About

Using the tool

You should choose a job considering many factors, including your skills, your interests, location, compensation, opportunities for growth, team structure and makeup, and job responsibilities, in addition to ethics. This tool will not recommend a certain path - that is up to you.

This tool should not be used to cast negative judgment on people. We all make choices based on the information we have at the time and for a variety of reasons.

You should not be discouraged about ethical challenges you may face - no field is perfect. Instead, I hope you will consider ways you can be the change you wish to see.

The industries here are fairly broad and there are a lot of grey areas, and not every potential job is covered. There are also potentially ethical jobs in industries you wouldn't otherwise consider.

Vision

I became an engineer because I was good at math and science in high school, and I was told that engineering would allow me to use my technical aptitude for social good. Starting engineering school, I found that many students, particularly women and other underrepresented groups, shared my aspirations of social good. However, most graduates were entering the conventional engineering job market, and their jobs were oriented towards profit rather than social impact.

It is time for an ethical reckoning in engineering education. As someone who cares deeply about stopping climate change, I am disappointed in the ways our profession has enabled carbon-intensive industries, and we must transform it. Obviously, we need systemic change – but your individual choice of career will nonetheless make a difference. With this tool, my goal is to create a dialogue about ethical careers for engineering students.

This tool does not prescribe a certain path – it doesn’t make sense for us all to work on the same societal problem – but I hope you will use it to reflect on your ethical limits, what types of work you feel are acceptable, and how you will use your power as an engineer to work towards a more just and equitable society.

Explanation of Ethical Areas

Although there are undoubtedly unlimited areas of ethical exposure, some of which we don’t even know of yet, I’ve identified six main areas to explore in this tool:

Equity: How does this industry’s work contribute to or detract from racial equity, gender parity, LGBTQ+ and disability rights, economic inequality, etc?

Labor: What are this industry’s practices like with regards to wages and benefits, unionization, workplace safety, and how do those practices affect labor rights and employee quality of life writ large?

Corporate Citizenship: How does this industry affect communities? Do companies pay taxes? What do they lobby for? To what extent does this company prioritize profit over and above social good when making decisions?

Privacy: How does this industry’s business model affect consumer and worker privacy?

Environment: How does this industry propagate climate change and other types of ecological devastation?

Safety: How does this industry affect the safety of the general public?

Many ethical issues span these categories – for example, the use of pesticides in agriculture is an environmental concern because these can pollute watersheds, but it also a safety concern for those who eat food. Also, not every industry will have a clear-cut ethical issue for every category, and the list of issues is not exhaustive. These categories and the discussion are presented as a starting point.

Other Resources

If you are a Cooper Union student, you can contact the Center for Career Development on Handshake to discuss career exploration, including ethical careers, and to take self-assessments. ONET is another useful tool for career exploration.

Please see the below for more ethical-career-oriented resources:

Green New Careers

Green Jobs

Impactful

Kernel Magazine

Acknowledgements

Thank you to Ricky Yurewitch for his generous technical help, and to Kit Nicholls for his invaluable help in ideating the project. Many thanks to Jolie Woodson and Toni Burrell from the Cooper Union Center for Career Development, who provided feedback on the initial version.