The Magic of Mentoring

Hi and welcome back!

Today I want to talk to you a little bit about how women are becoming successful in their engineering careers. According to an article titled "Women in Engineering" by Lisa M. Frehill, Peggy Layne, Ane Turner Johnson, and Sarah Hood, the key to a women's success in this field lies in the mentoring that she had access to. If she had more mentoring opportunities, she was more successful. I think this is a really important component that further proves how universities are incorporating the needs of females into their programs. Below is a brief overview of the article.

Mentoring has nearly become famous for its influence on their success. Articles appeared in in-flight magazines of major airlines and academic journals. Universities have started advertising different programs they have available. Everyone know that mentoring has a huge influence, but what exactly does mentoring provide the student?

First, we need to talk about the two kinds of mentoring. There is career mentoring and then there is psychological mentoring. Career mentoring, in order to be successful according to this article, should focus on finding someone in the student's future career path to act as a mentor and a guide. Psychological mentoring, on the other hand, should be focused on creating a bond between the counselor and the student in order for the student to gain emotional support and to build self-confidence. Through the combination of both of these types of mentoring, women find their careers in engineering more enjoyable and are thus more productive.

In all, I think this article helps to argue my point that the movement towards engineering is being driven by the confidence level of females. Due to society encouraging bravery, self-confidence, and boldness, women are starting to feel more comfortable pursuing this career. Furthermore, these mentoring programs act as stepping stones that help females get from where they are to where they want to be in their career despite the obstacles they might face!

I plan on looking into various examples of programs offered by schools that help females make the transition and help them find success. Come back next week for more! :)


If you have any questions on the article discussed above, or if you would like to read it for yourself, you can find it here.

Building Confidence in Young Girls - Ball Gown Bash

Hi everyone! Welcome back to my blog.

Today I want to talk about a program that I organized that took place today. Over the course of the last few weeks, I have been managing this event as well as working on my senior project. Oh, and before you say "Elizabeth, giving away prom dresses has nothing to do with engineering" just hear me out :) I'm sure you will catch the connection by the end!

The event was titled "Ball Gown Bash" and it was a non-profit event organized for the sole purpose of getting young high school girls a prom dress. The event was hosted today and nearly 50 girls showed up and only three left without a dress. These girls are living heartbreaking stories in which life is not always the prettiest. A few of the girls were homeless, others were in a situation where they couldn't facilitate prom financially. However, my co-organizer and I realized the importance of showing girls how truly beautiful they are starting from the youngest of ages. This event focused on bringing out young girl's confidence through providing them resources to feel beautiful. While the event was truly breathtaking and some of the stories were incredible, I bring it up because I think it reveals something important about our society.

Despite all of the new programs for women within different fields, we all still struggle with self-confidence issues. This not only seeps into our confidence socially but in life in general. Personally, I even believe this can influence academics on a major level. Girls who are not comfortable with who they tend to blend into the crowd - not stand out. Thus, women don't always want to pursue career paths that are non-traditional because they don't want to draw any negative attention to themselves.

I believe that through a variety of programs that are being put into place, women are starting to take pride in their individuality and are therefore becoming increasingly bold in their actions. However, I think this could be an interesting reason for why less women pursue engineering. When facing obstacles, the best thing to have on your side is confidence. I think it's super important for women to gain this.

My event today helped me see a greater perspective of the different life story that each individual has. I think the best approach to drawing girls into engineering would be to build their confidence because in accepting who they are I believe they might accept that they want to follow their dreams no matter how they might be viewed for doing so!

Below are some photos from the event. I hope these smiling faces bring as much joy to your heart as they did for me <3

The girls who attended the event were able to look and choose any dress from the five shown here. Then they were able to find all their needed accessories at the tables in the front!

To promote the event to the local community a few days prior to the event the local news came, shown above, to ask for last minute donations and to get a few more girls to sign up to recieve a dress! 

Shifting Societal Standards

Welcome back everyone!

I would like to start this post with a question. Please take a moment to think about your answer before you read the rest of this post... 

