This popped up on my radar today:
The Rocket Project – sponsored by heavy hitters Sony and Intel, no less.
After sharing the link with a few engineering friends, I received a wide range of reactions… from “Wow, they obviously selected for diversity in this campaign” to “what does this have to do with the Sony Vaio?” And “why didn’t they show any women in the first 50 seconds” to “what’s with the classic white man engineering mentor and use of engineering clichés like drinking from a fire hose?”
My response, while partially skeptical due to the fancy production and editing, is predominately sentimental. I went to the homepage of the project (http://discover.sonystyle.com/rocket/) and watched all of the individual team members’ 50 second video biographies. And they are all so sweet! Hearing these young engineers talk about what excites them about engineering, about math, about science… about how they are nerds but they don’t care… about how they love robots and can’t wait to be an engineer and get paid for building them and having fun at the same time (Steven)… about how they have other interests besides school and engineering… its inspiring! The first 30 seconds or so of Julia’s biography definitely resonated with me:
So, does this mean I am a sucker for well-produced videos featuring young engineers? Well, yeah. Is that a bad thing? Well, it could certainly be worse. As Julia says, “that’s okay… that’s why I’m here.” She definitely has that right.
The rocket “launches” on April 12th, and they have photos from mid-Feb documenting the process along the way posted to the main website. I’ll be looking for more sentimentality-inducing videos in a few weeks and will keep you posted ;)
Today, March 24, 2010 is the second annual Ada Lovelace Day - an international day of blogging to celebrate the achievements of women in technology and science.
Find out more at the main sponsoring site: www.findingada.com or follow #ald10 on twitter for the latest. Its currently a trending topic in the UK! Wooo! The target for 2010 was to have 3072 contributing bloggers… right now we’re a little short of 2000 participants so spread the word and write something if you are so moved.
For me, personally… in considering my “tech heroine” – its frankly a little confusing! Whenever I am tasked with coming up with a female role model or personal heroine, I first think of all the women I’ve worked with personally through the day-to-day grind. I have immense respect and admiration for many of these coworkers, supervisors, partners in crime. It is through them and their reality of working in engineering and making a difference every day by being themselves in each situation that I find truly motivational and inspiring. Though there are certainly still struggles, these women engineers are there – present – working – making a change – doing their thing. I dig it.
But its hard to discuss the details of why some of those day-to-day real women are so amazing without getting too personal… hence I’ll turn my attention to the famous tech heroines from days past, whose achievements and discoveries have been steeped in time and are now celebrated for their usefulness and how they have affected society and cultural development. So many great examples of stunning women whose legacy has obvious impact to us today. Women like Ada Lovelace, of course, as well as Marie Curie, Grace Hopper, Rachel Carson – it’s awesome how easily these names roll out of my head, and how (relatively) well known and celebrated these women are today.
But seeing these women through the lens of history makes me feel a layer removed - celebrating their memory and legacy is sentimental, inspiring, and motivating – but not DIRECTLY. I don’t really know these women, and though biographical details abound its not the same as actually knowing and working with them.
So today, on Ada Lovelace Day, I will celebrate by working with women scientists, engineers, and inventors of the future – kids and students! These tech heroines are still in the early stages of formulating their ideas, directions, visions, and interests. That potential, that hope, I find endlessly inspiring. They can and will go anywhere, and I am happy to support them and watch as I can. Plus, its the last day to work on the robot with my team before our FIRST regional competition. FIRST regional competitions start in Los Angeles, Colorado, Hawaii, Boston, Long Island, Ohio, Oklahoma, Philadelphia, South Carolina, and Seattle all tomorrow – so what better way to celebrate today than by working and participating in the community of upcoming women scientists, engineers, technologists, and roboticists!
[Ada Lovelace Day - official site] [The Bigger Picture: Visual Archives and the Smithsonian - Publicity, Politics, and Physics] [Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing] [Bitch Magazine Blogs - the Biotic Woman Reading List] [Powell's Books - Voices for Green Choices #1 -Rachel Carson, Fighting Pesticides and Other Chemical Pollutants by Patricia Lantier] [usfirst.org - FIRST Robotics Competition Regional Events]
<–Orange Timberland Sneakers I purchased in 2005 in anticipation for my first ever real industry engineering job (summer internship), thinking I needed shoes that sent the message that I was tough and a valid presence in the machine shop while being simultaneously slightly hip, interesting, and youthful.
Now I’m a little embarrassed to admit I spent this much time thinking about my shoes on the first day of the job (full first day of the job outfit: mannish khakis, a mannish collared shirt, and a vaguely feminine necklace) – but it shows me how worried and nervous I was about fitting in the engineering world as a young uninitiated woman. I really believed these shoes would help, so I wore them tirelessly that summer until I realized a few things:
1) THEY ARE UGLY. And my feet looked gross in them. Weirdly lopsided yet unstable, pointy in weird places (what is up with those toes?!) and looked dirty as soon as I put them on.
