IN MANY COUNTRIES, professional opportunities for women have opened up enormously over the course of the 20th century. But how much improvement has actually occurred and how has the situation changed for women engineers in particular? In the case of the United States, the National Science Foundation (NSF) has provided some illuminating numbers.
In 1995, in the United States, according to the 1998 NSF report, Women, Minorities, and Persons with Disabilities in Science and Engineering, women made up almost 46 percent of the general workforce and received almost 55 percent of all baccalaureate degrees, up from less than 43 percent in 1966.
In science and engineering, however, women are less well represented; and there are broad differences across disciplines. In general, more than 22 percent of science and engineering bachelor's degrees were awarded to women, who accounted for 35 percent of bachelor's degrees in the physical and earth sciences, as well as mathematics and computer science. By contrast, only 17 percent of engineering bachelor's degrees were awarded to women. (On the bright side, that number has grown from less than 1 percent in 1966.)
In the U.S. workforce, 22 percent of scientists and engineers are female, but only 9 percent of all engineers and less than 7 percent of electrical, aeronautical, and mechanical engineers.
The low percentage of women in electrical engineering continues to concern IEEE Spectrum. So this year we report on a panel discussion among six women engineers at the 1999 International Symposium on Technology and Society, in New Brunswick, N.J. It was held July 29-31 and moderated by Julie Sheridan Eng, of Lucent Technologies Inc. The panelists examined their reasons for choosing engineering as a profession and described some of the difficulties they encountered during the course of their careers, and the methods they used to resolve them.
In addition to the general discussion, presentations by two of the participants depict the situation for women engineers in Canada and analyze the salary gap for women engineers in the United States [see "Gender and diversity in Canada" , and "Similar pay, yet shorter careers" ].
Julie Brown (SM) is vice president of technology development at Universal Display Corp., an entrepreneurial flat panel display company in Ewing, N.J. From 1991 to 1998, she worked at Hughes Research Laboratories as research department manager for high-speed microelectronics for satellite communications, having earlier received a Ph.D. in electrophysics from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. She is actively involved in educational outreach programs and was instrumental in establishing the IEEE Student-Teacher and Research Engineer/Scientist (STAR) program, which encourages members to work with local schools to promote a positive image of the engineering profession and to encourage girls to consider a career in engineering or science.
Monique Frize (SM) is a professor in the department of system and computer engineering at Carleton University, Ottawa, and a professor in the school of information technology and engineering at the University of Ottawa. She worked as a clinical engineer for 18 years, initially at Hôpital Notre-Dame in Montreal (1971-79), and then as director of the Regional Clinical Engineering Service in Moncton, N.B. In December 1989, she was appointed the first holder of the Nortel-NSERC (Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada) Women in Engineering Chair at the University of New Brunswick, and is currently the holder of the Nortel-NSERC Joint Chair for Women in Science and Engineering (Ontario).
Karen Liu (M) is a staff research engineer in product planning and marketing for wavelength division multiplexing products for Tellabs Inc., in Hawthorne, N.Y. After earning her B.S. degree in mechanical and aerospace engineering with a specialization in engineering physics from Princeton University in 1982, and a Ph.D. in applied physics from Stanford University in 1988, she became a research staff member at IBM Corp.'s Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Hawthorne, N.Y. There, she engaged in research on devices and subsystems for wavelength-division multiplexed communications. In 1997, the group was acquired by Tellabs to form the core of a new development site for optical products. In 1999, she moved into the wavelength- division multiplexing group. She also represents the IEEE Communications Society on the steering committee for the Journal of Lightwave Technology.
Bhavya Lal is an associate at Abt Associates Inc., a government and business consulting company based in Cambridge, Mass. She has a bachelor's and a master's degree in nuclear engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), as well as a master's degree from MIT's Technology and Policy Program. At Abt Associates, she has worked on and led technology evaluation projects for the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Agency for International Development, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the United Nations. With these clients, she has worked on projects in Africa, Asia, and the United States.
