transform the company and industry culture to value those attributes and show how they contribute to innovation, resiliency, and overall company success.

NOTE: The following conversations with NDT leaders appeared as sidebars in the paper as published in Materials Evaluation.

Conversation with a Technology Leader

Arungalai (Aru) Anbarasu is a leader of women in NDT.

Arungalai (Aru) Anbarasu

Arungalai (Aru) Anbarasu is the chief technology and strategy officer at Waygate Technologies, a Baker Hughes business, where she leads new technology and product development for the NDT industry. In her former role as the executive general manager focusing on industrial X-ray and computed tomography (CT) business for Waygate Technologies (formerly GE Inspection Technologies), Anbarasu achieved a near 50/50 gender balance on her team.

“When I started [in] the X-ray business role, there was a lot of gender imbalance, resulting in a decision-making process that was often skewed,” Anbarasu recollects. She strongly believes that innovation is a result of bringing many different ideas to the table in order to challenge the status quo. “Balance brings you new ideas and new ways of growing and […] we were able to become the market leader in X-ray after that. I attribute that to the team, and think the diversity has a lot to do with it. Balance always helps you make the right decision.” Anbarasu refers to this as collective intelligence: in other words, when there is more variety in your data, the decisions are better.

There are several reasons why diversity in leadership is so important to Anbarasu. The foremost is that good female role models help attract good female talent, stave off attrition, and help other females (and males) thrive in their careers with the support of their leaders. One of the reasons is that mentoring grows out of these relationships, and as Anbarasu points out, it is important to have people who are both similar and different to you because “there are days that are bad and I need some sort of validation (from both a mentor and mentee) and they are there to help me feel validated, but I also need people who are different from me to teach me new things.”

As the mother of a daughter, Anbarasu believes that female leaders have a strong inclination toward a nurturing leadership style. She leads a team that is supportive of her and that she strongly supports: her team knows that she has their collective back. This kind of culture allows them to take more risks and innovate more freely and creatively within the broad ethical and compliance boundaries that she provides. Innovation is born when such creative environments are provided.

Anbarasu is also a strategic leader with a vision of NDE 4.0. “NDE 4.0 will completely change the [NDT] world. In the next five years, the NDE industry is going to move from detecting defects through NDE 4.0 to avoiding defects.” She went on to speak about virtual feedback loops and how the entire culture around manufacturing will change and improve. “We (in NDE) will go from being a cost to being a value […] for the customer.”

Just as she sees value in gender balance in leadership as essential to driving innovation, Anbarasu points out that gender balance is most critical for the NDE 4.0 movement. “NDE 4.0 is not just technology—it’s the whole ecosystem, it’s solutions, it’s culture, it’s team, it’s everything. However, we have to be realistic. This is an industry with a lot of inbuilt and inherent biases, several for good reason but also some others because of inertia, whether it is in the adoption of new technology or sharing of ‘sensitive data,’ there are several challenges we need to overcome, and the first times are never easy. The first ones through a wall always tend to get bloody. That said, to really succeed you have to have the perseverance to break through these walls.” She points out that with this level of innovation and transformation, there are always a lot of trials along the way, and a diverse team shows a lot of perseverance and resilience and helps develop sustainable solutions for the different facets of NDE 4.0.

On perseverance, Anbarasu recollects a story of how one of her female team members had previously brought the same idea to multiple leaders and was shot down each time, but that when Anbarasu came into leadership, the idea could finally move forward and is now heralded as a success for the company. Had it not been for her team member’s persistence and Anbarasu’s willingness to listen and let her team be creative problem solvers, the project would never have come to fruition. It is exactly this kind of leadership, collaboration, and persistence that NDE 4.0 needs to revolutionize the NDT industry. “There are going to be many firsts [with NDE 4.0] and you need that fighting spirit to get there; having that diversity [of thoughts] is important as well.”

________

Conversation with an Organization Leader

Karen Smith

Karen Smith

Karen Smith is president of Olympus Scientific Solutions Americas, a major player in NDT equipment manufacturing. Smith has been in the industry since 1987 with the same organization (Panametrics, now Olympus) through various acquisitions and has grown through various roles in the company, serving wherever her skill set was needed. Her combination of technical knowledge and communication skills has served her well in the many roles she has held.

Smith attributes her ability to succeed and assume the role of the president to the strong Olympus global team and to four primary leadership skills: being a good listener to understand what a customer’s needs are, experience across a wide variety of topics so that she can contribute where she’s needed, empathy, and optimism.

Smith says that one of the reasons she has been with the same organization all this time is, “I love inspection solutions; I love what we do; I love that we help people and help the world be a safer place.” That sentiment has been Smith’s driving force for staying in the industry even among challenges throughout her career. “Challenges over the course of a career make you adaptable and resilient. Working through challenges with a strong, talented team at Olympus and providing customers with new inspection solutions is in total very rewarding.”