2) I HATED WEARING THEM. Partially due to #1, but they became a symbol of me trying to dress/be someone I wasn’t due to the belief that I needed to change myself in order to be respected in engineering, that being myself wasn’t a sufficient condition to mandate respect within the organization and company culture. THAT IS SO MESSED UP that before I had even started working there, I had already convinced myself that I needed to be someone I wasn’t in order to fit in. What made me think that? How long did it take me to change?
3) I AM NOT A MAN and do not need to dress like one. During the first two months of that first summer internship, I have these vivid memories of commuting home after work and immediately stripping off all of the boring, drab, personality-less work clothes and changing into skirts, dresses, blouses while adding on earrings, hairbands, everything. As girly as I could get in the post-work hours! Reclaiming the personality that I could not express at work due to fear and confusion about what kind of image would be appropriate and optimally supportive of my developing engineering career. My roommate at the time, a male engineer in a similar first-ever internship experience, found my behavior a little hilarious and would frequently laugh at me as I emerged from my cocoon of mannish clothes every day after work to reflect my innate feminine nature. But I wasn’t alone! My other female engineering friends did it too! I remember another male friend remarking that the difference between male and female engineers was made clear in our post-work habits: women like myself got more dressed up after work to somehow compensate for the suppression of our inner selves during the workday whereas the men untucked their shirts, took off the collars, and generally cared less about their appearance to relax after work.
I donated the orange shoes away after that summer, I didn’t really want to look at them anymore and be reminded of my stupid thinking that these shoes could somehow be a magical talisman symbolizing my membership in the engineering brotherhood. It is hard to find a balance between wearing what you want and dressing appropriately for the workplace as a young female engineer! After that summer, I managed to stop wearing shoes that were downright ugly to the engineering workplace though the challenges of finding and expressing my identity as a female engineer certainly persisted.
I had another reality check a few years later when working in a Chinese toy factory as a manufacturing liaison to an American design company. In the factory, though I theoretically had freedom to wear whatever I wanted, I was reluctant to wear anything that would draw attention to myself. I stood out enough already as the only female engineer and the only Asian-American in the building – plus the few times I wore form-fitting jeans or even a V-neck I was on the receiving end of uncomfortable stares and gross looks from some of the male truck drivers and plastic handlers at the factory. So, I wore mostly company T-shirts, jeans, and sneakers just as my male colleagues did. That was fine and dandy for a few months until a close friend asked me, jokingly, “Well Ann, you’re basically a man anyway. When’s the last time you wore a skirt?”
Whoa. It had been months… many months… since I had put on anything but jeans. Work had been all-consuming and tiring, though I hadn’t realized to what extent it was completely taking over my life. I was shocked – I still thought of myself as feminine and somewhat fashion-conscious, yet it had been months since I had dressed in a way that expressed my femininity. How could I let that happen? Was that me letting being an engineer trump being a woman? Definitely a moment of self-reckoning and realizing – I am NOT okay with that!
Anyway, the inner battle between the girly-girl and the tough engineer is ongoing and expressed in the clothes I choose to wear each day. There’s a greater balance now in finding a tough yet feminine edge, and while I’m not in love with my current “tough” machine shop shoes (see right) at least I don’t hate them, either. At least, not yet…? They are not altogether different than the orange shoes – in fact, they look remarkably similar so I guess its primarily my reaction/interpretation of them that has changed.
I’d like to say that I’ve come a long way: Now, instead of racing home after work to change into clothes that make me feel like myself instead of a formed-in-the-mold engineer, I start the day with work-appropriate pieces that are feminine. I bring shoes and shirts with me, as needed, to change on the fly if I need to do some machining or working with dirty/greasy parts. At first I was self-conscious about the Mr. Rodgers wardrobe change at work, but after realizing how much happier it made me to not have to wear ugly shoes all day, it’s worth it!
Furthermore, on days when I know I will not be doing dirty work with heavy machinery and am meeting clients or presenting my ideas instead – it is a pleasure to choose shoes and clothes that are comfortable and reflective of my identity as both a woman and an engineer, simultaneously. And yeah…that’s progress, right? :)
I realize many of my posts have been somewhat… negative lately… in analyzing, remembering, and describing the current state of women in engineering. To balance it out, I thought I’d throw in a more uplifting type anecdote. So, this is the story of how I was taught by a male supervisor to stop making a fool of myself in the machine shop – and its all about leverage!
I worked in the college machine shop during the first couple of years of my engineering education. It was fun and engineeringly-cool, though I didn’t feel completely comfortable holding my own in any around the shop banter and definitely wasn’t one of the guys. Compounded by my own self-consciousness and lack of confidence in my abilities in the shop, there were a few tasks that I specifically dreaded because I didn’t know how to do them with my body.
For instance – have you ever used a milling machine? It was one of my favorite things in the shop, super viscerally satisfying, awesomely powerful yet requiring a delicate and careful touch (like all machining, really). Yet for all that I enjoyed using the milling machine to make parts, I dreaded working on it because there was one step of the break-down process I wasn’t strong enough to do…I thought.
