Year of Action on Diversity
An Unsuitable Job for a Woman?
To promote diversity, the engineering community must tackle the subtle stereotypes that hinder performance and enthusiasm for projects.
By Adrienne Minerick, ASEE Diversity Committee Co-Chair
The need for engineering educators to step up our diversity efforts hit home personally for me recently. A fun project to build a patio soon morphed into a first-hand lesson on the negative influence that society’s perceptions can exert – even on an experienced DIY enthusiast like me.
My gender-role revelation began with a four-day “staycation” that my husband and I had scheduled months in advance to construct a retaining wall and patio. At first, everything went according to plan. Dump trucks delivered topsoil, fill dirt, crushed gravel, washed rock, and, finally, 14 pallets of block, toppers, pavers, and sheetrock to the top of our steep hill. We leveled a 350-square-foot area and dug foundations for a 60-foot retaining wall to span behind a pond and waterfall.
Typically, my husband gets all the credit for completing projects like these. So I’ve adopted a strategy of talking the talk, hoping this will provide evidence about my ability to also “walk the walk.” We had set the first, and hardest, row of blocks when my mother and her new husband arrived for a visit. They offered to help us one afternoon, and things quickly went south.
My husband and I jumped into our usual routine of alternately loading blocks or buckets of washed rock into our tractor, unloading, and shoveling around the positioned blocks. Mom kept pulling me away to get or do things. Each time, her husband picked up the shovel to fill in. In short order, I was isolated from my pet project and trapped doing gardening tasks I resented. I was left with the unenviable choice of creating discomfort by returning to my project or suppressing my feelings to act according to my proper gender role (as imposed by 65-year-old guests).
When my husband and I went out to work on the retaining wall alone the next night, I was surprised by my lack of enthusiasm for the project. I was timid about decisions and second-guessing my next steps. An established engineer, I have overcome situations like these many times, yet this one rattled my confidence, my self-efficacy!
Why is this significant? Because job selection was determined via peer pressure and a subconscious bias about “women’s work,” not on qualifications or who would be most effective. Think how much more susceptible our engineering students and newly minted graduates are to the pressure to conform.
In engineering’s egalitarian environment, it’s often hard to recognize the influence of subtle prejudices on individual colleagues or students. Proactive advocacy, including positive conversations about empowerment and creativity, can help counter stereotypes that push nontraditional individuals away from really cool projects. For instance, my husband told me later he was totally unaware of the tension I was experiencing. Had he known, he certainly would have urged me to rejoin the project.
Simply talking to people similar to yourself about uncomfortable topics such as gender roles does too little to change the status quo. The majority remains oblivious while the minority absorbs greater stress, with scant sense of accomplishment upon a project’s completion. Well-intentioned individuals who try to be advocates for a minority can still miss indications of a problem. And they also struggle with how to react in situations they don’t fully control.
To ensure that the engineering profession has the diversity of expertise and experiences needed to solve society’s grand challenges, we educators must proactively prime the talent pipeline. Those in the majority must become aware of damaging biases in unfamiliar contexts and then learn to be advocates. When we are in the minority, we must voice our views on an issue long enough to change it. All of us need to support and empower diverse members of our local and national engineering communities – starting with using language to change the conversation (www.engineeringmessages.org).
The ASEE Diversity Committee is working to bring advocacy into the mainstream. This Year of Action will feature such efforts as advocacy tips from the Women in Engineering Division (wied.asee.org/AdvTips.html) and compiling diversity resources and ideas. Please watch our website (diversity.asee.org) for updates.
Adrienne Minerick, an associate professor at Michigan Technological University, is chair of ASEE’s Professional Interest Council I and serves on the Board of Directors.
Board Profile
Marjan Eggermont
Art as Engineering
When Marjan Eggermont moved from the Netherlands to pursue a Ph.D. in printmaking at the University of Calgary, about the only thing that stayed the same for her was the weather. As with her life, change and similarity became the basis of her artwork. She’s interested in how patterns form in different types of images or materials—how acid corrodes metal, for instance, or how similar skin patterns form on different parts of the body.
Changing and similar patterns also became part of Eggermont’s curriculum when she began teaching introductory engineering design and communications at Calgary’s engineering school. “In the art department, I was always considered a very process-oriented person, and it was a no-brainer that I started teaching engineers,” she says, laughing. “But among engineers, they definitely notice I don’t have their background. I’m quite random, possibly chaotic to some.” At the time – 2002 – most schools didn’t include first-year engineering design courses, but she has successfully introduced drawn graphics, oral presentations, written communications, and creative concepts. Now a senior instructor in the mechanical and manufacturing program, she is also the engineering school’s associate dean of student affairs.
Eggermont gained recognition as an artist as her teaching career took hold. She was named one of the 20 most influential artists in Calgary in 2003 by the Calgary Artwalk Society. Much of her work is on exhibit at the contemporary Herringer Kiss Gallery, which features artists from across Canada and the United States.
The divide between art and engineering is not that wide for Eggermont. Her current project as founder and editor of the online journal Zygote Quarterly explores biomimicry and the impact that nature’s flora and fauna can have on engineering design. The magazine finished as a finalist for the 2012 and 2013 Digital Magazine Awards.
Now the PIC II chair, Eggermont has presented at ASEE conferences from early on in her career and has been nominated for best paper awards several times. Most recently, she presented a paper on information graphics and engineering design at 2013’s conference in Atlanta.
She’d like to see more of an international presence in ASEE—and robust Canadian participation at the 2015 conference in Seattle. She’s also interested in new formats for paper presentations and changing up the variety of offerings during the week by holding short, skills-based workshops throughout the conference.
Meet Your Staff
Composer in Residence
By Nathan Kahl
Rachel Levitin has had a relatively quick rise through ASEE ranks. In the summer of 2009 she was hired as a temp for the National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship program, doing typical grunt work. Five years later she manages the program, which annually places hundreds of science and engineering grad students in government labs to carry out cutting-edge research.
What Rachel is most known for around ASEE, however, is her “night job” as a professional musician and singer/songwriter. Like most in this field, she caught the bug young. “In fourth grade they let you try a bunch of instruments, and I was going to start with the flute, but I couldn’t make a peep. It was the drums or trumpet, and I knew Mom and Dad would say no to the drums, even though a trumpet is just as loud.” Trumpet led to guitar (under tutelage from her father) and a revelation one day at the age of 12 while listening to pop music that she could write better songs than those she was hearing on the radio.
She loves studying music because it teaches her something new every day. “At first you start writing and you’re not thinking about structure or key, but there’s so much that goes into a song, from writing to recording, that it’s fascinating.” An album, which Rachel has been working on since 2012, will be released early next year. The recording not only requires most of her free time but also gobbles any monthly budget surplus. “It’s been worth not taking vacations and not spending money on anything other than eating and bills. That’s why I work as hard as I do during the day, because it allows me to fulfill myself completely.”
A Chicago native and long-suffering Cubs fan, Rachel now enjoys the Washington Nationals and life in D.C. She likes the opportunities ASEE gives her to travel to the annual conference and explore new cities. This past summer was her first trip to Indianapolis, and after the grind of the conference was over, she found herself – where else? – sitting with a guitar in hand and writing a song on the banks of the White River.
See her work at http://rachellevitinmusic.com/