Engineering and science have historically been mostly male—overwhelmingly so, until very recently. When Joan arrived at MIT, the percentage of women students was about 16%, and it had risen to about 20% by the time she graduated. This chapter starts with Joan’s viewpoint of how this disparity has played out, talks about some statistics, and discusses some projects that are attempting to attract more female makers. There are probably as many hypotheses about why women turn away from math, science, and engineering as there are female technologists. Joan will explore a few of her hypotheses in the next section.

The Engineering Life

I have always disliked the label “female engineer.” As far as I was concerned, I had a degree from MIT and I was an engineer, no modifier required. MIT was very much a meritocracy, and pretty much you got the grades you worked for. I always felt that if someone pointed out your gender, they might be implying you had gotten a pass on the standards because of it, so I tended to avoid women in technology groups and the like until I was very established in my career. When I was a young engineer, women in tech groups also tended to be all about how to manage having children, which I was not concerned with at the time. I just wanted to get to build cool spacecraft and discover new things about other planets.

I have several hypotheses about why some girls and women find it hard to get into and stay in tech, based on both my own experiences and observing others. These are necessarily very anecdotal and biased by my experiences. The next section gives you some objective numbers and then talks about programs that are trying to change things. But, for what it is worth, here are some things that I believe make it tough unless a girl has the right combination of traits.

Quiet, Please

Many male techies of my acquaintance are very shy, at least in person (online can sometimes be a different story). An introspective personality and ability to focus help a lot in learning math and science. Thus one would expect the pool of prospective scientists and engineers to be skewed quite a bit toward quiet introverts. However, girls interested in science and math are unusual and therefore visible and remarked-upon. Unlike a quiet male who might be left alone to pursue making things in the garage and who would not have to explain an A in math, a girl has a harder time being left alone to do this. A girl who wants to be left in peace might do something less unusual than becoming a scientist or enginner so that she does not have to continually defend her choices.

As an extrovert, I enjoy flaunting expectations. Early in my career, everyone around knew who I was, what my research areas were, and so on. Even for me, it was disconcerting that people would stop me in the hall and offer opinions on my work when I had no idea who they were. I realized that it was good for visibility and capitalized on it, but it would have been very hard if I had been like some of the quieter guys I have known. Thinking about it, I can only remember a handful of introverted female engineers and scientists my age. Perhaps as the world goes more virtual it will be easier for introverts, male and female.

Stupid Girl

If I am in a virtually all-male professional situation, I think pretty hard about asking a question that might make me look stupid. I always feel the difference between “that was a dumb question” and “dumb girl.” The reality is that in a technical discipline, no one knows everything, and asking your colleagues questions about their areas of expertise is critical. I think this really hurt me in graduate school, where I was frequently the only woman in classes and I hesitated to ask a question if I thought everyone else knew the answer already. I have no such compunctions now, but it took a long time to get past my reticence.

About Bias

People are people, and everyone brings some bias to the table when they meet another person. Women are usually shorter than men (I am five-foot two) and have higher-pitched voices. This means that I disappear at meetings where everyone is standing up, and a colleague with hearing loss might literally not hear me. I am conscious of this and have to allow for it, either by bouncing around a bit to draw people’s eyes, wearing bright colors, towing along a tall colleague, or otherwise being visible.

Once I have someone’s attention, I still have to validate myself. I rely heavily on my formal academic credentials for this. It is unfortunate but true that sometimes people just simply do not believe a female engineer can be competent. The only thing I have found that works is to be frequently and assertively right about things, which causes some of the problems noted in the previous section. It does not take a lot of imagination to foresee some scenarios in which these tactics do not go down well. That said, most of the time I have gone into professional situations assuming I would be taken seriously and just acted accordingly. Usually, this works. When it does not, sometimes the only thing to do is to cut losses and move on.

Sometimes, though, being female can make me an ambassador to non-technologists of both genders who, for whatever reason, have not followed a technical career path but who want to learn a specific skill (like using a 3D printer) from someone who they perceive will treat them as an equal. This has brought me into a lot of unusual, interdisciplinary projects.

