We all know about the right-hand rule. Typically introduced in the first physics course you’ll ever take, it is a simplifying assumption that arises as a consequence of an arbitrarily-assigned 3-D coordinate system. We need to choose one direction as positive and one as negative, and using your right hand is a good way as any to enable universal consistency. (note: the right-hand rule is also important in electrical engineering to determine the direction of current flow and magnetic fields)

Here’s a couple images that typically are used to illustrate the right-hand rule:

<–From wikipedia

From ExploreLearning–>

What gender do these cartoony-hands look like they belong to?

At left – this hand looks relatively unisex, but decidedly unfeminine. The image on the right is definitely the hand of a cartoon man. Wearing a boring sweater that’s slightly poofy, to boot.

Now contrast this with this image, from interactive mathematics:

Does this look different?

Note the red nail polish that ostensibly says “woman” – does that affect your conscious thought process? What about the subconscious?

I have undertaken surveys of several common engineering textbooks to get a feeling for the images that are typically used within. Engineering texts like to show men doing things – rarely do they use women, even cartoon women, to illustrate a word problem or concept. A scan of a common Statics book (Bedford & Fowler, 3rd ed., 2002) reveals that over 600 pages of text, only 6 women are definitively pictured and the ratio of men to women displayed is over 10:1.

Clearly there is a discrepancy between the diversity of the images shown and the desired diversity in engineering. The demographics represented within engineering examples do matter – they affect how we internalize knowledge and create foundations for our understanding.

The right-hand rule is just one example of how male models are typical in engineering and science concept introductions. Another simplifying assumption, this time on the part of textbook authors and illustrators, to choose a thick wrist and stout nails as the default instead of anything distinctly feminine. I wonder sometimes – what if it was different? What if every time we were introduced to a new idea it was through a female body or feminine image? How different would it feel to learn from an example that looks like me?

Just as the assignment of positive/negative is fundamentally arbitrary, so is the use of male images as the standard models for engineering knowledge and information. While once this was a simplifying assumption as most engineering students were male, this is no longer the desired situation. It’s time to stop being lazy and going with the images that engineers have always used, the assumptions of normality that have always existed within the field. It’s time to make a change, to start now, to encourage new viewpoints and possibilities in engineering, math, and science!

In 2012, please consider the images and examples that represent engineering knowledge in your life. Are they affected by assumptions of males as the norm? Are you ready to challenge the assumptions that have been foundational in the engineering field? As the saying goes, “when you ASSUME, you make an ASS out of U and ME” – let’s stop being asses, and instead be trailblazers in encouraging women into science, math, engineering, and technology. It’s about effing time!! =)

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.

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 ;)

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. =)

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]