To remove a collet that’s installed in a decent-sized mill, you have to loosen the hex drawbar nut that is at the very tip top of the machine (~70″ from the ground or higher) while simultaneously applying a brake to the spindle at the same height so that the nut you’re trying to loosen doesn’t just spin freely with the assembly. Suffice it to say, you have to do this:
At the end of each work or class session when it was time to pack and clean up, I would literally hang from the brake lever, swatting at the wrench attached to the drawbar, praying somehow to generate enough torque to loosen the damn nut. It usually took more than a few tries, the entire time me thinking “I hope no one’s watching, I hope no one’s watching, I look so weak and buffonish….”and furtively checking after each try to play it cool and make sure no one saw me flailing away at this wrench and brake above my head.
I was too proud to ask for help – none of the guys needed help! At that point, I was trying really hard to fit in and not call any extra attention to myself, plus I had a lot of misplaced pride and thought that doing stuff alone without help would make me me tougher and more “respectable”. I had seen my fellow student workers them do it and knew they could without any problems, so I assumed that I should be able to as well despite being a foot shorter and at least 50 pounds lighter then them.
Eventually, thankfully, my shop supervisor noticed my tarzan moves and taught me an amazing lesson in leverage. He brought over a stepstool, told me to stand on it and give that nut one more try now that my arms were in line with the center of my body instead of fully extended over my head. Simple, right? But SO effective. By pulling my arms into the same plane as my torso, I was able to use the strength of my entire chest, core, shoulders and arms (as opposed to just my arms) to hold the brake and loosen the nut. And it didn’t require him doing it for me – just handing me a tool to even out the mechanical advantage. He knew I was physically strong enough to do it, but just didn’t understand how to position myself in the situation.
I had never previously noticed that there were stepstools in the shop since I hadn’t ever seen anyone use them before. (And I was ashamed/scared/too stupid to look for one or think about using one?) But, come to think of it, they had mentioned something in the machining textbook about positioning yourself in the same plane with respect to the object of your work.
~~~ a brief side note and at home demo ~~~
In addition to being a female engineer, I am also a yoga instructor. As so much of yoga speaks to me biomechanically as proofs of leverage and force balances, this whole problem with the mill strikes me as also telling of how unconnected and ignorant of my own body I was back then.
One of the fundamental principles of yoga (and physics, statics, and dynamics as it turns out) is that hugging to the midline or bringing items in from the periphery makes you more stable and gives you more power. You can easily do a little experiment to verify this:
And its also an excellent illustration of forces, moment arms and torque! Remember that torque (τ) is the (cross) product of a force (F) and its moment arm (r). Let’s draw some free body diagrams to analyze further….
So – to recap – my reasons for not knowing how to loosen the nut from the spindle were:
1) I was too lame to ask for help. 2) I didn’t know how to use my body to maximize my leverage and strength 3) I didn’t know how to apply the physics and math principles in my own body.
And, thankfully, the shop guy handed me a stepstool and told me to get on it. An elegant solution, to be sure, that taught me much more than just how to remove a collet from a mill. =)
Yesterday I showed up for an engineering meeting to find that it had been canceled some 2 hours prior. The organizer apologized and re-got my number so that it won’t happen again. But I have to wonder… will it?
That feeling of showing up and realizing I wasn’t in the know brought back some related unpleasant memories from my last engineering company. Reliving them now still makes me ANGRY… incredulous… stupefied… disappointed. I was left out of critical meetings, left off of critical emails, unintentionally excluded from so many things, so many times that it stopped being forgivable.
Each time I pointed it out there was always surprise from supervisors and colleagues: “You weren’t invited to this meeting I’m headed to? We need you there, come with me now!” or “You didn’t hear about the huge problem in China everyone else was freaking out about last night? I can’t believe you were left off of this huge email chain about it, because its your responsibility to fix it.” or “Haven’t you seen the new design for this critical mechanism? Everyone’s talking about it.” It was so often no, no, no, no, I didn’t hear about it, no one told me, I wasn’t included, I wasn’t invited, but now I need you tell me about it quickly so I can get caught up and on the level with what actually is going on in this madhouse so I can now deal with it and do my effing job.
Most of the time I attributed the oversight to ignorance instead of malice – I am young, okay, and was in an nontraditional role (systems engineer) which many of the traditional mechanical-electrical-software folks were not used to dealing with. But after a couple years with the same folks, I mean SERIOUSLY? I was the ONLY systems engineer… I worked on a core team with only 5 other folks…I was very active and did a LOT of shit for the team and the company… yet only about 2 out of 5 gradually learned to remember me while the others consistently, repeatedly, (pointedly?) forgot.
I hadn’t realized how much it was driving me crazy until one day – I will not soon forget – it was an 8:30am meeting to triage a huge in-production design problem. We were reviewing a new design solution when everyone in the room began referencing something I had not seen nor heard of. Even the INTERNS in the room were in the know and participating in the discussion while I pondered, stupidly, if I had misunderstood the few drawings I had seen or if, once again, I had been left out of the preparation and content of the meeting entirely. A friend noticed my confusion, pulled up his email and showed me what he had received the day before – details, drawings, calculations, explanation, test results of the new design–!!! ARGH!!! yeah, no shit that would be super helpful to actually participate and do my friggin job!
