Novel Approaches
An engineering educator seeks to increase diversity with stories for kids and research on faculty.
By Mary Lord
Pamela Cosman always loved writing. She took lots of literature classes in college and has authored more than 250 research papers and book chapters. Alas, her first stab at an adventure story for preteens had all the excitement of a technical journal article. “You have to learn to write for children,” a friend candidly advised.
So Cosman, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of California, San Diego and an IEEE fellow, took writer’s workshops to develop an ear for dialogue. She joined critique groups and shared drafts with her four sons—racking up rejections before finally landing a publisher. It took more than a decade to produce The Secret Code Menace, a tale about children whose authentic knowledge of error-correction coding helps thwart a bank robbery. But her persistence reflects an overarching goal: Get more people from different backgrounds to pursue engineering. “One of the ways to do that is to make it fun—and make it fun earlier,” she explains.
Cosman says her own early experiences helped forge a career-long effort to diversify engineering education. Struggling in a French school, where “the only saving grace was math class, math being the universal language,” she got a gut feel for barriers and why some immigrants would gravitate to STEM. She also was a rare figure on campus. The fourth woman in her department when she joined UCSD in 1995, Cosman, an authority on wireless communications, video compression, and image processing, was the only one left a few years later. At one point, UCSD ranked worst among the top 50 engineering schools in its percentage of female faculty.
To change that dynamic, Cosman first sought to understand the reasons behind it. One clue emerged when she heard a faculty candidate rush through the second half of her hour-long research presentation after being repeatedly interrupted by a “huge number of questions.” Curious about how typical this treatment was, Cosman teamed up with sociology professor Mary Blair-Loy and analyzed 140 videotapes of job talks at six departments across two universities. They found that, after controlling for seniority and department, women got more questions than men, and departments with a higher percentage of men asked more questions of both male and female candidates. “We were surprised at just how aggressive the questioning sometimes was,” says Cosman. Some candidates fielded 40 or 50 queries before even reaching the Q&A session.
The data prompted Cosman to address job-talk hostility in trainings on unconscious bias and best hiring practices that she conducts for search committees in her role as the engineering school’s faculty equity adviser, a position she has held for the past seven years. She also codirects UCSD’s Center for Research on Gender in Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics, and Medicine. “One goal is to raise awareness among grad students and postdocs who are going on the job market,” says Cosman. “But my main goal is to modify the culture, to make things a bit less aggressive”—a climate she contends is “more of a turnoff for women and underrepresented minorities.” One recommendation: Have a seminar host intervene if needed and hold questions until the end.
Her data-backed approach has been better received than the role playing and lectures led by outside consultants. In fall 2012, just 12 percent of UCSD’s 201-member engineering faculty were female. Since then, women have made up more than 30 percent of new hires and now account for 16 percent of a much larger, 242-person faculty—including seven in Cosman’s department. The number from underrepresented backgrounds grew from 16 to 22, and now account for 9 percent of the total.
Cosman, who has presented her work on candidate evaluations and the gender effects of interruptions at multiple national forums, extended her equity work to undergraduates while associate dean of students from 2013 to 2016, winning a university Affirmative Action Award. Her latest research project, as UCSD’s principal investigator of a National Science Foundation S-STEM project, involves six schools called the Redshirt in Engineering Consortium that provide scholarships, summer programs, intensive advising, and other supports for low-income, first-year engineering students.
Long active in mentoring female engineering students, Cosman often gives talks on work-life balance. In her case, that included having her first child four years into her Ph.D. studies at Stanford, a second six days before commencement, a third pre-tenure, and the youngest post-tenure. In fact, it was an invitation from her eldest son’s second-grade teacher to talk about her research that launched her journey into children’s fiction. When she explained error-correction coding by having the class write and decode secret binary messages, “the kids were really engaged,” she recalls.“They didn’t view it as an annoying math worksheet. They viewed it as a fun puzzle.”
The Secret Code Menace may never hit the best-seller list, but Cosman has written an accompanying teachers’ guide and is polishing a sequel. A third book, more related to computer science, is in the works.
Mary Lord is deputy editor of Prism.
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