You Do What?
A Woman in Engineering
Haley Jones
The
reaction I am usually confronted with when I tell people that I am a lecturer
in telecommunications engineering is a mix of surprise and bewilderment. The
surprise goes with the word engineering - I don’t fit into the box into which
they would place a typical engineer. The bewilderment goes with the word
telecommunications – it sounds jolly sophisticated and I apparently don’t fit
that image either. Things usually improve when I elaborate with the terms
wireless communications and mobile phones. Everybody knows that there is
plenty of room for improvement in mobile phones and goodness only knows
somebody has to do it.
When I was an undergraduate, the proportion of women studying engineering was around 10%. Unfortunately, in the eleven years since I completed my undergraduate engineering degree the percentage of women studying the traditional engineering disciplines in Australia has not increased. The reason – image. Engineering does not have the prestige and glamour of medicine or law, for example. Both of these disciplines currently consistently attract greater than 50% women enrolments, having the benefit of many a high-profile prime-time television soap opera (Law and Order is one of my favourites, as was NYPD Blue until Jimmy Smits left...). Engineering, on the other hand, is a rather invisible discipline. I once read a quote from a 1930s Institution of Engineers, Australia (IEAust) publication which lamented the image of engineering amongst the general public and recognized the need for improvement. Sadly, things have little changed.
When people do know what engineering actually is, they tend to see it as dirty and labour-intensive, in a word, masculine. A wander through nearly any current Australian engineering department will actually support this view. Engineering culture is masculine. The reasons for this are obvious and understandable. However, engineering, despite its poor profile, underpins every possible aspect of the modern, “convenience” lifestyle. Hark back to the question raised in Monty Python’s “Life of Brian”, “What have the Romans ever done for us?”. Replace “Romans” with “Engineers” and the answers are practically identical. It is becoming widely recognized that diversity (in anything) is beneficial and integral to future success. With engineering playing such an essential role in our society it is important that women, constituting half of our society and therefore comprising our largest “diversity” group, have a say in what that role is and where it takes us as a society. There are two main issues concerning women in engineering. The first is how to attract them and the second is how to keep them there. These issues are, I think, quite distinct.
So, (1) how do we make engineering attractive to women?
A common suggestion is that the culture must change. The expectation behind this suggestion is that if we change the culture first then the women will come. However, any culture is necessarily a reflection of the people of which it consists. If the “typical person” profile doesn’t change, the culture is unlikely to change. The key is to make the image more attractive to bring more women in and the culture will change as a matter of course. Yet a culture will largely not affect you until you are a part of it. So what image appeals to women? It is well known that women tend to be more attracted to careers in which they can feel that they are making a worthwhile contribution to society. I have already emphasized how much engineering contributes to our society. It would take very little effort to capitalize on this aspect. For example, electrical engineering benefits the environment through design of more efficient ways of generating and using electric power (solar energy, more efficient appliances and technologies); telecommunications is about enabling us as a society to is about enabling us as a society to communicate more easily, cheaply and conveniently, leading to greater understanding between different cultures and peoples of the world; mechanical engineering is about building machines and devices to cut our workload and make our lives easier, meaning that we can spend more time with our families and friends, doing the things we enjoy; and biomedical and environmental engineering sell themselves under this premise. Women also tend to prefer a “clean” working environment. This is easy to accommodate in the information age where technology has taken over a lot of the “dirty work” for us.
Further, as far as I can recall the other women with whom I did my undergraduate degree all had parents or siblings who were either engineers or who worked in the industry. (One of the parent engineers was even a mother.) This is a telling example of how important a profile is. That is, if you know someone who has a particular job then the occupation’s profile is raised your mind. As I mentioned before, everyone knows about medicine and law – television has given them high profiles – and so they are often considered as potential careers by people of both sexes. Those careers with lower profiles don’t get the same interest in large part because they are not known about. This concept was confirmed and supported in the ACT SET report on teenager’s career choices, (discussed in the article in J59).
(2) Now, our second issue: how to retain women in engineering.
This is definitely to do with the culture. And I don’t
think the answer is quite so simple. I suspect that we need a few brave souls
who are willing and able to cope with the masculine culture, to act as role
models to attract more women, gradually changing the culture as a matter of
course, as stated above. However, while I dislike the constant implication
that children come under “women’s issues” (men are parents too) family
friendly policies such as flexible work hours, better access arrangements and
recognition of a female presence wouldn’t hurt. To that end, I’m pleased to
say that at least the days of strip-club lunches are over (I hope).
Beyond this, I currently don’t have much in the way of answers. Certainly I
need female company at times and fortunately have other women lecturers in my
Department with whom I can chat about anything from domesticities to my latest
research – and this is very important. Having other women only in service
roles in one’s workplace, as essential and important as these roles are, is
not quite the same as having other women as peers and mentors in immediate
contact.
Having heard all this, you might be asking what attracted ME to engineering?
Ironically it was glamour that attracted me, in a roundabout way. I wanted to
be an astronaut – still an occupation with a very glamorous image. There not
being any “degree for being an astronaut” at the time, I had to find out what
degree was most likely to get me there. I decided that electrical/electronic
engineering was the way to go. It certainly couldn’t hurt to know what to do
if any of those flashing lights or warning buzzers went off in the deep dark
recesses of space. Furthering my study into the specific field of
telecommunications engineering was fuelled by a combination of interests.
Firstly, the idea of being able to explain the aspects of our world in a
mathematical sense and to use these mathematical models to produce something
useful was rather appealing and, secondly, I have always had a fascination
with the idea of having all knowledge at our fingertips. The world wide web is
well on the way to fulfilling this vision and it would not be possible without
telecommunications.
I haven’t quite made it to being an astronaut, and at this stage, don’t intend
to. The glamour image has somewhat worn off for me. I am very happy where I
am. I love the contact I have with undergraduate students. I have had a
wonderful group of people in my classes in my first year of teaching and am
convinced that this is where I need and want to be, at least for now. The
feeling of successfully helping students to understand the often challenging
concepts that telecommunications engineering presents is very satisfying. I am
also now in a great position to be able to help with attracting a more diverse
group of young women into engineering. I look forward to the challenges and
potential rewards that this must bring.
Dr. Haley Jones is a Lecturer in Telecommunications Engineering in the
Department of Engineering, ANU, Canberra.