Purposeful Making

I have never really been able to get into a tool for its own sake, at least, not for very long. For example, in the case of 3D printing, I find the technology intriguing, but the application of it far more so. I have always been more interested in how different technologies might work together rather than the in-depth detail of how any one thing works. I can learn that detail when I need to. Typically, though, I need a problem to solve before I dive into something too deeply. This gives me a direction which allows me to structure what I learn. Although there are certainly exceptions, I have found that on average this style is more common among women engineers than among men. In Chapter 1, Rich talks about the difference between a maker and a hacker in his section on the hacker path. If we are both on the right track, it means women tend more toward making and men more toward hacking, which would fit at least the authors of this book!

Getting More Girls Into Tech

Assuming you are trying hard not to be biased and to involve more girls into making and, ultimately, into technology-focused careers, what should you do? The rest of this chapter shares some formal research into this area. Before delving into that, though, the following are some things that I do not hear mentioned often that I would like to add to the mix for those of you creating spaces at school or at home for a young female maker and perhaps her buddies:

• Chapter 5 talks about the importance of allowing for experimentation and failure in makerspaces. A perceived need to appear competent at all times fights against this and should be something you think about if you are designing a makerspace to attract both genders. Some of the programs discussed later in this chapter try different tactics to encourage girls to play with things in less structured ways or, alternatively, to give a sense of some structure.
• If you have a quiet daughter or female student who loves math and science, try to find ways to celebrate that while respecting introversion and perhaps her desire not to have too much drama. A good resource might be Susan Cain’s book Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking (Broadway Books, 2013). The author has a TED talk and other more abbreviated versions of her work online as well.
• If your daughter or student has a mix of maker interests and traditional female interests, do not comment on how weird this is. I took a ballet class at night and was heavily involved in figure skating for years just because it was nice not to stand out some of the time. But when people discovered my “other identity,” I would get commentary on how “strange” this was.
• Many makerspaces have training programs and resources that are primarily focused on tools or skills. If you are the one developing programming for a makerspace, consider more project-focused classes and meetups rather than ones that are primarily about particular technologies. In other words, serve the maker as well as the hacker, to use our Chapter 1 distinction. The projects do not have to be stereotypically female, but perhaps can have a civic or scientific purpose beyond learning to use a 3D printer or CNC machine for its own sake.
• Consider the physicality of the space and tools. Can someone short get at and use tools safely without having to climb on stools? Do you have to move things that weigh 50 pounds around to get at the screwdrivers? Do not go out and buy pink tools or floral toolboxes, but consider whether your setup will be overwhelming for someone with small hands or shorter arms. In general, think about whether someone who is not the size of an average adult male will be put in awkward positions when they are using equipment.
• Avoid using terminology as a barrier. As you will see in Chapter 12, I had a lot of exposure to soldering and electrical work as a child, but pretty much zero exposure to anything mechanical, because we lived in a small apartment. I did not see a machine tool until well into my MIT education and distinctly remember, over 30 years later, how it felt to raise my hand and ask what “tapping” meant in a room with a couple of other women and a few dozen guys. Define your terms and use analogy without being condescending. If there is one woman in a class, and she does not understand the basic terminology, she might leave rather than ask what seem to be dumb questions. I use cooking metaphors a lot, even for mixed-gender audiences.

Chapters 12 through 14 contain more stories about becoming a scientist and daily life in the profession. These anecdotes reflect my perspective and that of other scientists and engineers of both genders. Getting into a technical career is a lot of work for anyone, and wisdom that helps girls in particular might well help your young male makers, too.

One View: Why Are There So Few Women at Hackerspaces?

I asked Carlyn Maw, one of the cofounders of Crashspace (the first hackerspace in Los Angeles, www.crashspace.org), why there were so few women in hackerspaces. Figure 10-1 shows her with one of her cofounders, Tod Kurt. Carlyn wrote back with her thoughts (slightly edited for this book).

Why Focus on Female Makers?