I totally cracked… why were the interns included when I wasn’t? Looking back, I can almost justify it thinking that the interns had performed some of the tests and were directly involved, okay, but still — WHY couldn’t they have included me too? WHY was it so hard for them to remember that I was there? I SAT NEXT TO THEM! Was I truly invisible? Why did the managers leave me out and refuse to use mailing lists so everyone would be included? Was it because I didn’t do a good job? Did they respect the opinion and input of the interns more than me despite 3 years of living/breathing/smoking the product in all stages? Why did this happen all the time? If they knew enough to invite me to the meeting, why didn’t they include me on the necessary info?
I snapped… I picked up a plastic part of the product and threw it, hard, on the table in front of the mechanical engineering manager who I clashed horns with most frequently. It was HIS interns who were in the know. As I hurled it in front of him, I started vehemently crying and screamed, “I’M ON YOUR TEAM! I’M ON YOUR FUCKING TEAM!! WHY DON’T YOU INCLUDE ME!!!” This was at approximately 8:47 am on a Thursday morning. I had been at work for less than an hour. In that time, I had reached a total public meltdown and reacted violently. But I’m not a psychopath, I swear! Or at least I wasn’t until I started working in engineering……
It became a sort of a joke afterwards. I remember telling close coworkers later that afternoon about what had happened in my morning breakdown. In some ways I felt triumphant because I finally got the question out in a way that could not be ignored. None of my friends were much surprised that I had reacted as I did though – they knew my frustrations and lived them too. Meanwhile, the professional relationship with the mechanical engineering manager had already been pretty terse but now sank to unprecedented levels of fake-niceness and general assholery. He still left me off of emails and meeting invites, but made a really big deal out of the the ones he included me on. Yeah… thanks for that, jackass. The rest of the core team and my manager thought it was mostly funny, and indicative of the overall “stress level” the team was under.
WHEW… so what does this mean now? It reminds me of a study referenced by Virginia Valian in her book Why So Slow: the Advancement of Women. [See also the "The Advancement of Women in Science and Engineering" Report to the Chemical Scientists Roundtable available online and crudely excerpted here]:
As a result of gender schemas that portray women as less professionally competent and ambitious than men, women end up with less information and less public notice than do men. Compared to men, women have less access to informal routes of information and are less likely to be given opportunities by their superiors to receive public notice. For example, a [1996] study of the Johns Hopkins University Department of Medicine within the School of Medicine demonstrated that senior faculty were six times as likely to suggest names of junior male faculty rather than female faculty to chair conference sessions. Qualified junior women were also less likely to be identified as candidates for promotion compared with qualified junior men (1). Thus, women are not as likely to be identified as star material, and as their careers continue they become less and less likely to be perceived as important scientific contributors to their field. It should be emphasized that the claim here is about tendencies. Not every woman will experience problems. Even women who do experience problems will not experience them at every point in their career. Rather, on average, women will have more difficulty than men do. (1) Fried, L.P., et al. (1996). Career development for women in academic medicine: Multiple interventions in a department of medicine. Journal of the American Medical Association, 276, 898-905.
As a result of gender schemas that portray women as less professionally competent and ambitious than men, women end up with less information and less public notice than do men. Compared to men, women have less access to informal routes of information and are less likely to be given opportunities by their superiors to receive public notice. For example, a [1996] study of the Johns Hopkins University Department of Medicine within the School of Medicine demonstrated that senior faculty were six times as likely to suggest names of junior male faculty rather than female faculty to chair conference sessions. Qualified junior women were also less likely to be identified as candidates for promotion compared with qualified junior men (1). Thus, women are not as likely to be identified as star material, and as their careers continue they become less and less likely to be perceived as important scientific contributors to their field.
It should be emphasized that the claim here is about tendencies. Not every woman will experience problems. Even women who do experience problems will not experience them at every point in their career. Rather, on average, women will have more difficulty than men do.
(1) Fried, L.P., et al. (1996). Career development for women in academic medicine: Multiple interventions in a department of medicine. Journal of the American Medical Association, 276, 898-905.
It helps a little bit to see my past experiences through the lens of gender schemas and probabilistic tendencies, but it’s still disappointing. How do we make a change? What can I do to make sure I am not forgotten again? How to I ensure that it is my name that comes to mind when colleagues and supervisors are creating distribution lists or recommending for promotions?
In the short term, I’ll doublecheck with a friend to make sure that someone has my back in keeping me in the loop on meeting cancellations and the like. In the long term, I am still experimenting and dreaming of solutions. It has been almost one full year since my product-throwing escapade, and I am happy to report that I have not hucked any innocent robotic products towards any humans since.
