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A Different Point of View

by alisson clark

Behind great engineering innovations, there are amazing women. But the struggle to get there has been real and unrelenting.

On the first day of classes at Texas A&M University in 1983, Angela Lindner settled into her desk to begin her master’s program in chemical engineering. When her professor entered the room, however, he demanded to know what she was doing there.

“He said, ‘I don’t understand why you want to put yourself through this. You could just marry an engineer and not have to work a day in your life,’” she recalled.

That was just the beginning: When Lindner, now the College of Engineering’s associate dean for student affairs, compared her tests with those of male students, she saw that she had received lower marks for the same answers. But she didn’t give up, and just before graduation the professor called her into his office.

“I’ve learned something from you,” he told her. “You’ve proved that women do have the right to get engineering degrees. And I’ve realized that’s a good thing, in case you wind up getting a divorce and you have to support yourself.”

“Little steps,” Lindner sighed. “Little steps.” Women in engineering today don’t face such blatant discrimination, but the numbers show they haven’t made the same inroads into the field as in medicine or law. (Would you expect to see a story on female doctors in the College of Medicine’s magazine?) The National Academy of Engineering estimates just 9 percent of working engineers are women, and female students make up about 17 percent of engineering college students. (UF follows suit, with 1,507 female students representing 21 percent of the College.)

Women’s salaries lag behind, as well. The National Science Foundation placed the median annual salaries of female scientists and engineers at about 22 percent less than males.

Theories abound on why the gap persists, from women’s family and career goals to their learning styles, inclinations and innate aptitudes (re: Harvard president Larry Summers’ resignation after he spoke on the topic at an engineering diversity conference in 2005).

Whatever the contributing factors, it’s clear the industry needs women: not just to foster diversity, but to also fill jobs, says Cammy Abernathy, the College’s associate dean for academic affairs.

“For the past few decades, we’ve been supplying our engineering work force by importing talent from overseas, and that’s not going to be that easy anymore — there’s more competition for those engineers,” Abernathy said. “Our largest untapped pools to fill those jobs are women and minorities.”

Another reason to recruit female engineers lies in the synergy diversity creates, says former NASA engineer Donna Shirley, who became the first female engineer at the Jet Propulsion Lab in 1966 and went on to lead NASA’s Mars Exploration Program. Shirley, who now owns a management consulting company, says diverse engineering teams get better results, and research supports her experience.

“When the white males who had been at NASA for 20 years would be really stuck, and I’d bring an idea in they hadn’t thought of. It was just the result of having a different point of view,” she said.

Where We’ve Been

Ask middle-aged female engineers about the double standards or outright harassment they endured in years past, and many are loath to dwell on the negative. But to understand where we need to go, it helps to look at how far we’ve come.

In the 1960s, discrimination was overt. Donna Shirley arrived at the University of Oklahoma intent on majoring in aeronautical engineering, and her academic adviser told her that “girls couldn’t be engineers.”

Other women, such as UF agricultural engineering associate professor Carol Lehtola, were not-so-subtly nudged toward engineering disciplines deemed more acceptable for women. In 1970, Lehtola wrote to South Dakota State University and the University of Minnesota about agricultural engineering. Both responded that they’d be glad to have her as the first female student in the program, but Minnesota’s department went on to suggest that, as a woman, it might be more appropriate for her to study food processing. She chose SDSU.

The difficulties didn’t stop when these women entered the workforce. Abernathy graduated from MIT in 1980. Since then, “I never got a job in my life that someone didn’t say, you only got that job because you’re a woman — even the one I have now,” said Abernathy, who came to UF in 1993 as a professor of materials science and engineering and became the College’s first female associate dean in 2004.

“Now, when someone makes a comment like that, I agree with them,” she said. “In my generation, women were taught to work to make everyone around them successful, rather than just focusing on their own success. And in the interdisciplinary environment of engineering today, that’s a tremendous skill.”

Abernathy cites the teamwork that helped her develop a semiconductor device at Bell Labs, where she worked from 1985 to 1993, that is now used in millions of cell phones.

“I’m a very competitive person, but in my generation, women were raised and socialized with emphasis on being a team player. If I had focused on being the queen of my own empire, working in isolation, I never would have achieved that. So I embrace it. I tell people, ‘You think I got this job because I’m a woman? You’re right.’”

Engineers of Tomorrow

When Mallory Peterson came to UF three years ago as an environmental engineering major, no one ridiculed her or told her she didn’t belong. She knows those things happened — she’s heard about it at conferences of the Society of Women Engineers. She’s not concerned she’ll face that kind of discrimination, but she’s heard tales from young alumni who say their co-workers, many of whom are their fathers’ age, sometimes treat them more like daughters than equals.

“I’m just going to take it head-on,” Peterson said. “Part of the reason I wanted to be an engineer is because it’s a challenge.”

Peterson came to UF with a scholarship from SWE, a national organization founded in 1950, when women had to fight for a seat in all-male engineering colleges. She’s now president of UF’s chapter, founded in 1959 and revived when UF began a concerted effort to recruit women to engineering in 1972.

Former associate dean Gene Hemp directed the push to enroll more women.

“We just felt it was the right thing to do,” Hemp said. “I started by getting all of the female students together in a conference room to talk about what could be done. The bad news was, we all fit in a very small conference room.” One of the first problems Hemp identified was that women were being discouraged from careers in engineering — not by their parents, boyfriends or male professors, but by female teachers.

“We had many women who said their female chemistry or math teachers told them engineering was a man’s field,” said Hemp, who is also UF vice provost emeritus.

He encouraged those students to reach out to female high school students, telling them not to be dissuaded from their goals. Hemp also recruited female undergraduates majoring in math and chemistry.