If you were living ten to fifteen years how many males would you see in the makeup industry, how many females would you see in engineering, how many males would you see as "stay at home dads?"

While these are just a few ideas I think that it really shows how far society has come. In the past it was few and far between that someone would step across the very clearly marked gender boundary. However, this concept has not only become accepted in our society but encouraged! 

I would like to bring up Covergirl as an example. At the start of 2017, this makeup company introduced their first male model. Despite being highly contrivesal, this was a bold declaration for gender equality. In a typically female industry males are now continuing to pop up. On all forms of social media there are males embracing this new found attention and sharing their ideas. I personally believe that a lot of gender boundaries are being broken due to increases in technology and communication throughout the world (more to come on this).

I bring this example up in order to bring up the broader topic that my project is commenting on. Just as women are moving into engineering, both males and females are taking on new roles. I believe that females now have the confidence to puruse engineering because of an overall acceptance in today's society.

Could Bias Towards STEM be Starting at the Elementary Level?

Hi all! :) Welcome back!! 

Thus far we have discussed my internship and a few of the ways that we can see women in the engineering field during their adulthood but we have not yet discussed the influence of the elementary atmosphere on women that ultimately pursue engineering. Not only is there a vast number of stereotypes within engineering but toys that develop engineering skills are simply not geared towards females. 

A great example is LEGO, a company that we probably all know. What you might not have noticed about legos is that they typically have a male oriented theme. They are labeled as "boy toys" and are normally found in the corresponding aisle at the store while the girl's toy aisle is filled with pink and purple colors with lots of Barbies, cooking toys, and baby dolls. This signals to young children that girls are supposed to cook and take care of babies while the boys build things. The traditional gender roles of society are ingrained into the toys available to young children. Furthermore, when students go to decide which activities they would like to do or which classes they want to take, the ideas taught to them during childhood make it such that females take cooking classes while the men are in the wood shop or they're building cars. 

One female, Debbie Sterling, recognized this after attending her first few engineering classes at the university level. Not only does this change how girls think they are supposed to act in society but it limits what they learn. It has been shown that females at the university level typically struggle with spacial reasoning while men don't. But if you take it back to childhood you can clearly see that men understand this better because they have practiced how to take the 2-D image in the lego instruction manual and build the actual 3-D product. Girls didn't normally play with legos so they weren't able to practice this concept. However, Debbie Sterling did a study while developing GoldieBlox that determined that even when young girls were given traditional legos they weren't interested. After many studies, she also found that merely changing the colors of legos to pink or purple to intrigue the girls wasn't enough. She found that the young girls wanted to follow a story. Thus, she took the lego type blox that she developed and wrote a book where a female engineer is building objects that the girls can actually follow along and build with her. Not only were girls then developing their spatial reasoning but they were using their imagination. The story of how Debbie Sterling broke through the barrier in the toy industry is truly inspiring. I encourage you all to watch her TedTalk here. As you can see through this new product, there are people who want to encourage the next generation of female engineers.

So, it is clear that the struggle for women pursuing STEM fields doesn't just start when the enter high school but that it is a life-long battle. I hope that through this project you will start to see how deep this issue goes but that you also acknowledge the progress that is being made due to shifting barriers in today's society! 

MedTech Conference

Hi all! Welcome back, 

This past Thursday I had the honor of attending the MedTech conference put on by the Arizona Council of Technology. Not only did I gain an immense knowledge of technology in the medical industry but I saw a glimpse into how career networking really looks. 

Something that I noticed was that while there were a large number of females present at the event there were still more males. Furthermore, the sponsor showcase was where the duties of the females showed through. The females that were at the conference were mostly there for marketing companies. They were at the boots promoting the company and socializing with the other male engineers that were there looking for work. While this was an informational and marketing conference, I still found this interesting. 