[Virginia Valian, Ph.D. Distinguished Professor, Department of Psychology--Hunter College] [Amazon.com - Why So Slow: The Advancement of Women by Virginia Valian] [The Advancement of Women in Science and Engineering - A Workshop Report to the Chemical Sciences Roundtable (2000) by Virginia Valian]
Yeah, its true – did you know? Feb 18, 2010 is Introduce a Girl to Engineering Day. (And this whole week, Feb 14-20 is National Engineers Week – so celebrate accordingly!)
The National Engineers Week Foundation Website has tons of interesting resources and talking points regarding women and getting young women into engineering, including tips for engineers giving presentations at schools as well as helpful advice for parents curious about encouraging their children’s interest in math, science, and engineering.
It’s a pleasure to read well-articulated and coherently conceived thoughts on encouraging young women in engineering! Check out the whole section on Girls, Women, and the Engineering Profession if you have the time, or just read this:
Remember
Three bullet points. Simple, right? Yet undeniably powerful. If we could truly convince the world of these three items, that would be PROGRESS! In the meantime, I’ll work on embodying them fully myself and convincing my colleagues (who frequently voice disagreement on the 1st point) of their truth.
May many young women be exposed to the not-so-radical notion that they can become happy engineers, scientists, and technologists today! :)
PS – with all of the corporate tie-ins on the National Engineers Week Foundation website, I almost wish they had forged a partnership with Mattel to announce the introduction of Computer Engineer Barbie on this day. Or do I? Looks like Barbie, in the meantime, has partnered with the US Government to “ignite a national movement to inspire girls” on April 22nd for Take Your Sons & Daughters to Work Day. Hmmm….
[National Engineers Week Foundation - Introduce a Girl to Engineering Day] [National Engineers Week Foundation Website] [Girls, Women, and the Engineering Profession] [Barbie.com - Computer Engineer Barbie]
With all the controversy surrounding the March 2010 cover of Vanity Fair, this article by Patricia Zohn on the female Walt Disney Inkers, Painters, and Animators of the 1930′s and 40′s has been overlooked. It’s a fascinating read in its own right, describing how women were the backbone of the studio, working 85 hour weeks to release Snow White (the first animated feature longer than an hour!) and other pioneering cartoons. She writes:
Much has been written about the prodigiously talented men who brought Snow White, Pinocchio, Fantasia, Bambi, and Dumbo to the screen. But if behind every good man stands a good woman, behind Walt Disney and his “boys”—the all-male assembly line—once stood 100…. ever nimble but never showy, their job was to make what the men did look good.
In many ways, it was a magical kingdom where they might be summoned to help lay down sound effects for a dancing elephant or a witch’s cackle, or fling their hands in the air with a pair of castanets to show how the female figure moved. All the while, they were inking and painting minor miracles that would become part of our collective visual consciousness: the curve of Mickey’s ears, the sympathetic lines of Goofy’s face, the flap of Dumbo’s trunk, the downy spots on Bambi’s back, or perhaps the most storied, the fairy dust that has endured as a symbol of enchantment, if only we wish hard enough.
The anecdotes and stories from these early women animators are strikingly similar to the stories of the early ENIAC programmers and the early female “computers” that made headlines when first revealed in 1997:
The ENIAC, the world’s first computer, was invented to calculate ballistics trajectories during World War II – a task that until then had been done by hand by a group of 80 female mathematicians. The six women who were chosen to make the ENIAC work toiled six-day weeks during the war, inventing the field of programming as they worked. But although they were skilled mathematicians and logicians, the women were classified as “sub-professionals” presumably due to their gender and as a cost-saving device, and never got the credit due to them for their groundbreaking work.
These two groups of influential and pioneering women were contemporaries in the 1940’s: a hundred female calculators on the East Coast, sequestered together crunching numbers on missile ballistics and trajectory while in Hollywood, hundreds of female inkers and painters lived a similarly invisible but impacting existence drawing the outlines and painting the foundation of our much-loved characters.
Both sets of stories are further linked by the lack of recognition these women received for their critical enabling work. At Disney, “though they had been the backbone of the film, hardly any of the junior staff were invited to Snow White’s star-studded premiere, at the Carthay Circle Theatre on December 21, 1937—and they hadn’t been able to afford the preview prices ($5.50 a ticket), either.” A 1938 rejection letter from Walt Disney Productions to a young female applying to the studio makes it clear that in that time, the women inkers and painters were not seen as creative artists. Instead, their work was described by management as simply tracing and filling in with paint according to directions. Furthermore, women were not allowed to proceed up the ranks to become animators since “preparing cartoons for the screen…that work is performed entirely by young men.” Somehow the management did not recognize inking and painting as necessary preparations to get the cartoons on the screen? Imagine if the efforts of these awesome women had been valued and their skills recognized – if, instead of crediting Walt Disney and his army of male animators, some of the talented female inkers and painters like Reidun “Rae” Medby or June Walker Patterson were given their due and equal billing for their supporting work.
Meanwhile on the East Coast, the female programmers were completely excluded from the official military record of the ENIAC story. Never introduced, acknowledged, or mentioned in any history, they were forgotten until the mid 1980′s when a curious female computer scientist named Kathy Kleiman began asking who the women in the photographs with the ENIAC were. As the story goes, everyone just assumed that the women were just models posed in front of the machine to make it look good – they were “refrigerator ladies.” Its amazing that in forty years, programming went from a lowly position performed exclusively by sub-professional female clerks to a discipline in which female participation was assumed to be only as decoration and adornment to the machines themselves.