Sarah A. Rajala (SM) has three degrees in electrical engineering-a B.S. from Michigan Technological University, in Houghton, earned in 1974, and an M.S. and Ph.D. from Rice University, Houston, gained in 1977 and 1979. That year she joined the faculty at North Carolina State University, Raleigh, where she is currently professor of electrical and computer engineering and associate dean for academic affairs. From 1993 to1996, she served as director of the Industry/University Cooperative Research Center for Advanced Computing and Communication. Her research interests include engineering education, the analysis and processing of images and image sequences with application to the areas of color imaging, image coding and compression, motion estimation, and target acquisition and tracking.
Julie Sheridan Eng (M) is a technical manager for Lucent Technologies Inc., in Breinigsville, Pa., responsible for development of products for cable TV, access, and data communications products. After getting her B.A. in physics from Bryn Mawr College, she switched to electrical engineering, obtaining a B.S. from the California Institute of Technology, and her M.S. and Ph.D. from Stanford University, specializing in high-speed optoelectronic devices. She is past chair of the IEEE Committee on Women in Engineering.
JULIE BROWN: I started off as an undergraduate math major. My dad encouraged me to study math because he was a computer scientist. I took my first math course and found it extremely esoteric and transferred into engineering.
During college and in the workplace, I learned several useful lessons. The first was what my dad taught me about competing: grade grub because my male colleagues would also. Every test I would get a minus three points for something and think, "Oh, well, it was really my mistake."
"No," my dad would say. "If you think you were right, go in there and get those points. That's how they are getting higher grade point averages."
Then I also went looking for a boss who had daughters. That was very powerful advice. I thought, "Well, I will also look for an environment where there are a lot of women in the department so I can have women mentors and women colleagues." This was back in the early '80s.
Well, I ended up at a very conservative defense company in New England. I was the only woman out of 50 people in my department. I lasted there about nine months. I spent my days having things glued to my desk and then someone made up a little sign that said "Snow White and the Three Stooges" because I shared an office there with three men.
I left the company mainly because I did not like the work, but the daily games didn't help. That was an important lesson: to focus on doing things I was interested in. So I went back to graduate school.
My pivotal experience there was being taught that I should choose my battles well. At one point, my male colleagues liked to put porn games up on the computer and play strip poker incessantly. I brought this up with my professor and he said, "I am really not going to do much about this, choose your battles well." So I ended up deleting the operating files in the computer every day until the games stopped.
After graduate school, I worked in a research laboratory in southern California for eight years. But for one year now I have been with a small business. My two bosses are businessmen and not technologists. It is a wonderful and rewarding experience.
When I joined the Women in Engineering Committee of the IEEE, I learned that many women engineers end up in small businesses because they like the environment.
MONIQUE FRIZE: When I grew up in the '50s, people were thinking about going to the moon. It was so fascinating! But my whole family were writers and not interested in science. Every time I asked a question, they said, "Well, we don't care about that, just go find out in books." So I discovered I had to be a scientist because I was going to have to find these things out all by myself.
Then I went to college and I was one of eight women in science the first year. Out of 150 students, only two of us survived. We were told we were there to meet a husband. I didn't care about marriage, I was a very independent woman, and I was going to have my career.
After two years of studying pure science, I met a young man who was in engineering and he took me to the lab and showed me how you could create all kinds of signals on the scope, and that was it. I was instantly an electrical engineer. So I switched, but it wasn't easy. They told me that no women had ever gone through engineering. Girls did chemistry, so I should be a good girl and do chemistry. I did chemistry for one more year and I hated every moment of it.
When I did go into engineering, I said, "I'll be the first one, it doesn't really bother me." Mostly it was a good experience, especially the professors and the students. We were 13 students--a small class. One guy was so obnoxious I just couldn't repeat in this room what he said to me, but everyone else was "like a brother."
One professor would say, "Good morning, gentlemen, oh, and lady." He had seven daughters. Maybe he had too many. He was my worst professor.
Another professor was a mentor to me. This man helped me to become a good speaker and I won the East Ontario IEEE prize with my senior thesis on the first satellite project ever done in Canada. That really got me hooked.