On a side note, the innovations being made through engineers of all kinds is one of the reasons I love it so much. Currently, babies that are born "blue" (a serious lack of oxygen) are being treated significantly better because of engineering technologies such as 3D printing. After the babies are born scans of their hearts (deformities are all) are translated into a software than then prints out an actual model. This allows the doctors to look at the heart before they actually begin the surgery so that they can better understand how to approach the patient's particular situation. Innovation only occurs when teams are able to fully collaborate. Given that teamwork is so essential, I'd like to once again argue that it is incredibly important to have input from both genders. 

Stay tuned for more fun events and information!! 

SAT Performance Gap Between the Genders

Hi again!

In looking into the different characteristics that females and males bring to engineering, I found it important to look into different test scores. In a recent study of 2015 SAT exams, there was a 31% difference between the level at which males and females performed. According to AEI's Rick Hess these numbers are in fact "ugly" and represent a sad fact about traditional high school in current America. The males scored an average of 527 on the 2015 SAT exam while females only scored an average 496. Even into 2015 there is a statistically significant difference, particularly in math, in favor of males across all ethnic groups. AEI argues that this is because males are better prepared. However, according to College Board, this is not accurate. Rather, they argue that females are more prepared because in 2015 there were near 100,000 MORE females that took the exam that year. It might be just me, but this is mind-blowing. How is that, despite having a larger number taking the exam, females still struggle? In the next week, I plan to look into why colleges are going out of their way to recruit females despite their lower scores.

Here's a trend to think about. Over many generations, males have been scoring higher than females. This includes males of all ethnicities. Interesting? I think so. 

A Look Into Women in Engineering at the University Level

Welcome back :)

Today I had the opportunity to attend a "Women in Engineering" panel through Arizona State University. This panel consisted of three current female engineering students who currently attend the university and one admirative person who oversees the Fulton colleges of engineering. All three students were members of the Society of Women Engineers (SWE) that advocates for a higher female presence within the STEM fields in order to create a balanced team environment. Throughout the session, I learned a lot about the real experience of females within the engineering field, however, I also gained a glimpse into a possible motivation of this post. 

Upon asking "What do you think the driving force behind this movement is" I received a few surprised looks and a delayed response. I knew immediately that the reason behind this reaction was because it's not normally a question people have been asking. That's truly the motivation behind my project because while the implications of the movement can clearly be seen statistically just by analyzing the number of females entering the field, the actual reason behind this huge movement is a bit clouded. For example, ASU's current engineering program is twenty-one percent females which places the university slightly above average. However, it is difficult to pinpoint an exact reason behind this universities attempts to incorporate females into their engineering programs. 

One of the answers that I received was very interesting.. one of the freshman female engineering students stated that "engineering is a state of mind... you nearly need to have the confidence to succeed and others will treat you with respect despite the differences in gender. After all, why not all struggle through it together." While the rest of the group chuckled at the end of her response, the beginning really caught my attention. Does the answer to my research question really just rely on the fact that females now have the boldness to pursue a degree in a male-dominated field? Based on this question, I intend to pursue the social influences that may have contributed to the confidence boost that many are seeing. 

A more concrete answer that I received was from the only male sitting in the room (what a change!). Also in an administrative position, he offered an opinion sourced outside of the university.  He suggested that this movement is driven by the industry itself. He said, "companies are recognizing that by only having one gender's point of view they can only solve half of the world's problems instead of all of them." As evidence, he brought up a company that developed the seat-belt. A past friend of his worked on the project and despite all the testing that was run on crash test dummies and the numerous protoypes that were developed when the final product actually it the market it ran into a lot of complications. The designers of this seatbelt failed to consider how the seatbelt might work on a female, who had different body builds. Furthermore, they didn't account for how it might strap into a baby's carseat would strap in with the build of the seatbelt. All in all, the company realized that by exluding the female perspective they limited the success of the final product. In a world dominated by innovation and success, failure is not an option and so companies want to include both perspectives in order to further the influence of whatever product they might be developing. 

In the next few weeks, I also plan on looking into how both of the genders approach problems and the manners in which the approaches are similar and/or different! Keep your eye out for that! :)

-Elizabeth