The ENIAC women were inducted into the Women in Technology International (WITI) Hall of Fame in 1997 as a late but formal recognition of their work. As Anna van Raaphorst-Johnson, a director of WITI, then explained to Wired Magazine, “Somebody else stood up and took credit at the time, and no one looked back. It’s a typical problem in a male-dominated industry. And there’s still a lot of frustration with men taking credit for women’s ideas – it doesn’t seem to have changed much over the last 50 years.”
With the story of the female inkers and painters behind Walt Disney’s magic just now coming to light, I wonder how many other stories like this exist in our collective history. Certainly Mickey, Minnie, and Donald are among the most ubiquitous cultural icons in Western society – it’s astounding that the women who outlined and defined these characters were not given full credit until now. I know that computer science has a sizable history of women achievements and innovations being ignored, now I’m adding Disney animation to that list – but what else? In the last 50, 60 years, how many stories of women’s work have gone untold or claimed by someone else?
And now – how is this still happening? From my personal experience working and living in a Chinese factory, I know that all of the products we use, the clothes we wear, the reality we experience – is all created by the literal handiwork of countless women workers. From the labor of their fingertips, their backs, their steady hands and unwavering eyes come all of our daily essentials. Within engineering, manufacturing is never presented as a gendered issue – but sociologists, anthropologists, and journalists often write books on the impact and significance of women as the primary wage-earners in factories. Through their work, these women in manufacturing are shaping the world, yet the focus and recognition is always on the predominately male designers and engineers. Will this change in the next sixty years? Next time you go shopping and pick up a sweater or a gadget, will you think a woman made this or a man designed this?
But perhaps a better parallel from women’s work of days past to present can be found in the fields of biological physics, biomechanics, and bioengineering. These areas tend to be considered low science by those in the mainstream “pure” fields of physics and engineering, and as a result, discoveries in these “softer” fields are not as respected or lauded as findings in theoretical physics or classical mechanics. Is it a coincidence or a cause that higher percentages of women can be found in these fields? Is this how the past tendency to ignore the valuable work conducted by women is manifesting itself in our present day? In sixty years, if the discoveries in biological physics have led to fundamental innovations that change the way people live their lives – who will take the credit? Will history recognize the talented and brilliant women who thrive in the field, or will history continue the pattern of overlooking them in favor of the men traditionally considered to be leaders?
The only way to be sure is to start recognizing and publicizing the work of women in math, science, and engineering. Tell your stories NOW or who knows, you may need to wait some sixty years like the ENIAC programmers and Disney inkers and painters to finally be recognized for your contributions.
[Vanity Fair: Patricia Zohn's Coloring the Kingdom] [Flickr: Disney Rejection Letter, 1938] via [Sociological Images: Disney Rejection Letter, 1938] [WIRED: Women Proto-Programmers Get their Just Reward] [The Journal of the American Ordnance Association, 1961: The ENIAC Story] [WITI Hall of Fame: The ENIAC Programmers] [Journal of Technology and Culture: When Computers Were Women] [Sociological Images: Burtynsky - Factory Work In China] [Amazon: Assembling Women - The Feminization of Global Manufacturing by Teri L. Caraway] [Amazon: Juki Girls, Good Girls - Gender and Cultural Politics in Sri Lanka's Global Garment Industry by Caitrin Lynch] [Amazon: Factory Girls - From Village to City in a Changing China by Leslie T. Chang]
A few weeks ago I posted about the FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) Robotics Competition and if it was actually making progress in its goal of increasing the participation of women and minorities in engineering, science, and technology fields.
Now, the local team I am mentoring has been working semi-diligently for about 4 weeks and has only 2 weeks left before the robots must be crated up and shipped to competition! In the midst of the frenzy of designing, building, prototyping, arguing, and discussing, a fundraising opportunity came up last week – $2,000 from a local business in exchange for writing a nice letter and promising to put the logo and advertising materials on the robot, T-shirts, etc. This sort of sponsorship is common for FIRST teams to enable them to purchase machining time, raw materials, the aforementioned T-shirts, the things a robotics team needs to thrive at competition.
So, the coach of the team, a teacher at the sponsoring school, notified the team members of the need to write a nice letter to receive $2k in return. The students unanimously responded “Not it.” Most team members are busy with activities they perceive as worthwhile – cutting metal, riveting a frame, debugging the program – and are reluctant to slow their progress on those activities to write a letter. However, there are countless team members who, show up and sit around, observing instead of doing. Maybe they’re scared, reluctant, don’t know how to get started, intimidated – who knows their reasons for inaction, but sure there are plenty. So you’d think that offering the chance to be involved by writing a fundraising letter, an easily approachable task with no requirement of prior knowledge or engineering prowess, would be appealing to most students. But no, totally the opposite.