Then I went to industry, and I won't say the name. It was really boring. It was a company in the communications industry, but they had few projects, they just wanted to hire us in case we developed some nice patents. So I immediately asked for a fellowship to go to the Imperial College of Science and Technology in the UK and get a master's degree.
But I felt totally chained in that company. My boss was a sexist. He had two favorite guys that he discussed the stock market with every day. But with me, if I was late 5 minutes and I wanted to stay after hours, he said, "No, the elevator goes up at 8:30 and goes down at 4:30." So I went into biomedical engineering, which was so connected to humanity, and that's how I became a very happy engineer.
Then I came back to Canada and I did 18 years of work in hospitals as a biomedical engineer. I worked on my Ph.D. in biomedical engineering on the side during that time, and I finished it by long distance at Erasmus University. Then I decided I had to look for something else, so I became the first holder of the Nortel-NSERC (Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada) Women in Engineering Chair at the University of New Brunswick. I became a professor, and that was the happiest moment of my life. I think I've never been happier than sharing what I know now with young people.
I teach an ethics course and there are frustrating moments with gender issues. I see some very hurtful comments on the course evaluations by five or six students out of 100--sometimes by women from other cultures. Some people just cannot accept the gender issue.
KAREN LIU: In my career, I have not spent a lot of time thinking about women's issues, unlike Monique, who has incorporated it in her career. Until now my focus has been on getting by and being one of the guys, and that happened very naturally, starting in high school and college.
In college I found that as a woman in engineering, yes, I was a minority. But engineers as a whole were a minority. We were this weird species on campus compared to the humanities students. Therefore, we were all in the same spot, and gender didn't really matter.
I went straight from undergraduate to graduate school, partly because few people in my family were engineers and I didn't feel that I had enough of a handle on what engineering was. I also did not see any jobs that I was particularly interested in.
In graduate school there were about 10 percent women, and again there were gender issues, but it was minor compared to the standard graduate school issues of "What am I going to do my thesis on? When can I graduate?"
The one example that I can remember from graduate school that probably relates to the gender issues is that we had oral exams in many classes, which was wonderful preparation for professional life. But that means that unlike a written exam, where getting the correct answers is all that counts, your presentation style makes a difference. So my guess is that it is easier to be a woman in technology than a woman in some other field because in technology getting the right answer can count for more.
I remember taking an oral exam; and it was being given by a graduate student teaching assistant rather than a professor. He threw me a question I knew the answer to very well, and in retrospect what I should have done was to give the answer and then back it up. Instead, I started at the top and did a derivation. I got a quarter of the way through when he interrupted me with the answer. He had come to the conclusion I didn't know the answer and failed me on that question. So immediately that was a big lesson that style counts for a lot.
After graduate school, I went into industrial research. More recently I have moved into product development, and then, just in the last few months, into product marketing. In the research arena, I did not feel any particular gender pressures. Everyone was competing as an individual. Your identity was abstracted down to your publication list, and perhaps your publications are listed by initial and last name. So many people may not even know you are a woman until you present a paper at a conference.
In the product development world, it is both easier and harder to be a woman. What is easier is that the goal of the work is team-oriented and, therefore, there is more of an appeal to the rest of your personality. You are doing something because your team members need this output from you. In research, perhaps your work is driven by your ego. So product development is a nice environment because you are not a lone "techie." You can see the value of your work in the product, but even more in the short term, in your enabling other people to get their jobs done.
The one difficulty that I ran into in the issue of style is when I asked my manager why I was not promoted. He said, "Oh, I thought often of promoting you, but I do not believe that you drive other people enough to be a manager." We talked about it a number of times. I spent about a year trying to drive people. I was not happy doing so.
I realized a little belatedly that the alternative to pounding is to pull results from people, and to me that was a profound concept. It sounds trivial, I am sure, but I had not realized it until I watched this guy run a meeting and I was stunned at how effective it was to not pound, but to pull the results out instead. That was in line with what I was seeing about myself: I like for my results to be pulled by the need of my co-workers. And I thought, "I should learn to do that in reverse."
