my name is Jenny and I’m a mechanical
engineer and more than that actually I’m
a mechanical engineering professor and
it’s one of the great pleasures of my
life that I get to inspire other people
to become engineers and one of the
things that I tell my students and I
teach freshmen all the way to seniors is
that the core of engineering is not all
of this technical knowledge that I’m
like cramming into their heads okay it’s
not a beam deflection and Young’s
modulus of stainless steel the core of
engineering is really problem solving
this is why it frustrates me when I put
on my administrator hat and I don’t like
to do that too often but I put on my
administrator hat and I sit with my
fellow engineering educators and we sit
down to tackle one of the most pressing
problems in engineering which is gender
diversity and we stop thinking like
engineers we throw out the core of our
profession when we’re trying to tackle
this issue so how should we be solving
this problem let me introduce that first
as engineers we have a process for
problem solving and if you know any
engineers I’m sure that’s really
surprising to you that we have a process
for it okay so I’m going to show you a
flow diagram all right so the way that
this process works it’s called the
engineering design process you start by
defining the problem at hand you set up
some targets right you set up targets
for what success would look like with
your design to solution then you
brainstorm and you narrow down your
concepts and you come up with three or
four unique and viable concepts that
could potentially solve your problem you
go through then and make rational
decisions about which of these concepts
you should advance into a design
designing takes a lot of work it takes a
lot of time and energy so you want to be
careful on which design you choose to
move forward then you build it out you
build yourself a prototype it could be a
product it could be a process it could
be a piece of software
and you test it you test it to those
metrics that you laid out all the way in
the beginning right and hopefully it
works out and you got yourself a
solution you succeed on your test waha
we have ourselves a solution right this
is great this only happens like point 0
1 percent of the time as somebody who’s
designed a lot of things okay you fail
right and what happens is you got to go
back and you gotta test again ok so you
test you fail a test you go back to the
drawing board you tweak a little couple
things with your design all right you go
again and again and again and again okay
and eventually eventually your design
might get there that concept that you
chose to move forward might find the
eventual solution right but there’s
something that happens in engineering
more often than we like to admit and
that’s that we picked the wrong concept
to begin with we picked the wrong
concept to invest all of this time and
energy and when we do that we get stuck
in what I like to call the cycle of
death okay we’re stuck in an endless
design test cycle that’s never going to
get us to our eventual solution because
we need to be doing something radically
different so what we have to do in this
moment is engineers is we have to stop
and we have to go back to the drawing
board and is really tough okay because
we’ve put all this energy into it we’ve
mortgaged our parents house to do it
okay but you got to stop because you’re
never going to get there with this idea
and you got to pick another idea and
advance that through to design and go
through the testing all over again and
hopefully find the solution ok that’s
the engineering design process that’s
the way that we should be tackling the
problem of gender diversity and
engineering let’s apply it for a second
okay let’s start by defining the problem
I’m going to put some numbers out there
it’s another thing we engineers just
love to do okay so Wham pie chart okay
we generate each and every year in this
country we graduate about 107,000
bright-eyed bushy-tailed engineers out
into the world and those engineers are
primarily concentrated in three core
disciplines these are also the disc
ones that have the largest charged job
market believe it or not there’s
mechanical engineering civil engineering
and electrical engineering a lot of the
newer more interdisciplinary majors they
are fantastic I also teach in some of
those but they constitute less than
twenty-five percent of the total
engineering population in terms of
graduation so I want you to remember
this chart as I show you the next bit of
data which is where are the women in
engineering the women in engineering are
concentrated in three core disciplines
environmental engineering biomedical
engineering and chemical engineering in
those three disciplines they’ve actually
reached what we consider or actually
what our sociologist friends they know a
lot more about human behavior than we do
okay they consider to be a critical mass
critical mass is about thirty percent
female do you reach that number it’s
self sustaining right we we have to we
don’t have to put as much energy into
recruiting women in environmental bio
medical and chemical have reached that
threshold the three core disciplines
that graduate the most engineers fall
far far short of that critical mass
target civil engineering is the closest
to the target at a whopping 20 percent
female and my own discipline of
mechanical engineering battles it out
for the bottom of the barrel with
electrical at twelve percent female
nationally alright those are some
depressing numbers now this problem has
been around for a long long time and
because it’s been around for a long time
and the distribution is looked like this
and because the three biggest
disciplines don’t have enough women the
total percentage of female in
engineering for the past 50 years okay
has remained very low so here we are
we’re looking at percentage female
graduates in engineering from 1960s up
