Want more femgineers?
Looking back 21 years ago I never would have fathomed I would have become a femgineer or been involved in high tech. At the age of 8 I had decided I was going to be a lawyer, writer, and professor because I loved to read, write, and speak. I spent the next 10 years of my life working toward that goal. In elementary and middle school I wrote short stories, in high school I joined the debate team, and when it was time for college I chose Duke because it has a really great law school. So where did I get of course and decide to become an engineer, pursuing 2 majors (Electrical Engineering and Computer Science) then decide to move to California, work in the tech industry, then join startup, and then start my own company? Well the truth is I was NEVER encouraged by anyone to become a lawyer. In fact, as I’ve pointed out in this blog a number of times most of the men in my family are engineers. And when I told most people I wanted to be a lawyer people were actually shocked that I didn’t want to be a doctor or engineer despite coming from an Indian immigrant family.
But what led up to me actually switching? While I was growing up no one told me to be an engineer, my family didn’t even push me towards a particular career they just figured I’d end up in finance, engineering, or medicine. But there were a couple things that were happening on the sidelines. First my mom and dad really pushed me to excel at math and science mostly because they wanted me to keep up with the other Indian kids, which I didn’t really care about but it did make me more competitive in other areas like high school debate. Second, I’ll never forget the day I went to my cousin’s house and saw she had a computer, I really wanted one badly… Why? Because I wanted to play video games, type up my short stories faster, explore on the internet, and submit pretty book reports to my teacher. I just wanted a computer to live a full life and accomplish goals I had. Finally, there was the time that my dad took me to see his fab when he worked for Texas Instruments (my dad has actually worked for a lot of the big players in high tech: Sony, TI, Intel, Samsung, and Microchip). I was just blown away when I saw how the little robotic arm picked up each wafer (computer chip) and moved it over. I just sat there and stared at it for hours. Despite the curiosity of how things worked, the lifestyle of being an engineer was not glamorous to me. I grew up watching Ally McBeal…
So what did finally got me into engineering? Realizing I was a builder. I realized that all my life what I really enjoyed more than anything was building and creating things that made life more enjoyable. I always loved technology, I taught myself how to make my first webpage using Geocities in high school, I used to hang out with the nerdy boys who would burn CDs on the weekends, and spent hours on the internet reading, researching, and of course chatting with people who I wasn’t supposed to (a/s/l ring a bell?!).
I was literally sitting in my freshman economics class bored to tears and tired of just reading and writing papers. I wanted to build something. I wanted to create. And that’s what drove me to taking my first computer science class in college. The rest is history.
How do you encourage engineering?
But enough about me, this is about how we can encourage young women or girls to become femgineers and get interested in high tech. Well let’s start with what it means to be a femgineer. I coined the term almost 5 years ago and started this blog. To me being a femgineer means you are an engineer at the core, you enjoy building things in software or hardware, but you are chic and sophisticated, you have a personality beyond being a nerd. Maybe you like to travel, speak a few languages, play sports, enjoy cooking, and the list goes on. Its not enough to tell girls what they should become or what society needs, you need to sell them on the vision of what life will be like, and how you affect the world. In order to that you need to have role models.
When I was growing up there were hardly any women in engineering that were strong role models. Until I met my college professor Lisa Huettel. She was the first female engineer who inspired me. She was young, energetic, and I loved her method of teaching and the time that she took with each student. She was one of the driving forces for me switching into engineering in college.
We need more role models and we need to showcase them front and center. Point out their achievements both as an engineer and in life. Options are available for those individuals looking to make a difference in their life along with ways to help with the cost of an education. There are even opportunities for single mom scholarships to ease the stress from family while earning a degree. Its important to take a holistic approach, work isn’t everything.
How do you retain engineers?
When I was graduating from college I noticed a lot of my peers actually didn’t go on to become engineers both men and women. Even people who were better engineers in college than me! What did they go on to become? Investment bankers and consultants. Why? Because they saw absolutely no value in being an engineer. What they had experienced through internships were dull days of sitting behind a desk coding, little to no social interaction, and forget the opportunity for travel or making bank. Being a consultant had a glamorous lifestyle at least on face value.
Then I saw the same thing happen at large companies. Women who were engineers were leaving to become mothers or pursue other jobs where they could meet with people on a daily basis instead of sitting behind a desk.
Those who were initially interested in engineering are dropping out. Its not that they don’t like building or problem solving, they’re unhappy with the their job or the lifestyle. These people initially bought into the vision of building, problem solving, and creating products that improve people’s lives. But the reality of it was long hours, lack of appreciation, and unhappiness caused by sitting at a desk coding all day. Being treated like a cog will not inspire or motivate people.
