Round-up: Women Making Their Way in Engineering
Debbie Sterling used her Stanford engineering degree to start GoldieBlox, a toy company that makes engineering toys with strong girl-related themes.
We’re starting a new blog feature this week: a round-up of engineering-related articles or events that have recently caught our eyes. A theme presented itself this week to do with women in engineering and technology. Even so, we’ll reserve the right to make future round-ups more eclectic.
Around the Women in Engineering World
The first set of items includes stories about women in engineering around the world, from India to Dubai to the best cities in the US for women in tech. Also, look for profiles of women doing great things in engineering, at the beginning, middle, and end of exciting careers.
- A growing number of women are entering the Indian IT workforce
- Women in hijab who make mobile gaming apps is a sight to see
- 10 women who broke new ground in engineering
- Patty Lopez took a winding road to becoming an Intel engineer
- NSF Fellow showed her engineering and design interests at an early age
- Top 3 cities for women in tech? Would you believe Washington, DC, Kansas City, MO, and Fremont, CA?
Getting Women into the Field
Girls learn engineering lessons at NCSU outreach fair. Photo courtesy of NC State College of Engineering, The Engineering Place.
How to get girls interested in engineering is a challenge. Encouraging them to stay is even harder. Here are some stories about both these efforts, starting off upbeat with some outreach events and ending on a more sobering note with two studies analyzing what makes girls bail out.
- “Girl Day” at the University of Texas, Austin draws 4,300 girls
- Woman chemical engineer visits classroom, inspires a future engineer
- Natalia Perez-Fialto, 10, wants to be an engineer now
- Roominate takes the toy route to getting girls interested in STEM
- The Franklin Institute releases “Cascading Influences: Long-Term Impacts on Informal STEM Experiences for Girls”
- In Israel, teachers’ biases discourage girls from pursuing math and science studies
You Really Need to Read This One
This last item might be the most thought-provoking. Vivek Wadhwa has pioneered new ways of analyzing and talking about the engineering and technology workforce, going back to his first studies of engineering graduates in China, India, and the United States.
Recently, he’s weighed in on gender issues. To his apparent regret. Here he describes why he has decided to retreat from the debate, to the loss of all interested in gender equity in engineering and technology.
- Vivek Wadhwa: “Why I am stepping out of the debate on women in technology”
Did any of these articles surprise you? Teach you something new? Share your responses in the comments below or send them directly to us.
Eric Iversen is VP for Learning and Communications at Start Engineering. He has written and spoken widely on engineering education in the K-12 arena. You can write to him about this topic, especially when he gets stuff wrong, at eiversen@start-engineering.com.
You can also follow along on Twitter @StartEngNow.
And don’t forget to take a look at our popular K-12 engineering outreach books, Start Engineering, and Dream, Invent, Create.