until the present you can see there was
a nice little jump we can thank women’s
lib for that okay nice little jump in
the late 70s into the early 80s we went
from pretty much nothing okay up to
twenty percent and we’ve
old there since the late 80s until the
present every year we engineering
educators put another dot on this chart
and it fluctuates between like 18 and 22
okay we are not moving the needle and
this is super frustrating people it is
super frustrating considering more women
are going into stem in general stem
stands for science technology
engineering and math okay so let’s look
at another stem field let’s look at the
Biosciences okay the Biosciences saw a
similar jump now they had a higher
baseline to start with in the 60s but
they also jumped up in the 70s and they
continued to grow in percentage female
up until the president present when you
there’s actually an over-representation
of women in the Biosciences why is this
happening there are no women in
engineering lots of women in the
Biosciences well there’s two things
going on first we know a bit now that
women are sort of naturally drawn to
disciplines with immediate societal
impact the fact that all engineering
disciplines have immediate societal
impact is beside the point right it’s
more evident in engineering disciplines
with a bio or enviro prefixed to it the
other thing is there’s a huge amount of
pop culture that’s behind this right if
you look at all the imagery of women
going into medicine okay all through the
past 30 years that’s that’s huge that’s
a huge driver of these trends and then
consider what we put out there as a
culture in terms of engineering I know
he’s a physicist all right I know he’s a
physicist but most people can’t tell the
difference all right you could not ask
for a worse PR campaign for the cause of
engineering then somebody with
questionable social skills okay we don’t
need more on that all right so so what
are we doing about it well we have been
trying to solve this problem guys for 30
years we have been really putting a lot
of time and energy into this and as a
case in point I’m going to show you some
examples okay what would it look like if
you have a daughter right now I don’t
have a daughter I have a need
so she’s super cute so I’m going to take
this as an opportunity to show her this
is Macy okay Macy is macys almost too
okay she’s a potential engineer well
right and then she wants to become like
her aunt jen jen okay and become a
mechanical engineer what what’s going to
happen to macy as she grows up what kind
of programming is she going to be
exposed to that’s trying to push her in
this direction well we start off we’ve
got some wonderful gendered construction
toys games and say what you want about
this all right it’s definitely out there
all right and I think it does something
there’s also tons of programming right
take your daughter to work day introduce
a girl the engineering day Girl Scouts
is in on the game okay there’s there’s
engineering badges and all kinds of
stuff all right then you’ve got great
organizations girls who code is
fantastic right you got summer camps at
universities I’ve got an organization
that’s trying to do this right and it
kind of steps its way up as this child
is going through school and by the time
she gets the high school if she is
seriously considering doing engineering
as a college major we start to bring a
national organization Society of Women
Engineers weep an NSF gets in on the
game as soon as you’re in college right
massive massive amount of time and
energy and funding that’s going into it
and so well intentioned every women
engineers conference that i go to we put
up Rosie the Riveter and we say yeah
girls you can do it you can do it you
can become an engineer except we’re not
doing it right we are not doing it okay
this is not working all right so let’s
go back to that design process it’s time
to admit that what we’ve been trying for
30 years isn’t working it’s not working
and we can continue to beat our heads
against the wall for another 30 years
but are we we’re just adding another dot
eighteen to twenty-two percent okay
mechanical is down there at twelve all
right so we need to do something
fundamentally different we need to go
back pick another concept advance it
through to design test it and hopefully
reach that solution so let’s engineer
diversity for a second we have learned
you things from 30 years worth of work
in this area i’m going to say two
important things two important bits of
data here the first is that nationally
on average we don’t lose women any more
than we lose men once they make the
decision to go into engineering say what
you will about the retention rate that
I’m about to quote you that’s another
TED talk okay but men and women are
retained from freshman through to
graduation in college engineering majors
at sixty percent sixty percent of your
freshman class is going to graduate
whether your man or your one okay so no
difference in retention the second bit
of information that we know is that at
the start of the college pipeline there
are equal numbers of men and women who
are ready to go into engineering case in
point what we consider one of the most
important characteristics of a potential
engineer is math literacy okay in math
skill and if we take AP calculus scores
as an indicator of that we see equal
numbers people equal numbers of men and
women scoring a four or a five on the
calculus a B exam nationally there are
50,000 men and 50,000 women that would
qualify them for calculus credit in
college calc 1 and it’s also a good
indicator whether or not you’re going to
succeed in an engineering major if we
consider count 2 it’s actually
interesting this data is from 2015 okay
the ladies actually outperform the dudes
okay in Cal to soho so we have more
women than men getting a four or five
what this tells me is that there’s
essentially fifty to sixty five thousand
potential female engineers out there
