Engineering Your Potential

Engineering no longer refers to nuts, bolts and robotics. Today, fields such as entertainment, computer science, space exploration, biology, city design, environmental science and advocacy, transportation, and humanitarian sciences utilize engineers who understand inner workings and can design ways to improve current operations.

According to engineer Sean McGrath, “An engineer is someone who can take a simple idea and see through it to the bottomless pits of messy, complexity that lies underneath.” In other words, engineers are the “do-ers” that take abstract ideas and morph them into something tangible.

Yet, less than 2 percent of college graduates earn degrees in an engineering-related field. And, only a miniscule percentage of these graduates are women. This might be in part due to a lingering misconception that all an engineer does is “fix things.” Not true. (Even The Walt Disney Company has upgraded their engineers to “Imagineers,” demonstrating how the role of an engineer relies upon imagination just as much as implementation.)

However, there are specific segments of the field that attract female engineers. Agricultural Engineering is an interesting science, but don’t think the field is limited to crops and livestock. Quite the opposite; most agricultural engineers are employed by large greenhouse companies. It is their duty to build nutrient systems, design growing mediums for the crops, manage temperature and irrigation computer systems, and create blueprints for how the entire operation will look. In show greenhouses (i.e., places that welcome visitors, such as a botanical garden), an engineer’s role is vital. While plant scientists, landscape artists and horticulturalists ensure the growth of healthy plants, the agricultural engineer is the one who actually creates the attraction through AutoCAD drawings and lots of computer programming. And when trouble occurs, it is the agricultural engineer that designs experiments to determine the cause, studies possible solutions, and implements the solution.

Bioengineers combine a variety of fields into their specialty. Chemistry, physics, biology, genetics — all are required in bioengineering roles. A common misperception about bioengineers has been spurred on by the recent debate over cloning. But genetic recombination is only one small sect of the field. USDA scientists Delores Lomberk and Ceil Muller have been toiling away at improving certain fruit plants, working on adapting plants to smaller growing spaces while still producing the same amount of fruit. For countries with dry or limited soil, discoveries like these could save thousands of people from starvation.

One field that has always relied on a strong female work force is telecommunications. From the first telegraph stations, to phone operators, to radio personalities, women have made their mark in this field since the late 1800s. It was Erna Schneider Hoover who, seeing an opportunity to improve current technology, designed a computer system that could monitor incoming phone calls and automatically connect the call without requiring an operator’s assistance. In another field of telecommunications, Fran Allen designed the first supercomputer compilers, which paved the way for the modern PC.

Women engineers have become successful leaders in government, business, law, and medicine, utilizing their knowledge and skills to improve the world we all inhabit. While doing this, they have had to fight for their right to belong to such a male-dominated field, asserting their rights for equality, and fending off disrespect and hostility. Some women have even had to challenge major universities, such as Texas A&M, to receive the same educational documentation and certification as the male students did. Although the 21st century has seen a marked decline in these inequalities, they do still exist. But these women preserve, as they always have, and just engineer themselves the passion and drive they need to succeed.

The Extraordinary Women Engineers Project, an awareness and outreach program designed to encourage young women to choose engineering as a career (http://www.engineeringwomen.org), perhaps sums up women’s role in the engineering world the best: “We live in an exciting, complex world where the need for women’s creativity and know-how has never been greater. Why? Because women hold unique insights into what’s important in this world. And, women have a unique approach to solving problems. One viewpoint or one way of thinking is no longer adequate.”

Science and the “Fairer” Sex

Gone are the days when women are relegated to housework, secretarial employment or sitting behind a librarian’s desk. Welcome to the 21st century, where women are making great strides in fields previously dominated by men. Women, quite literally, wear the “pants” in many male-dominated professions, such as science.

Many credit Marie Curie as the first woman scientist, but this claim is actually incorrect. Hypatia of Alexandria, Egypt was actually the first documented female scientist. Records dating back to 370 A.D. indicate she received an education in Ancient Rome; she worked in the profession of teaching mathematics in her homeland, and she pursued additional education in the fields of astronomy and medicine. There is also record of her becoming an orator, writing texts about geometry (that still survive to this day), and inventing scientific tools such as the astrolabe, a device used in studying celestial bodies. At the age of 45, Hypatia was attacked on the streets of Egypt, stripped, beaten and killed with shards of broken pottery. Her offense: being an intelligent woman and speaking out against religious and sexual oppression.
Two thousand years later, the human race has evolved. No longer are women like Hypatia or Joan of Arc silenced for speaking their minds. Instead, women are highly sought after in professional fields. Our abilities to think abstractly, multitask, and be intuitive have made women ideal candidates for groundbreaking scientific work.

And today, there is not a single science that women have not permeated. In fact, women have even won Nobel prizes in fields such as physics, chemistry, physiology, and medicine. But science is a field that one does for the sheer love it, not necessarily for financial gain or benefits. There are obstacles to face from many directions.

Laura Kleiss is an agricultural scientist in the state of Florida. When asked if she has encountered any difficulties in her education or chosen profession, Laura says, “We had a few guys that were pests and said that a woman’s place is barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen. I just laughed, and in the end I think they got the point that women are not to be reckoned with, especially in science, since women lead in grade point averages in most of the classes.”

Breaking out of the stereotypes that many women have been raised with can be one of the most challenging things one will ever face in life. “Growing up in a small town where there isn’t any diversity helped me grow into an aware woman,” Kleiss relates. “Not because of where I grew up per se, but because I was in a female-dominated sport- Figure Skating. In training camp, I learned to get along with people from around the world and compete against them. They taught me that we can all get along. The only limit was how hard you would work for it. I took this back to my small town school and tried to get everyone to open their eyes to the many different parts of the world.”

It’s this determination that has allowed women, like Kleiss, to muster the courage inside and challenge preconceived notions of what a woman can and cannot accomplish.

So, why the obvious lack of women in scientific fields? Philip Greenspun, tenured instructor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, argues that one of the main reasons is that, taking into consideration the required education, intelligence, and working hours, scientific careers are some of the lowest paid in the country. Additionally, it is increasingly difficult to achieve tenure at universities or research institutions past the age of forty. Knowing this, many women choose to devote their educational and career energies to fields that will not discriminate against them in favor of new, younger graduates without familial responsibilities.

Greenspun writes in Women in Science in 2006, “Consider taking the same high IQ and work ethic [of a scientist], going into business, and being put on the fast track at a company such as General Electric. Rather than being fired at age 44, this is about the time that she will be handed ever-larger divisions to operate, with ever-larger bonuses and stock options. A top lawyer at age 44 is probably a $500,000 per year partner in a big firm … Even a public schoolteacher actually does better than a scientist … At age 22, the schoolteacher is earning a living wage and can begin making plans to get married and have children. By age 30, when the scientist is forced to start moving around to those $35,000 per year postdocs, the schoolteacher is earning $50,000 per yea.”

There is also the added pressure of multiple scientists competing with new graduates for an extremely limited number of jobs. For example, approximately 35,000 computer science degrees were issued in 2002. Yet, large companies like Microsoft and Apple only hire on a few hundred per year. With such odds against them, as well as the dangers of earning such a narrow-field degree, there’s little wonder left about the decline of women in the sciences.

So, the bottom line isn’t that women are being excluded from scientific fields; it’s just that they choose to focus their passion and energies on stable fields that will allow them competitive salaries, reasonable hours, upward mobility, and career stability. In the immortal words of Albert Einstein, “Science is a wonderful thing if one does not have to earn one’s living at it.” If one does choose the field, she finds great rewards in personal satisfaction.