We can encourage young girls and boys to pursue jobs as engineers all we want. But if we don’t do a good job of keeping them motivated they will drop out at some point whether its high school, college, or even after the enter the industry. Part of the reason many engineers join startups is because they get to be part of the product, process, and profits.
When children are growing up explain to them what it means to be an engineer, point out the jobs that are out there in hardware, software, and design. Show them the value in building and creating. Want more femgineers or mengineers? Encouragement them every step of the way, its the only way to inspire and motivate anyone!
Great post. I completely agree that we need more active female role models if we want to get more women in STEM careers.
One question. You wrote: “Women who were engineers were leaving to become mothers or pursue other jobs where they could meet with people on a daily basis instead of sitting behind a desk. Those who were initially interested in engineering are dropping out. Its not that they don’t like building or problem solving, they’re unhappy with the their job or the lifestyle.”
Do you think we should also focus on changing company culture to prevent this from happening? If so, how do you as a business owner keep your engineers from exhausting themselves and getting bored?
I was one of those that did not go the engineering route, despite getting an Electrical Engineering degree. Luckily, I eventually jumped into a software technology as an internal systems developer. I saw that you can be a technologist and enjoy your career without being stuck in boring, soulless engineering corporation. That is the perception that we need to battle against if we are to move our best and brightest students, both men and women, away from careers in law and banking and consulting and into science and technology careers. Thanks for sharing your story!
You’re welcome Mark! True you don’t need to start your career immediately after college, or even major in Computer Science in college. The beauty of being a technologist it that you’re constantly learning and growing, and even if you pick up coding at a later stage the tech industry is understanding and welcoming. Contrast this to law where you need to have a certain pedigree to make partner.
I think there are a lot of soulless jobs out there in every industry, which is why people often leave to pursue passion projects like opening up a yoga studios, bakery, or restaurant. America is starting to rely too much on foreigners to perform knowledge based work while the locals move into more service oriented jobs, which is fine but to me its a little funny… perhaps a topic for another post
Hope you’re enjoying fall in NYC
Great question Kaitlin! I think this calls for a follow up post on how to keep engineers motivated, but just to give you a little taste:
1. To avoid burn out that can happen anywhere but especially at startups we spent a lot of time at BizeeBee thinking about process. Alex Notov lead the effort in terms of implementing a process by which developers and designers work together to deliver the finished product. What I emphasized were the high level business goals like delivering a quality solution on time and being able to iterate quickly based on customers needs. So that translated to putting an emphasis on test driven development (up front testing to catch bugs before they happen), building small features, releasing regularly and collecting feedback from customers before moving forward to build another set of features. This can be hard because so much of business today is build build build, but you have to take the time and care to emphasize quality.
2. As a business owner one of my tasks is to allocate resources and retain talent. I’ll put a disclaimer that you need to find people who are good independent workers and require very little hand holding. So I wouldn’t take the following approach with someone who just graduated from school and needs more mentoring. At BizeeBee I know I have to keep everyone motivated and let them work on side projects, which is hard because there are business goals that need to be met. But I’ve found that people are happier when you reward them for their efforts and let them be creative. I give people freedom once they’ve demonstrated they can deliver required features. Also, I’ve learned to get out of people’s way and I only help when someone comes to me. Every week I do 1-1’s with my employees to check on them, how they’re doing emotionally, what they’re working on, is there something going on that I should know about. I try to keep this interaction as simple and casual as possible, because I want it to an open dialogue mostly guided by the employee. I’m just there to listen, offer suggestions, and make sure they’re happy.
3. Communication across the team is also important. I see to it that everyone knows whats going on and that we have open dialogue. This is easy on a small team but as the team groups I know it can be harder, which is why its important for managers to convey what each group/individual is working on, the purpose behind it, and if they need any additional help or resources. When communication breaks down problems start to arise. We used to do postmortems after every release as a team to gauge what was working and what wasn’t it was an open forum for people to also speak about how they felt. We release every week now so the postmortems have gone down in frequency but I still like to have one every few months, and we do weekly all-hands to make sure everyone has the opportunity to talk about what they’re working on.
Its easy to get bogged down in business goals and revenue, but when the bottom line becomes the driving force instead of delivering a quality product, people are less engaged. To me employee and customer satisfaction are primary and its my job to make sure both groups are satisfied, I think this is true for any manager. The rest will follow suit.
Hope thats helpful!