Recently, because of this decision, I moved into product marketing.
At this early stage, it appears to me that marketing is style-oriented rather than purely technical. When I look at who my colleagues in marketing are, it is almost cookie cutter: everyone is around 30 years old, and clean cut. They all play golf. So again what I am seeing is that it is very hard for women to be one of the guys when we leave the pure technology side behind and enter into a more composite role with either management or business aspects.
BHAVYA LAL: When I was born, my mother was disappointed I was not a boy. My grandmother was probably just as disappointed and said, "Why don't you raise her as a boy?" And it seemed to my parents to be a good idea. So while all my female cousins were playing with dolls, I was playing with building blocks and Legos.
All the men in my family were engineers, so it was decided that I was going to be an engineer, too. But I thought I would be a rebel and study nuclear physics.
After I finished high school in India, I came to the United States to study nuclear physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. But all the physics classes were at eight in the morning and it was very cold. So I decided to take engineering classes, which began around 10, or in the afternoon. I wanted to be a nuclear engineer, and that was good enough for my parents. "As long as you are an engineer, we are happy."
Anyway, I did well. I got an undergraduate degree and a master's in nuclear engineering. Then I felt that I was old enough to defy my parents and I did a second master's in technology and policy. So, now, instead of being an engineer, I study engineers, which is a lot of fun.
I want to comment on being a woman in nuclear engineering. I was one woman out of 200 men in the nuclear engineering department at MIT, which was a little difficult. But I had been prepared for it, even in my younger days. All my female school friends were taking art and gardening. I was taking wood shop and metal shop. So I was comfortable being one of the boys. But once I left MIT, I did field work at nuclear power plants around the country, both in the United States and in Germany, and that is when I realized there were virtually no women in the nuclear industry.
One of the highlights of my life was when I was at a conference and this guy walked up to me and said, "I would like to have this certain photograph." He assumed that since I was a woman at a nuclear energy conference, I must be a secretary. Usually I would be dumfounded and turn red in the face and go back home and complain to my friends. But I was prepared for something like this and I said my rehearsed answer, "I would like to have my feet massaged."
After getting my policy degree, I came to Abt Associates, which is a cross between a think tank and a consulting firm. A lot of the work I have been doing is for the National Science Foundation. We do a lot of large-scale evaluations of science and technology programs; and most of the engineering programs, of course, are male dominated. So I was studying mostly men.
But I am gaining seniority at Abt and my clients like me. So one of the clients said, "Okay, I'll give you X dollars and you can study whatever you want." I decided to look at the gender salary gap in engineering and that is one of the things I am going to talk about later today. There were some really surprising results. I was expecting to see a huge gender salary gap in engineering, but data from Abt shows there is not.
SARAH RAJALA: I grew up in a small farming community in the upper peninsula of Michigan, one of three children. We were all girls in my family, and although there are no engineers in my family, the expectation growing up was that the three of us could do anything. Those of you from farming communities may have experienced this: there simply is no difference whether you were a male or female.
I went to high school in town and those of us from the country were looked down upon. When I talked to the counselors, I was told that women were teachers or nurses and that was about it, and that is what I should be as well. I have to put the time perspective here. I graduated from high school in 1970. I was also told by my high school counselor that I should not look outside of Michigan for college because I would not fit in. Fortunately, we have a lot of good schools in Michigan. I went to Michigan Tech, which is very much an engineering school.
I went there as a math major. Many women at that time started out in math, but I didn't want to teach or be a computer programmer--the other growing profession that a woman could have. But I loved math and wanted to be able to use it. So I ended up choosing electrical engineering, not knowing much of anything about the field except that math was used a lot--and also in great part because people told me I couldn't do it.
At that time at Michigan Tech, the ratio of men to women was about 10 or 12 to one, and in electrical engineering I was the only female student in my class. A positive impact for me was that Martha Sloan, a former president of the IEEE, was at Michigan Tech when I was there. Although I never had her in a class, she was a presence.