Many women working in the industrial market have persevered and overcome headwinds they faced within that culture. “Specifically to NDE, I hope to find ways to get more women into the field and help keep them there. Certainly, the initiative to create a more diverse workforce was going on before I started my career, and I am excited to continue to support it. I’m happy to see how it has evolved in some markets, but I feel the interesting and complex nature of NDE is not as well-known and still needs to be discovered to help [achieve] balance.”

As a woman in NDT, the various changes Smith has faced throughout her career have contributed to her adaptability and resilience. Her first year as president coincided with the COVID-19 crisis. “The pandemic started like most challenges—one day at a time—and evolved to one hour at a time, so perseverance and adaptability have been key. We have not changed what we do but the process of how we do it. Because we were already focused on digitization, we were able to shift resources and respond quickly to the COVID-19 challenge. Perhaps equally as important, a renewed focus on empathy and communication has helped us keep morale intact and even increase it.”

To coincide with the growing demand for digitization, Olympus has prioritized product development and intellectual property, which includes a focus on operational key performance indicators. Smith remarks that at this time this culture remains at Olympus, but with a stronger focus on growth and performance centered on applicability for the end user.

Smith’s style of listening to employees and customers coupled with her background in NDT applications, operations, and marketing has positioned her to help Olympus maintain its status as a top NDT manufacturer leading the charge for NDE 4.0. They learn from their own trial and error but also from what other world-class manufacturers are doing. Olympus has adopted a culture of agility and continuous improvement in their product development and manufacturing, leveraging innovation methodologies to benefit their customers. They have also embraced Industry 4.0 to create efficiency in operational innovation by incorporating modern tools and practices such as robotics.

“We’re always striving to make the job of NDT more efficient, safer, and more precise, but we’ve not been able to do that in some environments. NDE 4.0 allows us this opportunity. With the data, access, and precision that NDE 4.0 offers, we can reduce over-engineering and increase efficiency, ultimately saving money. I dream about customers getting access to data in more places, more readily, and more safely. It’s that kind of passion and big picture thinking that will move NDE 4.0 forward. Let’s be clear—it’s not about just women doing this; the key is to facilitate a diverse group that incorporates everyone’s ideas—that perspective will bring us better outcomes.”

________

Conversation with a Technology and Business Leader

Kimberley Hayes

Kimberley Hayes

Kimberley Hayes is currently serving as the director of business development at VMI, a Varex Imaging Company. She has been a leader of ideation in NDT technology throughout her entire NDT career. From her days at Magnaflux and Olympus to today with VMI, Hayes very quickly learned the value of understanding the end users, their pain points, and finding a way to help them. Even when the end user is not her direct customer, Hayes recognizes the big picture: “By engaging the entire value chain, you can see where the challenges are and put solutions in place to move the entire industry forward.”

Hayes leads through agitation, striving to see where we, as an industry, can do better. Heavily involved in NDE 4.0, she consistently brings the big picture into focus and identifies the gaps, from the technologies themselves to the standards and specifications needed to gain more consistency and repeatability in inspections.

Hayes sees innovation and NDE 4.0 as critical to her company and the industry, and she credits her success in getting ideas implemented to her persistence. “It’s that persistence that pays off,” she says emphatically. “We can be moving so much faster if all the domains were aligned in the same direction, but too often you have to spend too much effort to shift some of those domains, to create that force. I’m usually in the front part of those discussions.” In other words, the entire value chain needs to get aligned in order to push technology, such as NDE 4.0, in place.

Hayes’s hope for the future of NDE 4.0 is that “we will see machine learning not as a threat but as a collaboration. Having a tighter bond between the process and the method, creating that feedback loop to making the welders better, the products better, and the process better. NDE needs not be siloed, but an integral part of the macro-organism.” It is precisely that mentality of seeing the entire process and how the pieces fit together that makes Hayes such an asset to the industry. “I foster the ideas and then the engineers actually make the solution, and we need both the big picture folks who can make those connections as well as the engineers with deep knowledge to make it all happen.”

Hayes often speaks of the Japanese phrase “genchi genbutsu,” which means “go and see for yourself.” In order to realize the big picture, she goes into the field to see what the real situation is. But she also makes the connections wherever she can in the value chain to find the decision makers and get everyone on board to facilitate a successful integration into the industry. Ultimately, this makes her company more successful in the marketplace as she positions them as a thought leader in the industry.

Hayes said she doesn’t spend too much time thinking about women in NDT in particular, but she did say that she recently completed an MIT course on AI and business strategy which contained a module on diversity and how team diversity elevated the collective intelligence of the group, particularly when women are included. Hayes sees that with NDE 4.0, the industry will be less dependent on heavy lifting and more data driven, which presents more opportunities for women in NDE.