The success of the College’s effort was demonstrable: In two years, the number of female students in the College rose from 26 to 87. By 1980, 13 percent of undergraduate engineering students were female. The first female faculty member came onboard in 1967, followed by the first female tenure-track professor in 1975. In 2004, 94 years after the College was established, Dean Pramod Khargonekar appointed Cammy Abernathy as associate dean for academic affairs, the first woman to hold any type of dean position within the College. He then appointed Jennifer Curtis as chair of the Department of Chemical Engineering in 2005 and Angela Lindner as associate dean of student affairs in 2008.

Female enrollment, however, hasn’t skyrocketed: With students in most disciplines ranging from 13 to 35 percent female nationally, engineering is a long way from parity.

“When I was at MIT, we had 17 or 18 percent women students. It’s not much better nationally now,” Abernathy said. “The numbers across the country have hit a plateau.”

A Formula For Success

To explain the plateau, experts point to a variety of factors, from the structure of high school science and math classes to the low number of tenured female professors. Among the theories:

1. middle and high school science

and math classes don’t always suit girls’ learning styles, which may cause girls to lose interest. “Bad teaching drives a lot of high school girls away from careers in science and engineering,” said Barbara Hughey, an MIT alumna who is now associate director of the Institute’s Women’s Technology Program. The program brings high school girls to MIT over the summer for an intensive introduction to engineering.

National solutions:

“In middle school and high school, we need to grab their attention so they see the relevance of science and math to what they want to do,” said Hughey, whose daughter is a high school sophomore. Programs like WTP help by giving girls the hands-on experience their high school curriculum may lack.

Gator Engineering solutions:

SWE reaches out to middle school and high school girls with two annual programs. In the first, engineering students visit local schools to give girls a better picture of the dynamic, collaborative nature of engineering careers. In the second, high school girls come to campus for hands-on lab experience.

2. A lack of female professors

as mentors and role models may discourage female students. In 2008, just 12.3 percent of engineering faculty were female, according to the American Society for Engineering Education. The shortage of female mentors might make a young woman’s college experience more difficult, and it may discourage those women from pursuing careers in academia. Abernathy says her experiences at Stanford and MIT made her doubtful she would ever teach. “When I looked at the faculty, it didn’t look like an environment where I could fit in very well,” she said.

National solutions:

Hemp suggests the economic downturn may also come to the rescue: When job offers for engineers with bachelor’s degrees aren’t as plentiful or lucrative, more students opt to further their education with master’s degrees and Ph.D.s. It’s possible this could lead to more talented female students going into academia.

Gator Engineering solutions:

Since 2001, Khargonekar has increased the number of female faculty in the College by 50 percent. And the Florida Institute for the Development of Engineering Faculty prepares graduate students for careers in academia by giving them an inside look. Students learn about academic job searches, create resumes and craft research and teaching statements.

3. Women who had bad experiences

in the field may try to protect bright young students from the same experience. That’s what happened to Sabrina Parra, a civil engineering senior from Miami, whose high school teacher tried — unsuccessfully — to steer her away from engineering. “She said it was probably not going to be a good field for me,” Parra said. “I found out later she had been in engineering and had switched to teaching.”

National solutions:

Outreach programs such as the Web site EngineerGirl.org, launched by The National Academy of Engineers in 2000, lets teenage girls explore career options and connect with women in the field.

Gator Engineering solutions:

When female engineering students arrive at UF, SWE matches each of them with an upperdivision mentor in her field. The mentors coach new students through the program with study groups, test review sessions, social support and networking.

4. Engineering may suffer

from an image problem. A 2003 study from the University of Michigan showed that girls who excelled in science tended to choose careers in biological sciences because of their perception that engineering and math-based sciences were “less people-oriented.” Girls in the 17-year study cited wanting to help people as a reason for choosing the so-called “soft sciences” over engineering.

National solutions:

From biomedical to environmental engineering and everything in between, the perception that engineers don’t help people just doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. But engineers need to do a better job spreading the word, Abernathy says.

“A young person’s perception of what we do doesn’t take into account the collaborative nature of engineering today,” she said. “You’re not working in a lab all by yourself trying to figure out how to make widgets. A lot of engineering is about making people’s lives better.”

The Gator Engineering solution:

The awed expressions of the kids at UF’s annual Engineering Fair offer ample proof of UF’s contribution. When elementary and middle schoolers see the submarines, satellites, robots and electronic games that UF students create, engineering’s reputation as a cold, theoretical discipline is dealt a death blow.

Measuring progress

How will we know when we’ve succeeded in paving the way for women in engineering?

“The only way to tell if our job is done is if the percentage of women in the student body goes up, when we get to something that looks like parity,” Hemp said.

The good news, says Abernathy, is that diversity in one area, be it race or gender, helps diversity in all areas. As one of a few female students in her department at Stanford, an experience she likens to “being in a men’s locker room or a fraternity house,” Abernathy found camaraderie with a male African- American professor who could relate to feeling like an outsider.

“If he hadn’t been there, I don’t know how I would have made it through,” she said.

While the female students of today are highly unlikely to be singled out for ridicule as Lindner was, the associate dean still hears tales of internships punctuated by daily catcalls from male co-workers. When young women do encounter sexism, however, they have a wider support network than in years past. And that network isn’t exclusively made up of women. It’s important to remember, Lindner says, that for every male engineer or professor who makes a female engineer’s life harder, there are more who have a genuine commitment to diversity in the field.

“I could have walked out of college with the message that white males were my enemy, but that’s not fair. We can’t stereotype them back,” she said. “You have to give everyone the opportunity to do the right thing.”