each and every year fifty to sixty five
thousand who have the aptitude for going
into engineering so let’s put some
engineering skills to use here okay
we’re going to do a little math it’s
really complicated we’re going to do
multiplication and division so bear with
me okay
so we have a hundred and seven thousand
engineering graduates every year if we
incorporate our retention rate of a
whopping 60 percent we need to recruit a
hundred and eighty thousand men and
women as college freshman in engineering
classrooms 180,000 if we then put our
critical mass target of 30 percent
female on there we get 54,000 female
recruits that’s what we need each and
every year entering college classrooms
this is an interesting number okay it’s
interesting because remember when I
quoted you for the AP calc scores
there’s fifty to sixty five thousand
potential female engineers each and
every year it’s also interesting if you
look at this number relative to the
number of high schools in the United
States there are twenty-six thousand
public high schools and another like
dozen or so twelve twelve thousand
private high schools if each public high
school in the US graduated to two
females to go into engineering we would
hit this target I think that’s possible
ok this is we’re not stretching this too
far here alright so where where are
these girls going where are these girls
going if they’re not going into
engineering well they’re going into the
Biosciences okay the female talent is
going into the Biosciences so if i am to
look out into a calculus one class in
college forty-three percent of the
females that i see that class are going
into the Biosciences only fourteen
percent are going into engineering for
the males in the class it’s the exact
opposite thirty-eight percent are going
into engineering with only nine percent
going into Biosciences ok so if i’m
suggesting a solution here am I
suggesting that we steal female talent
from the Biosciences yes yes I am
suggesting that we steal female talent
from the Biosciences okay because the
messaging that those women are receiving
to go into the Biosciences a lot of it
is you can save the world as a doctor
right well I save the world every day as
an engineer i design medical devices ok
so our messaging is off so let’s think
for a second about some potential
concepts here I want to I want to leave
you with some hope and I also want to
point out a couple organizations that I
think are doing this correctly that we
could use as models for what our
eventual design solution will be full
disclosure here guys I am involved with
these organizations that i’m going to
show you i am not paid by them ok i’m a
fangirl and a volunteer all right so
we’re going to start with I got to give
a shout out to the National Academy of
Engineers ok National Academy of
Engineers very prestigious organization
they realized that they’ve had a PR
problem ok it’s not okay to keep saying
we’re Sheldon all right so they have
done a really great job of promoting the
message that engineers are problem
solvers and engineers are solving the
world’s most essential problems
engineers are focused on security on
health care and on sustainability those
are the grand challenges of engineering
that our most pressing so they’ve helped
us reframe the field of engineering we
also have programs like my own I run a
nonprofit organization called the Perry
initiative which quite frankly steals
female talent shamelessly from the
Biosciences okay so we take girls who
are interested in medicine who are
interested in biology and we show them
all the engineering that’s involved in
developing the tools that go into
medicine and it’s been it’s tremendous
it’s like empowerment through power
tools so we reach about 1500 girls per
year all across the country and what
we’ve found to be the most valuable is
actually this curriculum this idea that
we can influence college major choice by
showing them the possibilities in
engineering there’s also a great
organization called Project Lead the way
pltw Project Lead the Way is operating
on a scale
nationally that has the potential to
actually recruit those 54,000 females
pltw is curriculum that is engineering
themed for elementary middle and high
school classes that’s taught by actual
elementary middle and high school
teachers so it’s happening during the
school day it reaches 2.4 million kids
in all 50 states so if pltw gets the
messaging right to the female sitting in
those classrooms we have some hope
another point on the policy side there’s
been a lot of great progress with the
next generation science standards NGSS
was developed by representatives from
about 40 states and it’s been adopted so
far in 16 of them it explicitly
incorporates engineering theory and
engineering practice into the science
classroom so this is like the Common
Core but for science and they have
chosen engineering as the theme through
which to teach a lot of science so we’ve
got a lot of hope here that at least
kids are aware of this discipline called
engineering and aware of the problem
solving potential that comes with it so
what needs to happen now folks is that
we need to advance these concepts we
need to take what we’re learning in
terms of innovative curriculum and
programming and scale it up through some
of these existing entities so that we
can reach that target that target of
54,000 females and eventually solve this
problem we need to invest our time in
our energy in organizations that have
the potential to solve this these summer
camps with 20 girls at a time when you
send a female engineer off into a high
school classroom these are all
well-intentioned but they’re not fixing
the bigger problem fifty-four thousand
females going into this discipline
nationally is totally totally achievable
we can fill that gap but in order to do
that we have to think like engineers and
we must engineer the diversity that we
want to see
thank you
[Applause]
you [Music]