________

Conversation with an NDT Trainer and Level III

John Stewart

John Stewart

John Stewart is the executive director and founder of American Aerospace Technical Academy (AATA). The authors had a conversation with Stewart to seek a male perspective on training diverse candidates in NDE. He is an example of promoting equality and fairness.

Stewart, an ASNT NDT Level III, a US veteran, and industry veteran of Space X, Virgin Galactic, The Spaceship Company, NASA JPL, and others in the aerospace sector, started AATA in 2015. AATA trains veterans, women, and other disenfranchised communities in NDT via a free 12-week program. Moreover, in 2018, AATA had the first all-women cohort come through its program.

According to Stewart, it is not enough to simply say we need more women in NDT; we must take action. He provides the following example. Over the last few years, the term “anti-racist” has emerged. It is not enough to be not a racist; we must actively work to fight racism in society. The same is true for getting women into the field of NDT: “It’s obvious there’s not enough women in nondestructive testing,” says Stewart.

Stewart has seen firsthand what Bridges et al. (2018) showed: that success in a STEM field for women is dependent on two factors, the person’s abilities but also the culture or environment surrounding them in the workplace. Stewart goes on to explain, “The success [of the women entering NDT] unfortunately is not really based on the student or the person; often the success is based on the employer and how the employer works with the women in NDT. So, there’s a stigma there we need to get out.

“I think it’s really a good opportunity for the employer when they hire a woman, because then they get to see that there’s a lot of things that they can do, versus what we [as men, typically] can do. It’s diversity and inclusion. When you only have a few percent of women in the industry, you’re going to have a lot of problems to solve, but once that percentage increases and hopefully they’re 50% of the NDT workforce, then I think a lot of those [problems] will go away. I think due to the current average age in NDT, there’s still a lot of misogyny. It’s not always out in the open, and it needs to be addressed.”

Stewart, being a person of color himself and with his experience in training a lot of people of color in NDT, also sees the correlation between the resiliency that women and minorities need to have in their daily lives leading to success in the NDT world. “They seem to have to work harder and be better than their male counterparts to get any recognition, let alone the same recognition. That’s my experience as well, being a minority. You have to be able to defend your position [on a job site], and it’s something that we’ve had to do all our lives,” he says.

“As we move toward NDE 4.0, I would hope it will help bring more women in the industry, though I think the problems in the NDT industry are a lot deeper. I think NDE 4.0 is […] going to benefit women coming into the industry because it broadens the technology. You add software into the industry, and it will help include more women in the industry.”

Acknowledgments

Ripi Singh would like to acknowledge his female peers Ann Gowdey, Fernanda Ave, Lalitha Shivaswamy, and Kim Hayes for inspiring conversations on the topic during his research in preparation for the panel discussion at BC-Tech Summit in Vancouver 2019. Singh appreciates his association with women leaders in CT—Jill Meyer of Bead Industries, Kathy Rocha of UCONN, and Laury DiMarco of Dymax. Singh also recognizes the role played by his early management career mentor Cheryl Lobo of Raytheon Technologies.

Marybeth Miceli would like to acknowledge Singh for his objective research on this topic and inspiring women to feel confident about the value they bring to the workplace by being women. Miceli would further like to thank the women who came before her, paving the way in the industry, particularly Brenda Collins, Jocelyn Langlois, Toni Bailey, and the late Sharon Vukelich. She would also like to thank her male mentors, the late William F. Via, Jr.; John C. Duke, Jr.; Ricky Morgan; and Flynn Spears for always being open to her “innovative” ideas to push the industry forward. Miceli would additionally like to thank her husband (who is a true partner in every aspect of life), her parents, and her children as well as business partner Michelle Harnish for their support in this endeavor. Lastly, Miceli would like to acknowledge that this process has been both cathartic and painful, but she believes that this information, data, and research is extremely important to get out into the NDT industry.

Both authors would also like to thank significant contributors to the content, Karen Smith, Kim Hayes, John Stewart, and Arungalai Anbarasu, for helping to validate the research through candid conversations and their permission to publish these conversations.

Disclaimer: The research and viewpoints included herein are not intended to diminish or promote any gender. They are simply presented to make a case for a proper blend and balance of gender in working teams as the right thing to do to create business value as well as build an equitable social structure.

Authors

  • Ripi Singh, Ph.D. (he/him): Chief of Innovation & Strategy, Inspiring Next, CT, USA; ripi@inspiringnext.com
  • Marybeth Miceli, C.Eng. (she/her): President, Miceli Infrastructure Consulting, Principal, We-NDT Marketing Network, CA, USA; marybeth@miceliconsulting.com

References

Citation

Materials Evaluation 79 (3): 272–284
https://doi.org/10.32548/2021.me-04215
©2021 American Society for Nondestructive Testing


Reprinted with permission 
 

 
March 22, 2021
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