Of the millions of engineers
worldwide, only about 14% are women.
To some, this statistic is prima
facie proof that women are unjustly prevented from joining what is
generally regarded as a desirable and socially beneficial profession. To others, it merely shows that the
difference between men and women extends to aptitudes and career choices. But to Stanford mechanical-engineering
graduate Debbie Sterling, that statistic represents a challenge she is tackling
with her company, GoldieBlox.
The firm's mission statement,
prominently displayed on their website below a pie chart showing the infamous
14% number, says that its goal is to "get girls building." GoldieBlox's line of construction toys
are designed to appeal especially to girls, and come with storybooks about
female engineering role models.
These kits include "GoldieBlox and the Dunk Tank,"
"GoldieBlox and the Movie Machine," and a GoldieBlox zipline action
figure—the character herself as a doll with long blonde tresses, dressed in a
tee shirt and overalls and definitely not
possessed of a Barbie-doll-like figure.
Although I have not bought toys for young children for many years and my
judgment on such matters is therefore suspect, the kits look a little on the
pricey side to me. You can lay out
as much as a couple hundred bucks for the Solid Gold(ie) Package, which
includes nearly every item in their catalog. But hey—if it can really turn your little Mabel or Doris
into an engineer, it's worth it, isn't it?
GoldieBlox has been around for
only a couple of years (Sterling founded it in 2012 with help from
Kickstarter), and so it is too soon to tell whether the firm, and other similar
girl-oriented science-technology-engineering-math (STEM) products now
available, will push that 14% number higher. But GoldieBlox, as a privately funded self-supporting
free-enterprise company, is a welcome addition to the sometimes heavy-handed
efforts of the federal government to do the same thing. While I have not received funding from
the U. S. National Science Foundation for many years, I have kept up with its
various programs and policies enough to know that the paucity of women in
engineering and other STEM fields is of great concern to that agency. According to one source, NSF will spend
over $800 million in fiscal year 2014 on education and human resources, and it
is safe to say that a good fraction of that will go toward programs aimed at
increasing the participation of women in STEM fields at all levels.
Rarely does any discussion of
this topic stray into the fundamentals of the ethical concerns involved, so I
will try to do a little of that here.
One argument in favor of increasing the number of women in engineering
is purely utilitarian. It has two
premises and a conclusion. Premise
One is "Women and men are equally capable of being engineers." Premise Two is "Only 14% of
engineers are women." The
conclusion is "A lot of women who could be engineers are not becoming
engineers." At this point,
the pleas from industry that they cannot find enough good engineers are brought
in to justify spending tax money on special programs designed to encourage
women to enter STEM fields.
This argument has the advantage
that it relies on statistics.
Premise Two is an undeniable statistical fact, and as for Premise One,
you can find psychological and educational studies that support the contention
that women as a group have the brainpower needed to do most engineering
jobs. But to get from the
conclusion of this syllogism, which is factual, to a call to action—"we should get more women into
engineering"—requires that we either ignore all the other possible things
that the potential-engineer women could do with their lives, or perform a
complex global optimization problem involving the entire working
population. So this argument
doesn't take you as far as it seems to promise at first, at least without a lot
of public-policy help smuggled in at the last minute.
Another argument, which in my
view is much stronger, is based on the generally accepted notion that irrational
prohibitions and thoughtless misallocation of opportunities and role models are
wrong. To give a personal example
of the first, my wife was the daughter of a highway engineer. When she was in high school in the
1960s, she wanted to take a drafting class, because she had seen the kind of
drawings that her father did at work and she thought that might be a good thing
to learn. She was told that
"girls don't take drafting," and ended up in a home economics
class. While the feminist movement
of the 1970s had has many far-reaching effects, not all of which were positive,
I think it is a good thing that such arbitrary sex-related employment exclusions
are largely a thing of the past.
The lack of opportunities and
role models for women is a similar problem, although these fall more into the
category of sins of omission than commission. As GoldieBlox founder Sterling learned when she was a girl,
construction toys were made and marketed for boys, not girls. Now that her company is around, that is
no longer the case, although time will tell whether enough enlightened parents
will buy GoldieBlox kits for their daughters to make a difference.
Programs that connect up girls
with working women engineers can make a tremendous positive difference here. Just meeting a woman who was able to
make it through engineering school and get an engineering job can be a great
encouragement to a young woman who finds attending mostly-male engineering
classes intimidating. The NSF
money that is spent on those sorts of encouraging activities addresses these
sorts of passive injustices. While
statistics proving their effectiveness may be hard to come by, you can talk to
women who are now engineers to whom such things made their careers possible.
By
and large, engineering is a profession that contributes to human
flourishing. As mothers, women
have historically done most of the work in contributing to the flourishing of
the class of humans called children, and so it is no great stretch for women to
contribute also in the more indirect way of an engineering career. I wish
GoldieBlox well, and hope that in future years I may end up teaching some women
who can fondly recall the time they discovered GoldieBlox and the Dunk Tank,
and their lives were forever changed.
Sources: I learned about GoldieBlox and its
founder, Debbie Sterling, from an article by Nicole Villalpando that appeared
in the Austin American-Statesman
print edition on Dec. 5, 2014.
(Full access to the online article requires a subscription.) I also referred to the American
Association of Universities website at http://www.aau.edu/WorkArea/DownloadAsset.aspx?id=14335
for statistics on the NSF budget, and the GoldieBlox website
www.goldieblox.com.
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