But the environment at Michigan Tech was somewhat bizarre because it was so isolated and male dominated. I had good and bad experiences there, and they gave me an arsenal of things that I knew were good and bad about being a female in this discipline.
Very few people believed that I or any female could or should make it in engineering. You were only there to get your Mrs. degree. Fortunately, I got tied in with a faculty member doing some biomedical engineering research. I got very excited about that. As an undergraduate, I worked at a company doing work in the biomedical field and that motivated me to go on to graduate school at Rice University, where I got my master's and Ph.D. Rice was a very positive and different experience. It is a small comprehensive university. It has an engineering school, but they have many other disciplines there as well. It was a much more positive environment for women.
There was a group of women in graduate school, and this was the first time I had ever been around women studying the same things I was. That was extremely important to my development. I also had two strong faculty mentors at Rice who did not doubt my abilities--and, believe me, at that time I had a lot of doubts.
I ended up not staying in biomedical engineering. My expertise is actually in telecommunications and image processing. The reason for that was a negative experience in a research lab at the medical center. The doctor who headed it was one of the most sexist men I had ever met and I just did not like the environment. I did not like the way he treated the female physicians or anybody else, so I switched my focus. But I continue to apply my work to the biomedical area.
I had lots of opportunity at Rice to be in the classroom to assist faculty mentors with teaching and decided that is what I really wanted to do. So after my Ph.D., I took a job as an assistant professor at North Carolina State and have been there ever since. I was on leave one year as a visiting professor at Purdue doing research, and during the summers I have worked in industry as a consultant.
I was the first female faculty in electrical and computer engineering at North Carolina State, so there were interesting issues to deal with. But overall people were supportive.
An interesting situation occurred when I got pregnant with my first child. I was the first woman in the College of Engineering at North Carolina State to have a baby and the dean and department head had not dealt with this issue before--and this is only 13 years ago. At North Carolina State, we did not have a maternity leave policy for women in nine-month academic positions. So the question was, "My baby's due at the end of September, early October. What are we going to do?"
So I talked to the dean. He is an electrical engineer and has daughters, and I think that helped a lot. He relied on his experience dealing with male faculty members with severe illnesses. He said "Let's handle it like a heart attack." The point is that we are flexible with our faculty, and when they have an illness that interrupts their work schedule, we work out some shifting of responsibilities. I didn't teach for that semester.
JULIE SHERIDAN ENG: I also come from a small town, Bryan, Ohio, halfway between Toledo, Ohio, and Fort Wayne, Ind. My father owns his own business, and my mother is a teacher. Growing up, I had no exposure to science or engineering, and very little interaction with anyone with a Ph.D.
I learned about careers in engineering through the local mechanical engineering professional society, which sponsored mathematics exams for sixth grade to 12th grade children. My school made it mandatory. You took these exams. in the classroom. If you did well, you went to the regional level and took another test. If you did well again, you won prize money and were invited to go to an awards banquet with the local engineers. I can tell you the money was really the driving force.
I continued to do that from sixth grade through 12th grade. You can imagine that an experience like that not only reinforces your own aptitudes, but provides access to people you otherwise would not know. These people told me engineering is an interesting and challenging career. They also said it was wide open to women.
My parents were supportive of my career decision as long as it took me to college and I could financially support myself afterward. But I was leery of going to a fully technical university. So I found a dual-degree program. You go to a liberal arts college for three years to get a full broad liberal arts education and study something like physics or math. Then you transfer to a technical university for two years in an intense technical curriculum. At the end of five years, you get two bachelor degrees, one from each university.
I went to Bryn Mawr College, an all-women's liberal arts college outside of Philadelphia, and then, after three years, I went to the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. At that time Caltech was over 90 percent men. That is one of the biggest transitions I ever had to make in my life. But once I got used to it, I had an excellent academic experience there.
After my sophomore year, I went to work at one of the national labs outside of Chicago. Coming from an all-women environment, I had never imagined that somebody would view me differently because I was a woman. A graduate student was leading our group, and another guy and I were working on the program. Whenever the grad student explained something technical, he would look that guy in the eye. And when he said, "Do you guys understand?," he looked directly at me. I'd get so aggravated!
