Building More Equal Engineering Education

“Life isn’t fair.” I swear I’ve been told those three words a million times when things don’t go my way. When I was younger, I felt that was a dismissal of my feelings surrounding a situation (which honestly, it probably was). But now that I’m older and “wiser”, it’s a starting point. Life isn’t fair…so what am I going to do about it?

This applies past just my sister getting the bigger room in our house (which, let’s be honest, is a little unfair). It applies to all the different times people have tried their best and still lose, every time you’ve worked hard and still didn’t get that grade or job promotion, and, most notably, all of the different types of discrimination and inequalities ingrained in our world.

Before I begin talking about what our organization can do to work towards a more equal and fair world, I’ll give a little background on who I am and how I got to be a part of it

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I’m Genevieve, a 10th grader at Piedmont High School. Vaughn told me about how he was starting a non-profit and having his first workshop in a few weeks. I mentioned I’d be happy to help if he needed any more contributors, and a month or so later, Vaughn took me up on that offer. Now that I’m understanding more and more about the organization, I’m even more excited than I was initially.

When Vaughn first told me about all this, I was immediately struck by how impactful this organization could be; not only are older elementary kids young and impressionable, but they are full of creativity. This momentum of new ideas often gets lost through middle school, high school, and the pressures of being a teenager. Our organization can intercept this cycle and demonstrate a world of possibilities in engineering, hopefully providing motivation for kids to continue their passion through high school and beyond. It is especially remarkable since elementary schools generally lack engineering integration.

I was lucky enough to have engineering introduced to me in 4th grade. Every Thursday we had new engineering projects led by my fourth-grade teacher, and it made me not only love Thursdays (which previously were my least favorite day of the week) but also think more about what I could possibly be when I grew up. Which, honestly, “what do you want to be when you grow up?” is such an arbitrary question that we ask young kids—as if most young adults even know fully what they want to be or do. But regardless, ever since 4th grade, I told everyone that I wanted to do something involving engineering and science. And still, to this day, I want to study some sort of science, engineering, or medical degree as college becomes more of a prospect.

I’m aware this wasn’t everyone in my classes’ reaction to these 4th-grade engineering days; some people probably felt that the reflections, drawing of diagrams, and repeating experiments got redundant, or some kids that were in that class now want to study psychology or literature or history or or the whole plethora of other options we now get in college. But that’s the key: my classmates and I were given the freedom of choice.

We weren’t told when we were 9 or 10 years old that those engineering days gave us a choice, but they did. They showed us the possibility of what we could do in the future, past just reading books and learning simple math, which let us find our passions early on. Many kids do not get this opportunity and don’t discover their passion—whether that be engineering or something else entirely—until later on in their lives. And unfortunately, this usually affects kids who are growing up in schools with less funding and fewer resources.

We can work towards preventing this from happening. It’s a step in the right direction toward giving people equal elementary-school-level engineering education, which is particularly powerful for young girls.

I think it’s safe to say that feminism, especially in terms of science, has come a long way since our parents were growing up, but it still has a long way to go. Now, Vaughn told me not to include statistics, but I’m going to ignore him briefly because it’s in my nature to argue my points with numbers; quickly looking up the demographics of people in STEM, only 28% of them are women. Take that in for a second: we’re almost half the population but only a little more than a quarter of the people in STEM. How is that equal? And, looking further, of all women in STEM, only 16.5% are engineers or architects. It doesn’t take an experienced mathematician to tell that this is a completely disproportionate distribution across the genders in STEM and engineering (source for these stats: aauw.org).

I think there is a lot to be said about why these numbers are the way they are. Part of it, I believe, is that women still aren’t taken as seriously as men and aren’t given the same promotions, opportunities, or paychecks that a man in their position would get. I think also it has to do with how a lot of girls have an idea, sometimes subconsciously, that engineering is only for boys or is only accepted when it’s boys doing it. This stems from what’s pushed into our society when we’re young.

There’s a lot of discussion on how children’s toys and different colors assigned to genders have affected the perception of what occupations different genders are “fit” for, but I also am talking about the education aspect. Imagine if we were able to give equal engineering education to everyone from a young age, no matter their gender: this could completely change girls’ ideas of what they’re capable of doing since they’re being treated as equal to their male classmates in a STEM context from the beginning.

It’s unrealistic for me to expect that we can reach every kid in the world, but even just starting school by school, city by city, we could help influence people’s lives. I think ultimately, Encouraging Engineering is an organization that has an opportunity to create more equality within engineering and education, across genders and different socioeconomic classes. It is this exact thing that I hope to do with my time working on this project: to show girls that they’re able to be as smart (or smarter) and should be taken as seriously as their male counterparts in STEM, and to give kids, no matter where they live or how much money their parents make, the opportunity to find their passions.

Encouraging Engineering is just starting, but I think we can have a big impact, and maybe we can even make life a little more fair. I’m excited to see how we do. See you soon :)

- Gen