Engineer Your Life is a terrific initiative serving to break down stereotypes and challenge social expectations about who can be an engineer. The goal is to inspire young women to consider engineering as a creative, team-oriented, and lucrative profession that makes a difference. Why does this matter? Well women comprise just 20.4% of engineering majors in universities and 11.1% of practicing engineers. Meanwhile, engineering is considered among the ‘fastest-growing occupations’. But that’s only the beginning…
EYL’s latest study surveyed high school girls, guidance counselors, and practicing engineers to understand ‘cultural perceptions of engineering and its feasibility as a career choice.’ These four messages tested best among the girls:
Live your life, love what you do. Engineering will challenge you to turn dreams into realities while giving you the chance to travel, work with inspiring people and give back to your community.
Creativity has its rewards. Women engineers are respected, recognized and financially rewarded for their innovative thinking and creative solutions.
Make a world of difference. From small villages to big cities, organic farms to mountaintops, deep-sea labs to outer space, women engineers are going where there is the greatest need and making a lasting contribution.
Explore possibilities. Women engineers often use their skills to go into business, medicine, law, or government. An engineering education will prepare you for many different careers.
In light of engineering’s persistent public image problem, these messages—which are aligned with the values and aspirations most important to girls—are convincing girls that engineering is exciting, meaningful, and definitely worth considering as a career. These messages are used throughout Engineer Your Life, and the coalition encourages the entire engineering community to adopt them in all your outreach activities and materials.
What a cool campaign! Just check out the EYL videos:
Initiatives like this give me hope that the next generation of engineers will include a lot more motivated women with the expertise and confidence to narrow the gender divide. For good.
Rebecca Skloot has a book coming out next year… and it sounds spectacular! There’s already a lot of buzz surrounding the publication of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks and this morning Rebecca and her book appeared as the cover story of Publisher’s Weekly behind the heading ‘The Making of a Bestseller 2010‘. Congratulations to our former SciBling! Here’s what PW has to say:
Science journalist Skloot makes a remarkable debut with this multilayered story about “faith, science, journalism, and grace.” It is also a tale of medical wonders and medical arrogance, racism, poverty and the bond that grows, sometimes painfully, between two very different women–Skloot and Deborah Lacks–sharing an obsession to learn about Deborah’s mother, Henrietta, and her magical, immortal cells. Henrietta Lacks was a 31-year-old black mother of five in Baltimore when she died of cervical cancer in 1951. Without her knowledge, doctors treating her at Johns Hopkins took tissue samples from her cervix for research. They spawned the first viable, indeed miraculously productive, cell line–known as HeLa. These cells have aided in medical discoveries from the polio vaccine to AIDS treatments. What Skloot so poignantly portrays is the devastating impact Henrietta’s death and the eventual importance of her cells had on her husband and children. Skloot’s portraits of Deborah, her father and brothers are so vibrant and immediate they recall Adrian Nicole LeBlanc’s Random Family. Writing in plain, clear prose, Skloot avoids melodrama and makes no judgments. Letting people and events speak for themselves, Skloot tells a rich, resonant tale of modern science, the wonders it can perform and how easily it can exploit society’s most vulnerable people.
Last week, this article from the Chronicle of Higher Education hit my inbox from a reader named ‘Basma’. And then from ‘Jessica’ followed by ‘Cheyanne’. The link continued trickling in over the weekend… Apparently readers are aware I occasionally have something to say about gender bias in academia (and out and somewhere in the space between). My friends ’round thesetangledseries of tubes don’t put up with that sort of riffraff either. The piece begins like this:
As a female professor, are you called rude and abrasive while your male colleagues who make similar statements are simply labeled assertive? Has your department head discouraged you from taking an assignment, saying that because you have children you might not be able to handle it?
If things like that have happened to you, yell: “Bingo!”
The Center for WorkLife Law at the University of California’s Hastings College of the Law is unveiling a new online game on Thursday called Gender Bias Bingo. The game is intended for women, although men who have overheard biased statements or have faced bias because they are fathers can also play.
Visitors to this site are asked to choose a square and submit a representative story or quote from their experiences. The goal is to teach more of us to recognize gender bias while demonstrating the ways it can push women away from an academic career path. Director Joan C. Williams also explains the noteworthy economic angle:
“It does not make economic sense, particularly in these economic conditions, to keep recruiting women and then keep driving them out,” says Ms. Williams, who points out that a start-up package for a research scientist can cost as much as $1-million. “There had never been built, as far as I could tell, a clear explanation of why it’s cheaper to keep her.”
While it’s too early to tell how the mission of Gender Bias Bingo will play out, it’s certainly a unique new initiative. Not only does the game highlight the myriad of struggles facing women in the ivory towers, but it serves as a kind of tangible record–a visible means to display the ugly marks left across academia by such behavior. In a small way, this might reflect that gender bias is less acceptable than ever. At least, I hope so.
According to Abel, just eight of the 192 individuals awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine are women. As he writes:
To have Blackburn and Grieder win the prize is an incredible accomplishment for any scientist, but one that I think will pay huge dividends in helping our young women (and the mini-women that some of us Dads have) in appreciating that they too can be a world-class scientist.
I couldn’t agree more. Congratulations to Blackburn, Greider, and Szostak!