The not-its went around and around the circle of students until finally the only female present at robotics practice that day said, with frustration, “Fine, I”ll do it, you lazy jerks!” And sure enough, she sat down, crafted a letter in under an hour, and it was mostly done. BUT – I keep thinking about this – why her? Keep in mind this is the same woman who previously accused me of being “too girly” and refuses to acknowledge femininity in engineering. Yet, she was the one who felt compelled to yield to the team needs by submitting her time to fundraising instead of building.
Immediately memories of the exact same situation happening to me, on my robotics team some 10 years ago, came flooding back. I always had to write the fundraising letters when no one else wanted to! Argh! They always had excuses, like “I have to leave in 10 minutes” or “I am bad at writing” or “You can do it better than me.” But none of them ever tried, took it upon themselves to learn! I am guessing this experience is shared beyond my recent and past experience – when this season started, one of the other female team members expressly mentioned that she actually wanted to build the robot this year instead of only documenting and writing letters as she got stuck with last year. It really seems to be a trend…
In any good team situation, there are compromises made among team members – yet why is it always the females who end up compromising? The men get to puddy along, doing the work they have deemed as uber-important and untouchable, whereas the women have no such delusions of grandeur about their work and are more willing, eventually, to do what is needed for the health of the team. Its particularly stunning when you consider that the fundraising efforts are what actually make the building possible, as the dollars are the true enabler of all aspects of the competition. Note that entering the competition starts at $5k for veteran teams, $6.5k for rookies doing the competition for the first time. Extra materials or special mechanisms often required advanced machining, which requires $$$.
So… what can we learn from this situation? It’s hard not to make the sweeping generalization that women are more likely to compromise for the greater good of their teams, while men are more likely to keep their own interests sacred. I wish it was only in high schools, but I’ve seen so many examples of this as well in industry that it just hurts my head. Maybe what this speaks to is the need for a team education that emphasizes compromise and prioritizing team needs above the individual – but how do you do that? How do you teach people that compromising is worthwhile, needed, valuable, and rewarding? A ropes course? A team-building scavenger hunt? A crappy pop-psychology management book? In my experience, everyone rolls their eyes at these corporate-style efforts at team building, and few lessons are actually taken away. Maybe if we made everyone write fundraising letters to enable their high school robotics teams to participate, they would start to learn. It’s certainly worth a try, at least.
[FIRST Robotics Registration and Payment Terms] [Adventure Associates Team Building Activities - Ropes Course] [Scavenger Hunt Anywhere: Team Building Scavenger Hunts] [The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: a Leadership Fable by Patrick Lencioni]
I was recently accused of being “too girly” – not by an older man in the workplace, but by a young woman on a high school For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology (FIRST) Robotics team. While serving as an industry mentor for this team, I had taken the young woman and a male team member to the local hardware store to look around for mechanical inspiration. While both students loved the pipe fittings, kinetic sculptures, and multi-jointed lamps, they were both shocked when I suggested we head to the floral department next. “Flowers?” Exclaimed the young woman, “Why would you ever want to go look at flowers?” I set off by myself to admire the hanging planters and cool fountain designs, taking note of the non-trivial engineering design and development involved in bringing those floral products to market. Upon rejoining the students, the young woman again remarked, “Ann, that’s so weird. Looking at flowers? You are too girly!”
It is striking to me that this young woman had such overwhelmingly negative sentiment towards the femininity, the “girly-ness” represented by flowers. Her statements indicate her belief that flowers do not belong in engineering and her conviction that being girly is a negative attribute unbecoming of a robotics team mentor/engineer.
While not surprising, this firmly rooted belief that “engineering is not girly” is still disheartening. I had hoped that in the last ten years, since I initially joined a high school robotics team and fell in love with the engineering design process, that some of the efforts of industry and government to encourage young women and minorities in engineering would have had a more perceptible impact. One of FIRST’s organizational goals is to increase the participation of women and minorities in engineering. While they have initiated several programs to start teams in low income neighborhoods, it would appear that the image of engineers as middle class white men is not changing any time soon.
FIRST has limited data on the demographics of the students, coaches, mentors, and volunteers participating in their programs each year. While they excitedly publish the total number of people involved (38,000 high school students in 2008) and show steady growth over the last 17 years of competition, it is unknown whether they have truly increased the numbers of women and underrepresented minorities participating.
Several studies commissioned by FIRST and carried out by the Center for Youth Development at Brandeis University have painted an overall positive picture of FIRST’s impact in low-income communities and undeniable effect in getting students, both male and female, interested in engineering careers. However, these studies do not claim any improvement, year over year, in female participation in FIRST. An independent study conducted by Georgia Tech collected demographic information to examine student participation in FIRST Lego League, a competition for 9-14 year olds, for two years (2006-2007). Their findings were that while the overall number of students participating increased between subsequent years, the overall percentage of female and minority participation was consistent between 25-27% and 14-18%, respectively. The Georgia Tech research went on to study the gender and minority balance on each individual team, finding that “very few boys (~3%) are in the minority on their team, whereas between 30% and 40% of girls are in the minority.”
