On a warm autumn Ann Arbor morning earlier this semester I went to the Fishbowl to finish a programming assignment for one of my classes. I was wearing a sundress and makeup because the weather was nice and, more importantly, I subscribe to the belief that looking fly as hell and writing computer code don’t have to be mutually exclusive activities.
As I sat down at a computer, the man beside me turned and said, “Oh, these are all actually CAEN computers in this area,” referring to the software used by the College of Engineering that only engineering students can log on to. It was an innocent enough statement at face value, but it represents something that many students face every day: I didn’t look like what this person thought an engineer should look like, and as a result, he immediately placed me into a category different from himself. In engineering, as well as in many other fields, there is a pervasive and subconscious mentality that there exists a set definition of what a “real engineer” is, and if someone doesn’t fit it, they inherently don’t belong.
As a woman, I have my own experiences with discrimination in engineering, as do many of my fellow students. “I wish my son was as lucky as you,” one of my parent’s friends once mentioned offhandedly to me. “It’s unfair that girls take the spots of guys like him just because schools need to have a certain number of female engineers.”
It’s an exhausting logical fallacy, the underlying belief that these positions could be taken away from someone innately entitled to them in the first place, and one that overlooks many of the realities that women and other demographics historically underrepresented in engineering face.
The fact that there are a number of successful engineers who are women of color, who are gay, who are from low socioeconomic backgrounds, does not mean it’s “easier” to be any of those identities. In many cases, being a woman in engineering means that you still have to prove that you deserve to be where you are at every turn. To get straight As in order to be considered just as smart and capable as your male colleagues who have average GPAs. To navigate a workplace where you are told not to wear heels or makeup because your gender identity can still be considered a handicap and not an asset. To have to be higher up in a company than the man you graduated with in order to receive the same paychecks as him. Not that any of those accomplishments are remotely an issue if you are like many of my female colleagues — bosses and you know it — but the lack of equality in engineering isn’t just a woman’s problem or a person of color’s problem. As a community, we need to examine our culture critically.
In a study titled “Men, Women, and the Culture of Engineering,” sociologists looked at the foundations of the gendered forms of interaction that are prevalent in engineering and other historically male-dominated fields such as medicine and management, where men and women with “virtually identical qualifications … show dissimilar job status.” In engineering specifically, technically oriented workplaces encourage the importance of mechanical ability, rational thinking over emotional thinking and abstract knowledge over personal relationships — all values that are historically associated with a “masculine” identity. The researchers note that in many environments, the “style of … presentation is as important as substance,” and those who are seen as embodying feminine traits are correspondingly also seen as being less competent engineers.
Although many engineers would like to believe that a culture valuing technical skills would award merit based on ability and performance alone, the facts speak to a much more biased truth, one that can be quantified in part by looking at the wage gap among different demographics within engineering.
The pervasive belief that a wage gap between women and men in the United States exists because women “self-select” into lower paying jobs than men accounts for only a small amount of the disparity. According to research by Claudia Goldin, a Harvard University labor economist, the majority of the pay gap between men and women can be attributed to “differences within occupations, not between them” in many of the highest-paying professions, including engineering. Women in engineering can expect to earn one quarter less than their male counterparts — a statistic that doesn’t begin to account for the additional inequalities that people of color, men and women face in the workplace.
Despite what we in engineering may wish to believe, these statistics provide just one indication that the culture of engineering is one that doesn’t view technical ability as the only indication of value.
Googling the phrase, “what makes a good engineering culture?” returns a number of results, all of which, interestingly, have almost nothing to do with engineers themselves. From “push relentlessly towards automation,” to “optimize for iteration speed,” few of the suggestions address any application of human behavior. The nature of engineering has changed, though. As engineers, we work in a society where the social element of our work has the potential to have as much impact as the purely mechanical aspects. We no longer expect curriculums to prepare students for a future based strictly in manufacturing. In today’s global, knowledge-based economy, a diversity of experiences, creativity and innovation are considered important for jobs, if not more so. Although these occupational expectations have evolved, many leaders in the STEM fields still shy away from addressing the social injustices that are pervasive in our community.
Engineering graduate student Luke Bruski is one of the students working to change the conventions that lead to these types of disparities. As executive director of Own It, a student organization focused on social justice topics as they relate to engineers, Luke explains that his group’s mission is “a challenge to the Michigan Engineering community to be our most authentic selves.” Formed in 2013 by a group of Engineering students, Own It has hosted a number of on-campus events, seminars and speakers focused on promoting inclusion and advocating for diversity in the College of Engineering.
Luke emphasizes that Own It exists not to advocate for a narrow or specific interpretation of inclusion, but to provide a space in which people of all identities can speak for themselves. Their major goal is to host a keynote event once a semester and have it represent a theme that they do supporting events around. The group’s first keynote event featured Ed Seaberg, vice president of IT services at Rockwell Automation, and Stephenie Landry, a director for Amazon Baby, who discussed their experiences surrounding LGBTQ issues in the workplace in front of a packed Chesebrough Auditorium. This semester, Own It’s semester theme and keynote event will address the topic of gender dynamics, focusing on the experiences of women and transgender engineers.
The students of Own It are not armchair philosophers or passive activists, either. Perhaps the most powerful element of these events is the speakers and the leaders themselves: engineers from within and beyond the University who have personally experienced the issues they are advocating for and who are actively invested in the belief that engineering can be a culture encompassing a variety of identities — gay, female, black, transgender and many others — and regard them as unique and valuable contributions to our profession.
For many in STEM fields, there’s an attitude that these topics are not contenders for the most critical issues we face in our profession, and that addressing subjects in the humanities is somehow a less noble pursuit than circuit design or differential equations. But engineering doesn’t exist in a vacuum and having a viewpoint that fails to consider ourselves and the people we are designing for as part of the same system is especially nearsighted. Social justice isn’t outside the scope of a valuable engineering culture; it’s an increasingly integral part of it. There is well-established research that shows that diverse teams produce better results in academia and in the workplace, and an economic motivator for social change such as that is often the most powerful catalyst for the people already in power to stop viewing the success of others as a zero-sum game that comes at the expense of their own.
But what I challenge our community to do, and what groups like Own It work to promote, is for all of us to look well beyond that reason. That begins with giving these topics the space they deserve and demand in our community and by listening to and learning from the people who experience them on a daily basis. One valuable aspect of our engineering culture is that it holds in high regard an ideal that we should be continuously learning and striving for improvement for the best possible system or solution. We are not exempt from that process. Until we embrace these topics and address these issues that affect so many in our community, our profession is inherently lacking. There is currently one dominant narrative in engineering that is vastly unreflective of us as a whole. We’re not all white, straight, cisgender males. We shouldn’t all be expected to act like we are, and we don’t all want to be. Our identities are not just something to be accommodated, but something to be embraced and seen as integral and inherently valuable to engineering as a profession.
Julia Zarina can be reached at jumilton@umich.edu.