The head of the department did not think women should get Ph.D.s because you work a lot of late nights in the laboratory. He believed that if both men and women are there, they are bound to fall in love and cut down on the amount of good science that is done. I have to admit, I did meet my husband in the lab, but somehow we were both still able to finish up our thesis work.
Another pivotal experience was that Julie Shimer from AT&T came to my school recruiting for a Bell Labs summer research program. [Julie Shimer is now a corporate vice president and general manager at Motorola Inc. At AT&T, she was department head of VLSI process technology development.] I was accepted into that program. At that point in my career, I was still planning to stop at a bachelor's degree. One major advantage of studying engineering is that you can immediately support yourself. But I went into this lab and saw the excitement of scientists working on fiber optics and the excitement of setting up an experiment and taking data and computerizing things and analyzing data.
That initial experience was pivotal in my decision to get a Ph.D. And through it I also learned about the Bell Labs Graduate Program, a fellowship program that provides full tuition scholarship plus stipend to a handful of women and minorities pursuing Ph.D.s in science and engineering. I was awarded a Bell Labs fellowship and was supported through graduate school by AT&T. The only requirement for fellowship recipients is that you have to work at Bell Labs for one summer during graduate school. Along the way, they pair up each recipient with a mentor in industry. This program is still offered by both Lucent and AT&T. I encourage anybody interested to check it out on the companies' Web sites.
So at the end of graduate school, I felt a warm affinity to AT&T, which had paid for my entire education. My husband and I were looking for positions in the same geographic area and specialty. So we targeted large companies and technology-rich regions and decided to go to AT&T Bell Labs [now Lucent Technologies]. I work on semiconductor lasers for fiber optics. I have been there for about four-and-a-half years now, and just recently went into technical management.
NEIL COWAN: I'm writing a book on the history of the U.S. woman engineer. My question for Sarah: after your two "heart attacks," did you have any role in formulating health care policies for your organization?
RAJALA: Indirectly. I served on an advisory counsel for women's affairs at the university. In fact, a fairly large group of women on campus helped to formulate that policy. We tried to make it not just a maternity policy but a family leave policy, and it has evolved over the years, based on input that women across campus have provided to the university.
JOSEPH HERKERT: I am from North Carolina State University and a past president of the IEEE Society on Social Education and Technology. Monique, some of your students had difficulty with gender issues when you raised them in your ethics class. Could you tell us what the nature of those difficulties was?
FRIZE: I have been developing this course for 10 years now and spend about 2 out of 36 hours of lecture on gender issues. The rest is spent on professional engineering and ethics. But to me the gender issue is a very big part of ethics, and I introduce it with the work that I have done concerning the low participation of women in engineering. We talk about harassment and what it means, what is equity and what is a quota, which are very different policies. A lot of young men and most of the women in my class respond very favorably, but on the course evaluations, some people comment that I spend too much time on gender issues.
SHERIDAN ENG: We had a speaker at the conference yesterday who has been in the engineering profession for over 50 years. She mentioned that, while a lot of the overt things have gone away, she was surprised when her daughter told her she was experiencing some of the same issues the woman herself had experienced 30 years earlier. Do the panelists feel that things have improved [for women engineers] in the working environment over time?
FRIZE: Most definitely. I have seen changes from the time I finished school up to today--and the last decade has shown the most change. There has been more awareness of the importance of diversity.
RAJALA: Things have changed a lot. In fact, it is a bit scary that many of our undergraduate students believe that there are no problems and everything is taken care of. I worry about their ability to cope if they do run into a problem.
SHERIDAN ENG: As a follow-up question: if the salary gap [see "Similar pay, yet shorter careers"] and the worst part of the overt discrimination are now gone, and the engineering colleges are open to women, then why is the percentage of women engineers staying pretty constant--as opposed to, say, medicine or law, which are now close to 50/50 in their professional schools?
