It’s the end of summer, which means back to school! If you’re a senior in high school, senior in college, switching grad schools, or thinking about going back to school, it’s time to apply to colleges and grad programs. As mentioned in a previous post, the gender balance of a program is an important factor on the overall experience for both men and women, and should be considered when picking programs.

Engineering programs face a particular challenge in this area, but some programs are definitely more balanced than others. The representation of women in engineering programs has been slowly increasing over the years. No, seriously, REALLY slowly. Check out the NSF Women participation in CS and Engineering data from the last 20 years:

In 2008, the national average for women’s enrollment in engineering programs was 18.5% for undergraduate and 21.6% Masters/23% PhD for graduate students. I’m guessing it has not change significantly over the last 3 years. With these numbers in mind, let’s see how the top engineering universities and smaller undergrad-focused schools measure up. The percentages listed below are the most up-to-date numbers that I could fine online. Note that colleges vary in exactly what major they include within Engineering, so check out the sources if you want more info on a particular school.

Percentage Women in the Engineering College of Universities

MIT: 40.6% undergrad/16.8% grad (source)

Caltech: 37% undergrad/23% grad (source)

Cornell: 30.2% undergrad, 25.4% grad (source)

Stanford: 29.9% undergrad/23.2% grad (source)

UC Berkeley: 23% (source)

Georgia Tech: 23% (source)

University of Michigan: 22% undergrad/20.5% grad (source)

Purdue: 19.8% undergrad, 20% grad (source)

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign: 17-20% (source)

Percentage Women in Small Undergraduate-focused Colleges

Olin College of Engineering: 44% (source)

Harvey Mudd: 35% (source)

Cooper Union: 35% (source)

Rose-Hulman: 20% (source)

All Women’s Colleges with Specialized Engineering Programs

Smith College: 100% women! (link)

I also wanted to include Smith College, which as far as I know is the only all-women, 4-year US institution with a specialized engineering program (specific engineering majors, not just a single general engineering degree). So, if you’re looking at colleges for undergraduate or graduate engineering programs, at least check out the gender ratio in the programs you are considering. Faculty gender ratio is another important number to look at. A clear presence of women makes a world of difference in the academic and social environment of the college. It can also say a lot about the administration’s attitude towards the value of more women in the field. It’s the next 4 years of your life (or more for grad school), so choose wisely.

I came across an article in IEEE Spectrum about how Germany Faces a Shortage of Engineers. In the article they clearly state the societal need for more engineers:

a steadily rising demand for developing sustainable mobility and energy solutions are also contributing to [the shortage of engineers].

The article later states that they are failing to get more women to be engineers, which would help solve the problem:

“Many girls are more interested in helping people and society and don’t see this possibility in engineering,” Schanz says. “It will remain very hard to attract women to engineering—much harder than reducing the dropout rate.”

There is a clear need to solve the world’s energy problems through engineering–exactly the motivation a lot of women look for when choosing a career. Yet the perspective is that it will still be hard to attract women to engineering?  When I read this article, it was glaringly obvious that we should be using the global energy needs to entice more women to become engineers!

Why is there such a disconnect between engineering and helping society? In my mind, engineering is directly related to improving society and helping people, and it can affect society on a greater level than other professions that help one person at a time. Maybe it’s because engineering is so often thought of and advertised as building “cool” things, like bikes and cars. The “cool” factor is not enough to motivate people interested in “helping the world.”

There are numerous studies that show a key factor for women in choosing their career path, even from a young age, is the ability to help people and society through their work. In my personal experience and in working with math-and-sciencey girls, understanding that engineering is intricately linked to helping society is crucial in deciding to become an engineer. I distinctly remember, in my second year of college when we were declaring majors, reasoning with myself how electrical engineering would help me “make a difference.” Even then, I didn’t have a full picture of what I could achieve through engineering, but I convinced myself enough to stick with it, and I’m glad I did.

To really start to attracting women to engineering, the image needs to change from “building cool stuff” to “solving the world’s problems.” Because if we’re actually going to solve the world’s problems, we definitely need more engineers…

In graduate school at my large research-oriented institution, I’ve noticed that a lot of people I have met (both men and women) do not acknowledge that women (or minorities and international students) have a different experience in engineering education or industry than the dominant demographic, usually white males. I would like to believe that there are no differences based on gender, but it is difficult when I am constantly reminded that I am an oddity in engineering. When I meet people and the first thing they say when they learn I am an electrical engineer is “Why did *you* decide to do engineering?” or “Do you *like* electrical engineering?” Because, clearly, this women in engineering anomaly must be explained! But I digress…

What I really want to do is show and explain the kind of different experiences that many women have in engineering in a positive and informative way rather than in a way that might make people feel attacked. So, I thought, what about web comics?

PhD Comics by Jorge Cham are great and I love his strong woman engineering grad student character, Cecilia.

You are the one of the only (or few) women in the class and if you do poorly or say something wrong it will be more than just you being judged; it will be all of WOMAN KIND! No pressure.

It’s a minor thing, but anything having to do with clothing sizing (t-shirts, lab coats, etc) always defaults to larger men’s sizes, so petite women just look ridiculous. Don’t forget, engineers come is small sizes too!

I recently discovered Wasted Talent by Angela Melick, who drew comics about her engineering undergrad experience. One thing I like about her comics is that they are a lot of the stereotypical engineering scenarios but with a nerdy, anime-loving, game-playing, imaginative female spin on it.

You’re the only woman in a study session or group project, and inevitably the penis joke or innuendo happens. Do I laugh, smile, chime in, look unhappy, or have no reaction? It’s already awkward regardless of how you react.

Support networks of other women in engineering are essential for knowing that you’re not going it alone as the only woman in a mostly-male discipline. And, they help you realize that it’s ok to be feminine and girly; you’re still a fierce engineer!

These are just a few comics that caught my eye, but I’m sure there are tons, so feel free to add others in the comments!

A former co-worker recently sent me this photo from 2007 of our team enjoying a Chinese dinner during a big trip to the factory to get everything rolling on the production line. Looking at this picture is confusing and fascinating – I see so much in it:

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.

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]

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]