Hierarchies are Hard to Shake
World War II’s ‘culture of order’ still influences engineering education.
By Debbie Chachra
In early April of this year, I visited the Trinity Site in New Mexico. Today, it’s a nondescript fenced-in patch of desert, open to the public once a year. If you look very carefully, you can see that it’s in a slight depression, the remains of the crater formed by the detonation of the very first nuclear bomb. And I thought about the long, long shadow that World War II cast over engineering education in the decades that followed.
One obvious example was the primacy of engineering science following the success of the Manhattan Project: math and science first, and then build and test. But perhaps equally important was the hierarchical, male-dominated structure that persists in engineering to this day. As Ursula Franklin, metallurgist and author of The Real World of Technology, has noted, soldiers returning from war displaced women who had worked to supply the war machine. While women adjusted to the role of 1950s housewives, veterans brought to industry a “culture of order, discipline, and minimal consideration of an individual’s contribution,” Franklin told the Atlantic.
Fast-forward six decades, and we live in a connected world where collaboration is becoming easier. Accordingly, we ask our engineering students to work in teams, and we often talk about leadership. But we rarely provide examples of either, leading our students to find their own models of teamwork and leadership. Many look to the military, hierarchical corporations, and the traditional patriarchal family.
My first-year students are all relatively inexperienced and unspecialized, but it’s easy for them to fall into traditional hierarchical patterns, not least because, as Franklin points out, such is the culture of engineering education and practice. Teams are also likely to be led according to societal norms of what constitutes a leader – namely an extroverted male who is not a student of color. But such hierarchical patterns undermine the value of teamwork.
So how do we help our students make the most of functioning in teams? In our first-year design course, my faculty colleague Ben Linder does a simple exercise to demonstrate the value of working in groups for ideation. He gives the students three minutes to write down the names of as many birds as possible on a card. Each student then exchanges cards with a neighbor, who has almost invariably listed a number of birds that are different — that is, even in a group of two, in this constrained exercise, the number of ideas available has increased. The whole point of working in teams is to leverage this expansion of ideas and approaches. This is also part of the argument for diversity: People with different backgrounds will come up with different ways to solve problems. Sometimes the converse (that homogeneous teams can miss important solutions) is apparent. The absence of a menstrual tracker in Apple’s health app, installed on new iPhones, is almost certainly the result of a team that either had no women or that didn’t allow their voices to be fully heard. (If you’re not clear on the importance of a menstrual tracker to women’s health, consider that “When was your last period?” is one of the first questions asked when girls and women visit a doctor over about a four-decade span of their lives.)
Students can be encouraged to think about decentralized models of leadership and teamwork such as those found in large-scale collaborative projects like Wikipedia, the open-source software movement, and the Occupy Sandy aid response. Students may feel as if they’re “stepping up” when they make decisions for the group, but they may actually be shutting down the contributions of other members. They can also actively ensure that all voices on their team are heard. An example of this is using “brain-writing” rather than brainstorming. In brain-writing, individual participants write ideas on sticky notes or index cards, which are then shared with their teammates to catalyze new ideas.
An important role of teamwork and leadership in engineering teams is to allow them to be unique, and to create things that no other teams could, by leveraging the unique knowledge and skills and life experiences of the people in the team. Rosie the Riveter, take your long-overdue seat at the table.
Debbie Chachra is an associate professor of materials science at Olin College. She can be reached at debbie.chachra@olin.edu or on Twitter as @debcha.