FRIZE: There are quite a few reasons. For example, stereotyping is still a serious issue. The image of engineering not being connected to humanity or to people is another. Teachers treat boys and girls differently in school. There is a lack of information on the opportunities in engineering for women.
LAL: In graduate school, I visited high schools to talk about what it is like to study engineering and become an engineer. When I talked to the girls afterwards, many of them told me that their fathers were saving money for their brothers to study engineering but were discouraging their daughters from going into engineering by threatening not to pay for their college education.
RAJALA: The parents of school-age girls as well as under-represented minorities strongly influence students' decisions on whether or not to choose engineering, math, or physics as a career. Many parents do not understand the options. The profession as a whole needs to be out there educating people on who we are as engineers.
LIU: When a young person chooses a career, she is choosing an identity. Some of my friends and colleagues have said that, having spent so many years in the engineering profession in a largely male environment, we are no longer comfortable relating to nontechnical women.
And that has been a hidden cost. We have structured ourselves in a certain way and may not have developed other aspects of our personalities.
Perhaps young people are picking that up and are choosing not to go into the profession. Now the hope is that if you define success as integrating the positive aspects of both male and female natures into these work teams, that cost will no longer be there.
SHERIDAN ENG: So do we need more women engineers?
FRIZE: Yes. People ask me, "When will you stop? When will you be happy with the numbers?" And I say, "I will never stop until I know that there are no barriers." So it is not 50 percent, it is that women will be comfortable being an engineer, if that is what they want to be.
BROWN: We need more creative engineers in the workplace, which to me means diversity. One reason why diversity in the workplace has worked so well is that a lot of companies are seeing true financial gain from having people who look at problems differently.
SHERIDAN ENG: Many companies are seeing the reality of the labor statistics. A large fraction of the workforce becomes eligible for a pension by 2005. Companies look at these numbers and they understand that the fastest-growing segments of the labor population are women and minorities. So the companies that are able to attract and retain all types of new talent will be the most successful.
NEIL COWAN: America cannot afford to waste talent, it is that simple. It is not a function of the number of glass ceilings, glass walls, or glass sidewalks. In the richest and most powerful country in the history of western civilization, we have to maximize every bit of talent we have in this country, and the only way to do it is to make sure every opportunity is open to everybody.
JOYCE CURRY LITTLE: IÕm from Carlson University, Baltimore, Md. Several of the people mentioned going to single-sex schools. Has that helped or hurt your careers?
FRIZE: I wouldn't be here today if I hadn't gone to an all-girls school. I went from kindergarten all the way to grade 12 in single-sex schools and adapted very well to the university with the 150 guys and eight women. For some young women, it's important to be in an environment without the competition with boys or concern over what the boys will think of you.
SHERIDAN ENG: From my college-level perspective, I chose Bryn Mawr because it had the three-to-two program with Caltech. I was happy that a lot of intense and very academically minded women went there, but I wasnÕt specifically looking for an all-womenÕs college. Now, having gone to Bryn Mawr, I think it was an excellent experience and I'm very passionate about it. People ask, "How well can a womenÕs college really prepare you for the workforceÑespecially in a mostly male profession?" But an environment where there are no boundaries, no preconceived notions of what women can't do, and no overhead of typical coed college life, allows you to explore your own aptitudes and interests. This allows you to develop a comfort level with yourself and your own abilities that you will be able to take into any situation.
TOM JEPSEN: I am here as an independent scholar, but I also work as a systems engineer in the telecommunications world. I was very interested in Karen's comments on people-pounding as a management style. But in engineering, and particularly in software, people-pounding has not been an effective style for getting a quality product out on time. So what can we do to change management in the engineering world to make it not only more effective but also more inclusive?
BROWN: I find that some people require black-and-white answers. It is not pounding them, but providing them with a very clear focus. I found that most engineers require that, and it took me a while to get comfortable with it.
SHERIDAN ENG: I think many managers pound because it's easier than leading. True leaders have to strip away all the extraneous information and emotions to form a razor-sharp goal, and then focus a team around that goal with a sense of purpose. They have to lead by example, and be as committed and driven as they are asking others to be. I think that managers who can do this will get a level of commitment and cooperation among people that pounding will never produce. And, if a management style is more effective, it will be recognized.