It’s been wonderful to read commentary and reactions to Unscientific America around the web and in print and discuss the book with readers and friends. Still, the attention from my own town has meant the most. IndyWeekalready ran their review, and today I was thrilled to see The Herald-Sun. I just love the research triangle. Here’s an excerpt:
“It’s easy to look now at the Obama administration and feel encouraged that there are beards back in the White House,” Kirshenbaum said recently, before heading off to Washington, D.C., to speak at an event hosted by the Center for American Progress. “But there’s still a rift between the world of science and the rest of society, and there’s a danger for those of us who care about science becoming complacent. Science, unfortunately, has become such a partisan, controversial issue, the situation is not going to change just because there’s a new administration in power.”
Whoever is in power, Kirshenbaum pointed out, scientists need to communicate better and science needs to take a more prominent role in education and public discourse.
Her claims are buttressed by the latest report from the Pew Research Center, which finds that 85 percent of scientists themselves see the public’s lack of scientific knowledge as a major problem for science.
I’m honored to be featured, and admittedly, the fact that they included the ‘charismatic sea cucumber‘ has me smiling ear to ear. The full article requires free registration and is available here.
The U.S. National Academies published a new report which finds no gender bias in the faculty hiring process. According to the data, women are being hired and promoted with equal access to resources once we make it that far.
Still, there’s no doubt it’s the journey that’s most arduous.
Here are some interesting figures from the latest issues of Science:
CNN asks ‘Is Feminism Obselete?‘ and Mary Matalin goes so far to suggest:
‘No conservative woman would choose to call herself a feminist as it’s described by liberals today.’
The story begins with David Letterman’s apology to Sarah Palin after a tasteless joke at her daughter’s expense. She accepted, but some conservatives took notice that many ‘feminists‘ didn’t stand beside her in the scuffle. In terms of Palin, I’ve said this before:
[Her] politics are not ‘pro-woman’ simply because she is female..a candidate’s gender should bear no role in his or her ability to take on the responsibilities of president. But our VP-in-waiting must be preparedon day one. In global decision-making, we don’t get a do-over. Sarah Palin’s positions on critical policies seem based on values that many throughout this diverse country do not share and she lacks the experience–especially in foreign relations–to lead…The message I advocate at The Intersection and elsewhere is that men and women should be considered equally for many roles, never that anyone should be afforded preference based on number of X chromosomes. Let our leaders be chosen, not by the composite of their gender, but by their readiness to preside over our great nation.
The CNN piece goes on to explore what feminism means and how it has changed since the movement began. Carol Costello asks who embodies feminism today and considers how ideals have changed. But must modern feminism be dictated by political ideology?
It’s complicated. On the surface, Merrium-Webster defines ‘feminism‘ as:
1: the theory of the political, economic, and social equality of the sexes 2: organized activity on behalf of women’s rights and interests
Quite obviously, women polarized at liberal and conservative extremes do unquestionably hold very different interpretations of women’s rights. However, I sincerely hope that feminism does not become indistinguishable from the left because I fear it would be cast off as radicalism which would undermine the movement. We have so many miles to go toward achieving an equalvoice in America and around the world. I may not agree with Ann Coulter or Laura Ingraham, but there are women across the aisle doing tremendously positive work that every ‘real‘ feminist ought to celebrate regardless of affiliation. We must rise above petty partisanship if we are to get anywhere.
One of our recent posts–Sheril’s much-read “Singled Out“–is in the running for the Three Quarks Daily 2009 Science Prize for science blogging. We encourage those of you who enjoy this site, and who liked that very courageous post, to head on over and give us your vote. And thanks in advance for considering us.
This morning I interviewed artist Kate Kretz who has a cameo in my next book. After a very interesting discussion on topic, our conversation shifted to motherhood. Kate’s a new mom and as I recently mentioned here, many of my friends are now pregnant and/or first time parents. I’m always looking for great reading recommendations to pass along.
Everything changes when a woman becomes a mother, but society–particularly women themselves–often colludes to deny this simple truism. In The Mask of Motherhood, author Susan Maushart (a nationally syndicated columnist in Australia and the mother of three children) explores the effect childbearing has upon women. In the process, she removes the veils of serenity and satisfaction to reveal what she holds to be the truth: the early years of motherhood are physically difficult and can be emotionally devastating. New mothers increasingly enter full-scale identity crises, few women have sufficient information about child-rearing realities, and, as Maushart writes, “the realities of parenthood and especially motherhood are kept carefully shrouded in silence, misinformation, and outright lies.” The book comprises seven essay-style chapters. In “Falling: The Experience of Pregnancy,” Maushart discusses wrongful notions about morning sickness, the mixed messages about pregnancy weight gain, and the “mask” of stoicism pregnant women feel compelled to wear. In “Laboring Under Delusions,” Maushart exposes the changes 30 years have brought in childbirth, and the contemporary woman’s need for self-control in all things, including birth. In “Superwoman and Stuporman,” Maushart disabuses readers of the myth of what she calls, “pseudo-egalitarian family life.” The Mask of Motherhood is extensively researched, convincing, and deeply insightful. –Ericka Lutz
Does sound interesting and I’m curious if readers have come across the title. Further, what else might you recommend in terms of terrific books for first time parents? Let’s get a list going. Comment thread is open to your suggestions…
Sheril Kirshenbaum is a research associate at Duke University and co-author of Unscientific America. Sometimes she's a classicist, radio jock, or congressional staffer. For more information, visit her website.
Rebecca Skloot