Anecdotally, it seems that the gender and minority balance for the older high-school age FIRST Robotics Competition may be even worse. By necessity – FIRST reflects the long time legacy of predominately white-male engineering culture in its coaches, mentors, and volunteers, as the available pool of experienced engineers willing to donate their time for free is mostly male and Caucasian. While FIRST has trademarked the ideas of “gracious professionalism” and “coopertition,” they have no name or training to reinforce the novel idea that women can be engineers as well, that you can in fact be girly and an engineer at the same time.
FIRST’s vision statement is “To transform our culture by creating a world where science and technology are celebrated and where young people dream of becoming science and technology heroes.” Unfortunately, I think what may be more pertinent is to transform the culture of science, technology and engineering to welcome young people of all gender, race, and upbringing. There are some signs that FIRST is headed in the right direction – just last month, a new partnership between FIRST and the Society of Women Engineers (SWE) was announced with emphasis on increasing the number of female competitors. Though there are no specific details on initiatives or immediate changes, at least the organizations are officially joined on a formal level. Also, new for the 2010 FIRST Robotics Competition is a self-registration system that will hopefully allow the real numbers and individual demographics of each FIRST participant to be known and tracked for years to come.
[FIRST 2008 Annual Report] [Brandeis FIRST study #1] [Brandeis FIRST study #2] [Georgia Tech study] [FIRST Trademarks Gracious Professionalism and Coopertition] [Urban Dictionary: Gracious Professionalism] [Urban Dictionary: Coopertition] [FIRST, SWE Form Alliance]
Check out this advertisement for a new Product Design group at a State University:
This poster is a great illustration of why I am increasingly turned-off by the culture of engineering. I don’t care about mountain biking. Call it my female “nurturing” instinct, my “softness” in preferring yoga to mountain biking for adrenaline rushes, or even my “altruistic preferences” in wanting to spend my time on something that would help everyone’s lives, not just recreational mountain bikers – but I’m just not interested. Instead, I want to design things that average people actually use every day: toothbrushes, computers, desks and chairs, a birth control dispenser that doesn’t suck, etc. Engineers design all of these as well; yet the designers of the poster chose this unimaginative example.
I don’t attribute it to malice – just ignorance. The guys who made this poster likely searched their brains for a few microseconds before choosing to go with the mountain bike image because they thought it was cool. It is in exactly these kind of recruitment scenarios, however, that those in power need to consciously think about the images they are choosing to represent their field if they care about attracting more diversity in engineering.
Out of curiosity, I pulled up the stats on your average mountain biker:
Let’s compare those to the stats on your average engineer:
Wow, these two populations have similar demographics. And I know a lot of engineers who mountain bike. Doesn’t this make advertising engineering with mountain biking kind of like waving a big sign that says “hey (white) upper-middle class men with disposable income who mountain bike! Want to hang out with other dudes like you and learn how to make stuff that we like! Become a product designer!” Ugh, what a turn-off.
And its really a shame – we need more diverse product designers to create more diverse products! Just consider – all of the things in your house, all of the things sitting on store shelves, were designed by teams of engineers that are 88% male and 90% caucasian or asian. If I am a hispanic female, the probability that during the course of the day I get to use a product that was designed by someone like me is almost 0%. If I am a white or asian male, the situation is completely reversed – everything I touch was made by someone like me.
More women and minority product designers will only improve product quality and better address a broader spectrum of consumer needs. Increasingly the market is recognizing women for their influential purchasing power – some say 97% of buying decisions are now influenced by women. So why don’t we actually try to get more women into engineering and product design with recruitment campaigns that are actually relevant to their lives? Why don’t we use examples that people can relate to, regardless of socio-economic class? Why don’t we do better?
I propose a few alternatives for the poster creators:
1) Grocery Cart
If you live in a city you’ve probably seen lots of new-style grocery carts that change your shopping experience. Everyone eats and buys food, isn’t the possibility of affecting grocery shopper’s lives through good design equally interesting to designing a cool mountain bike?
2) Bike Helmet
How do you make a bike helmet cool yet still functional in protecting the head? This is a challenging design problem that is broader-reaching than the fancy mountain bike and may appeal to both mountain bike enthusiasts and those more “nurturing” types who are more interested in protecting human life. Plus, companies like Bern and Yakkay are creating cool new helmets that make traditional designs look outdated.
3) Remote Controls
TV is pervasive, as are DVD players, cable boxes, etc. and we’ve all suffered from a badly-designed remote control where you can’t find the buttons or the functions are unclear. Do you want to re-design this?
Anyway – the point is that there are SO MANY things around us, all the time, that have been “designed” by engineers and could serve as great examples of “design projects” for aspiring design engineers. By thinking of some of these wider-reaching examples, maybe a wider demographic of people could start to become interested in engineering.
[http://www.trekbikes.com/us/en/bikes/mountain_hardtail/9_series/elite98/]
[http://www.imba.com/resources/science/travel_patterns.html]
[http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/wmpd/employ.cfm]