Now I would like to change the topic. We did touch on the working family, but only a little. So let's go down the panel and find out, first, how you're balancing work and family and, second, if you have made any specific compromises in your career or your family life that you would be willing to share.
BROWN: Well, I'm married, I have no children, and while being in a business environment and making money is important to me, my husband, an artist, has the opportunity to just do whatever he wants with his life. So we really reached a very good balance in our life, both doing what we want.
FRIZE: I tell women to choose their partner as carefully as their careers. It worked for me. We both parented and shared duties.
LIU: I'm married to a technologist and have two young children. We share the parenting, but perhaps less than we thought we would. That largely has to do with perhaps just personal prioritization. In some aspects of our joint life, my husband takes the lead. It just works out that, for the children, I make the major decisions and he might spend more time implementing them.
LAL: My husband is also an engineer and we met in the lab. He has a degree in mechanical engineering and computer science and he is also a consultant. So we have very similar lives. This is a burning question for me.
I had a baby two-and-a-half months ago and I need all the help I can get. We have child care at work and my workplace is a very baby-friendly place, but there are still issues because both my husband and I work. I'm on maternity leave for the next two weeks, but I don't know what's going to happen after that.
RAJALA: I've been married for 20 years. I have two girls, aged nine and 13. I am sure my husband and children will tell you that I don't balance my life as well as I should. Work is a priority. My husband is an engineer. He works for an R&D firm, so he has had considerable flexibility in dealing with some of the day-to-day issues, especially because I have traveled a lot more than he.
So he has had to pick up and carry on, but two things are important in all that. My mother has been willing to come in when I'm out of town for three weeks so my husband is not left with the sole responsibility.
Second, we have learned to pay for things that we really do not like to do. I have someone who comes in and cleans, and someone who takes care of my yard. You establish your priorities and decide what you can afford to pay for, that will alleviate some of the stress in your life.
SHERIDAN ENG: My husband is also a technical manager at Lucent in the same division. We found that in some ways it's easier to be in the same field. In graduate school, for instance, you each understand what the other person is going through.
But in other ways, it's more difficult. There are the typical issues that come up when both spouses work. You have time constraints and may not have enough patience or sympathy for the other person because you're facing all the same problems yourself.
I have a final question. Right now, considering where you are in your career, would you advise young women to come into engineering?
LAL: Well, there need to be more women engineers in the field of policymaking--there's so much that engineers can bring to policymaking in terms of the problem-solving skills needed and setting up an analytical framework. The country can definitely use it.
SHERIDAN ENG: I tell young people that engineering is a very exciting and challenging field, despite what is portrayed in the media. You get to work on many types of problems and there are many avenues of career development. There are opportunities to go into academia, stay in the technical arena, go into management or policymaking, go into a start-up company. Things are not perfect. But you can go ahead with your career and succeed in the midst of these issues.
Are there any other questions or any other comments that the panelists or audience would like to make?
DOTTIE BOYLE: I'm a retired operating room supervisor. This is my first time here, but I have to compliment you on what you people went through to get where you are today. I think women have to learn to praise themselves because other people don't. Nobody can take away your knowledge. And the more knowledge you get in your field, the more respect you're going to gain.
The Carleton University World Wide Web site of Women in Science and Engineering, at www.carleton.ca/wise/, provides literature, statistics, and information for women engineers in Canada.
For more information on internship and co-op programs at Lucent Technologies Inc., visit the company's Web site at www.lucent.com.
Two reports from the National Science Foundation (NSF) contain information relevant to engineering careers for women. Science and Engineering Indicators 1998 and Women, Minorities, and Persons with Disabilities 1998 are both available from the NSF Web site at www.nsf.gov/sbe/srs/stats.htm.
PHOTOGRAPHS: CRAIG WALLACE DALE
0018-9235/99/$10.00 (c) Copyright 1999, The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc.