Women in Engineering—Will GoldieBlox Help?

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. 

Radio Shack: Thanks For The Memories

When leather-hobby-store owner Charles Tandy bought an anemic chain of nine radio-parts retail stores in Massachusetts for only $300,000 in 1963, he had a vision for what he could do with the brand.  The embodiment of that vision began when he opened the first Radio Shack store outside of New England on West Seventh Street in Fort Worth, Texas.  Among the crowds of customers who flocked into the new store to see the latest in stereos and electronics hobby products was a small boy with a burr haircut and an expression on his face that would lead one to believe he thought he had died and gone to Heaven.  That was me.

Any institution that attracts people to the field of engineering is doing good, at least in my engineering ethics book.  And over the past five decades, I would venture to guess that the huge international chain of Radio Shack stores has fostered the careers of more electrical engineers than any government program sponsored by the likes of the National Science Foundation.  It appears that the Shack's glory days are over, judging by last week's announcement that the firm is shedding about 1100 of its nearly 5200 U. S. locations.  For the last several years, I have sadly watched the slow decline of a firm that grew along with the cohort of electronics hobbyists who came to maturity in the 1960s and 70s and went on to revolutionize much of modern life.

The phenomenon of a hobby activity becoming a matter of urgent national interest happens fairly rarely.  It happened during World War II when a critical need for radio operators who knew Morse Code and radio technology led defense recruiters to the ranks of amateur radio operators, who excelled in both.  And one of the leading suppliers of equipment and parts to radio hams back then was the Radio Shack store of Boston, Massachusetts, named after the customary naval term for a ship's radio room.

For various reasons, the company fell on hard times during the 1950s, but leather-goods entrepreneur Tandy had the foresight, or good luck, to perceive that there was a big future in retail electronics when he bought the chain in 1963.  The success of the first new store in Fort Worth under Tandy's ownership led to a growing number of stores nationwide, and pretty soon anyone in a mid-size U. S. city no longer had to rely on slow mail ordering from catalogs to get a wide variety of electronics parts and kits, including tubes for the notoriously unreliable TV sets of the era. 

If every dollar I've ever spent at Radio Shack had been invested in stocks instead, I'd probably be richer financially, but infinitely poorer intellectually.  As I'm sure is the case with thousands of electrical engineers of my generation, the electronics hobby that the local Radio Shack made possible for me turned into a career.  And up through at least 2000, Radio Shack was the first place I thought of whenever I needed ordinary electronics parts.

But time goes on.  While the Shack entered the field of personal computers very early, in 1977 with the historic TRS-80, they missed the chance to become an established player in the field.  Since then, electronics has become so sophisticated and complex that very few people outside the classroom actually build electronic circuits for fun anymore (and maybe not for fun in the classroom, either).  This complexity is a good thing for electronics consumers, but it has ended the golden age of the hobby.  At its peak, a teenager with a soldering iron and a set of plans could turn out anything you could buy off the shelf from a store, ranging from a crystal radio to a color TV (the last with the aid of another company from a bygone era, Heathkit). 

Teaching electrical engineering as I do, I have the opportunity to learn how students today become interested in the field.  While I have not taken any scientific surveys on the matter, my impression is that most of our students don't narrow down their career choice until they get to college, where electrical engineering appeals to them as a profession that combines interesting work with a reasonably good chance of getting a job after graduation.  The ones who tinkered with electronics in high school or earlier are relatively rare, but stand out for their superior ability to do hands-on work in many cases. 

There are numerous institutional efforts going on these days to increase the ranks of students interested in STEM, which is now the standard acronym for science, technology, engineering, and math education.  Both government and private enterprises sponsor programs such as the FIRST Robotics Competition (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology), which is designed to bring together high-school students and professional engineers as volunteers in robot designs that are different every year.  The only things like this that were available when I was that age were high-school science fairs and Explorer Scouts, if you happened to be living near an Explorer post that specialized in such things.  I joined such a post, and benefited greatly from the knowledge that I wasn't the only teenage boy in Fort Worth who would rather spend an evening with oscilloscopes and voltmeters than girls (for a long time, anyway). 

In the nature of things, it's hard to evaluate scientifically the good done by educational programs of this type.  Part of the payoff for those who organize them is the knowledge that the students involved are doing something that is socially and technically positive.  Whether or not they all go on to engineering careers is almost beside the point. 

But I doubt that any number of top-down organized programs and government grants will be able to replicate the spontaneous, grass-roots way the electronics hobbyists of my youth spread in numbers and accomplishments in the middle years of the twentieth century.  Part of the reason, I suspect, has to do with the overall decline in what you might call the average quality of life in families.  An engineer has to believe that what he or she does is based on reliable, objective scientific realities, and must have a personality that is agreeable to working in such an intellectual environment.  It may be the case that certain cultural periods just naturally produce more of that type of person than other cultural periods.  And we may be living through a period of time in which the engineering type of personality just doesn't show up as often as it used to. 

I'm not a sociologist, nor a business expert, and I can't predict what will happen to the future pool of engineering students, or Radio Shack in particular.  But nothing will change the firm's legacy of encouraging and providing for the happiness and enjoyment of thousands of hobbyists during the golden age of do-it-yourself electronics. 

Sources:  The news about Radio Shack's closing of 1100 stores was carried by numerous organizations, including CNN at http://money.cnn.com/2014/03/04/news/companies/radioshack-store-closings/.  For those wanting to know more about the history of Radio Shack, you can consult (as I did) the Wikipedia article "Radio Shack" or an online collection of Radio Shack catalogs, including the first one issued in 1939, viewable at http://www.radioshackcatalogs.com/catalogs/1939/.  I also referred to the Wikipedia article on Charles Tandy.  For more information about the FIRST robotics competition in the U. S., see www.usfirst.org.

The Mythological STEM Crisis

What I'm about to write is considered rank heresy in some circles.  But at least one prominent expert has taken a similar position, and he has backed it up with extensive research.  So here goes.

If you have spent any time in engineering education, either as a student or instructor, you have probably heard about the alleged "STEM crisis."  STEM stands for science, technology, engineering, and math, and is the umbrella acronym for a range of academic subjects that (a) are obviously essential to the continuation of modern life as we know it and (b) are not mastered by enough students each year to ensure such continuation, at least in the U. S.  That is the story, anyway:  that we are teetering on the edge of a disaster in which our economy will crash and our technology will stagnate for lack of enough young people able to do science, technology, engineering, and math.

In a recent issue of IEEE Spectrum, a publication of the world's largest professional organization for engineers, author Robert Charette took issue with this claim, which he calls a "myth."  Why a myth?

A myth isn't a lie, exactly.  It's a story that may have elements of truth in it, but isn't necessarily wholly and literally true.  Nevertheless, there is usually a group of people who have a strong reason to believe in the myth, and repeat it over and over until belief in the myth spreads among the general population.  

Charette finds that, depending on your definition of what a STEM education or a STEM job is exactly, that many people holding STEM jobs do not have a bachelor's degree in STEM, or necessarily a college degree at all.  On the other hand, if you look at the pool of all graduates of STEM programs, most of them are currently working in fields other than STEM ones.  So it doesn't look like you necessarily need a STEM degree to get a STEM job.  And if you do get a STEM degree, unless you're lucky you are liable to end up in a non-STEM job anyway.

Anecdotes aren't statistics, but they make situations seem more real.  A student of mine graduated from my university a few years ago with a bachelor's degree in manufacturing engineering.  After an unsuccessful spring and summer looking for a technical job, he returned to school, attended another couple of years or so, and obtained his second B. S. degree, this time in electrical engineering.  Even with two STEM B. S. degrees, it took him over a year of looking before he finally found an engineering job last summer. 

If the STEM crisis was as severe as some would have us believe, people like my student would be snapped up before they graduate.  And average starting salaries in engineering would show a steady increase above average wages for as long as the crisis endured.  Neither of these things is the case, however. 

While some engineering students get jobs before they graduate with B. S. degrees, others, like the student I mentioned, have a lot of trouble finding suitable work.  And Charette notes that while average wages of STEM employees have risen faster than those of non-STEM employees over the last 30 years, the increase is not evenly distributed across all fields.  Engineers, it turns out, saw their wages rise slower than those of non-STEM workers. 

Charette suspects, and I agree, that the real reason the myth of a STEM shortage won't go away, is that it is in the best interests of those who employ STEM workers to have an oversupply from which to select the top echelon of graduates, while being able to let them go when business slows without concern that there will be a problem in rehiring when things turn for the better again.  Because the long-term employment model is now long gone, engineers can look forward to a series of short-term jobs with multiple employers anyway, and often the only way to get a raise in such an environment is to quit and join a different firm.  But as an employee, you always take the risk that you'll quit at the wrong time and be out of work for an unknown length of time. 

If the STEM crisis isn't all it's cracked up to be, does this mean that it is perverse and wrong to encourage more students to study STEM subjects?  Not necessarily.  For a variety of cultural and political reasons, K-12 education in the U. S. has fallen on hard times, and one way to help fix it is to encourage a renewed focus on STEM subjects.  There is little actual harm in running pre-engineering programs in high schools, and maybe some good results, although the longitudinal studies to prove whether such programs are really effective are so expensive that they are almost never done.  And other things being equal, providing more resources for students to study STEM subjects in college is a good thing too.  But overall, we might be better off leaving the system to adjust itself, rather than expecting that such programs will permanently put the alleged STEM crisis to rest.

As Charette points out, there is now a sizable educational and governmental establishment that is heavily invested in the STEM myth, and whose existence would be threatened if we all woke up one morning and had a good laugh at their expense by realizing that the STEM crisis is at least partly advertising rather than reality.  And turning such bureaucracies around is a political problem, not just an engineering problem.  But the first step in dealing with such problems is to realize that things aren't necessarily the way they are presented to us.

Politicians and governments can do only so much.  Most of the people I know who are truly content with their role in the engineering profession were not waylaid into it by a government-sponsored program.  Someone close to them, a relative or friend, got them interested in engineering, or perhaps they just discovered on their own that it is fun and (usually) remunerative to make things.  As long as a society allows enough freedom for people to choose their direction in life, and provides enough resources to educate those who can succeed in mastering the technicalities of engineering, there will be enough engineers to go around.  Maybe not as many as companies always want, but enough.  And the next time you read something about the STEM crisis, take what you read with a grain of salt.

Sources:  The article "The STEM Crisis Is a Myth" by Robert N. Charette appeared on Aug. 30, 2013 on the IEEE Spectrum website at http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/education/the-stem-crisis-is-a-myth.