PATCHING THE PIPELINE
Originally, three girls signed up for the first Harnett County group of FIRST Robotics competitors late last year. By the time the team — made up of students from Overhills and Harnett Central high schools — received its shipment of robotic parts and the rules for this year’s contest, only one girl on a team of nearly a dozen remained.
She’s Lydia Gutierrez, a shy Overhills junior who was first introduced to engineering and robotics in the eighth grade when she joined a similar team for a much smaller event. That group, she said, used Legos for their creations. In FIRST Robotics, it’s a lot more “real” — metal, wood, nuts, bolts, heavy machinery, complex tools and a whole lot of design and computer programming.
“It was a little intimidating at first,” says Gutierrez, whose only female counterpart is the team’s director, Campbell assistant professor of engineering Lynn Albers. “Being the only female on the team is interesting and eye opening. I never had a clearer picture of just how much a STEM program like this is dominated by males.”
Research shows that the intimidation Gutierrez felt is one of many factors that keep young women from pursuing STEM fields in high school and college. It’s also a factor for STEM graduates who enter a male-dominated workforce and leave the field within their first 10 years. Twenty percent of all engineering graduates are women, yet only 11 percent are practicing engineers, according to a recent study, “STEMming the Tide: Why Women Leave Engineering” by Nadya Fouad and Romila Singh from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Lack of advancement, low salary, workplace climate, a bad boss, low confidence and, yes, intimidation were among the top reasons women left the field, according to the study.
It’s called the “leaky pipeline” — a metaphor to describe the reason women drop out of STEM fields at all stages of their careers. A 2009 study by statistician Berry Vetter claimed that 280 of any 2,000 ninth-grade boys and 210 of any 2,000 ninth-grade girls will have taken enough math to pursue a technical career. About half of those boys and only 45 of the girls will major in science in college. Forty-four of the boys and 20 girls will complete their science degrees. Five of the now men will go on to obtain PhDs in science, and only one woman will do the same.
Albers, who joined Campbell’s faculty in January, admits she’s battled the the lure of leaving the pipeline on a few occasions. The MIT graduate who earned her master’s degree in math from Manhattan College was one of 60,000 employees laid off by Nortel Networks — where she was a systems application engineer — in 2001, leaving her at a crossroads in her career. Instead of leaving the field altogether, she went back to school at North Carolina State, where she interned at the N.C. Solar Center. She made a third of what she made at Nortel, but Albers says she reconnected with all the things that made her love science and math in the first place.
“Professionally, it was the happiest I’d ever been,” she says. Soon, she became that “one woman” in Vetter’s research when she earned her Ph.D. from N.C. State in mechanical engineering.
Albers has found a home at Campbell, where she’s helping mold the new school’s curriculum and leading Gutierrez and other high schoolers on the Campbell-sponsored FIRST Robotics team. Albers has experienced what it’s like attend a male-dominated school like MIT (at least it was in the late 1980s) and have your work dismissed by colleagues because of gender. She, Carpenter and the current School of Engineering staff are working to create an inclusive environment, she says, “removing as much bias as possible.”
“The hardest thing for me at MIT was being part of the 20-percent female population,” she says. “All the professors were men, all you saw in the classroom were men. Living arrangements — men. It just wore you down a little bit. At Campbell, we want a supportive environment for women and men.”
Fouad and Singh’s study found that the most satisfied female engineers were those who received support from supervisors and co- workers, received ample opportunities for training and development, and saw clear paths of advancement in their respective companies. The least satisfied, according the study, were those who experienced excessive workloads and whose efforts were undermined by their supervisors or co-workers.
Why are these findings important? Why does it matter that so many are studying and working to lessen the gender gap in certain STEM fields?
The National Science Foundation estimates STEM workers make up just over 4 percent of the U.S. workforce (about 5 million people). This small group is critical to the U.S. economy. They’re better paid and have better job security than other fields on the whole. Corbett’s 2010 study “Why So Few?” reported that nine of the 10 fastest-growing occupations in the U.S. require significant scientific or mathematical training.
“Attracting and retaining more women in the STEM workforce will maximize innovation, creativity, and competitiveness,” Corbett wrote.
“Engineers design many of the things we use daily — buildings, bridges, computers, cars, wheelchairs, and X-ray machines. When women are not involved in the design of these products, needs and desires unique to women may be overlooked.”
Diversity is key, Carpenter says, and not just with gender. African-Americans make up less than 5 percent of the nation’s engineers, and Latinos represent just over 7 percent. Schools and companies that recognize the importance of diversity and act accordingly perform better.
“The research is clear,” Carpenter says. “Diversity is your key to innovation and creativity. And in engineering, innovation and creativity is huge. A diverse team trumps a team of ‘experts’ in solving a difficult problem every time. Every time.”