The discussions to this point have not talked about why it is important to help girls and women become a bigger part of the maker community. Basic fairness and letting everyone have the career they want is a basic reason, of course. However, there are also social costs if a lot of people who otherwise might have become technologists do not. The world needs more people who can objectively analyze the world, no matter what profession they ultimately choose. More people trained as engineers, scientists, and mathematicians may mean that all the jobs that could really use technical training probably will actually have someone appropriately trained in them, which might not be the case otherwise. Many baby-boomer engineers are starting to retire, and some farsighted tech companies are beginning to worry that not enough young people are entering tech fields to replace them. The following section gives some statistics. All the sources noted in what follows are gathered into one note at the end of the section to make things a little easier to read.

The Numbers

Every ten years the U.S. Census tallies up the professions of Americans. The last census was taken in 2010. As reported by the National Science Foundation, engineering occupations in 2010 employed 1,569,000 people, of whom 200,000 were women (13%). In 2010, there were 91,000 employed aeronautical engineers (Joan’s background), of which 10,000 were female (11%). At the master’s degree level, it drops to 34,000 and 5,000, respectively—so in 2010, I was personally 0.02% of the population of female aeronautical engineers in the United States. There are also a lot of women who move into other things rather than stay in a strictly engineering role. I wonder what I would be counted as now, for example.

The Anita Borg Institute’s Why Women Leave report found that women leave technology companies at twice the rate of men, with the leading reasons being lack of advancement, too many hours, and low salary. An intriguing article published in the January 2015 issue of Science by Sarah-Jane Leslie et al (see upcoming note) showed that fewer women get PhDs in professions where it is perceived that innate talent is required for success. The authors suggest that practitioners in technical fields stress the hard work to succeed, rather than implying that everyone is brilliant to start with! Of the fields the researchers looked at, philosophy, math, and physics had the highest perceived need for brilliance, and education and psychology the lowest—with the various scientific and engineering disciplines scattered between.

The Problem

According to the NCWIT report cited in the note that follows, there will be 1.2 million computing-related job openings expected in the United States by 2022. If nothing changes by then, only 39% of these jobs will be filled by U.S. computing undergraduates. According to the same report, 57% of 2012 undergraduate degree recipients were women; 18% of computer and information science undergraduate degree recipients were women (which falls to 12% at major research universities). This is a drop from 37% in 1985. There has been a 64 percent decline in the number of first-year undergraduate women interested in majoring in computer science between 2000 and 2012.

The news is not any better in the workforce. The computing workforce was 26 percent female in 2013. The Intel MakeHers report (full reference in Note that follows) discusses cultural and social discouragements for girls and women in maker activities, particularly cultural biases, a lack of mentorship, and a feeling that makerspaces are not safe for them. Teachers also may underestimate girls’ math and science ability relative to boys, as reported by Claire Cain Miller in The New York Times.

So the bottom line is this: there will not be enough computing professionals in the years to come, and half the population has declining interest in filling them or perhaps perceives they cannot fill them.

Case Studies

All this might just be pretty depressing, and it is tempting just to throw up your hands and think that maybe the stereotypes are true. But fortunately, there are a lot of people trying various things in school and community settings. Many of these are at this point experimental, and it is not yet clear where they will go. Out of these experiments, there will doubtless come many new ways of learning. Not all of them are complicated; they can be as simple as repurposing part of a classroom or taking on an intern—or as complicated as launching a 50,000 square-foot makerspace.

Marlborough School: Robots, Visual Arts, and More

The Marlborough School, an all-girls, 7th–12th grade independent school located in the Hancock Park area of Los Angeles (www.marlborough.org), is experimenting with various new maker technologies at the school, mostly focused for the moment on its visual arts program and on its FIRST Tech Challenge robotics team (see Chapter 4).

Visual Arts teacher Kathy Rea was an early adopter of classroom 3D printing and had her architecture students design models for an urban village in Tinkercad and produce them using a 3D printer (Figure 10-2). In her new 3D product design class, students are first taking apart existing objects (rain gutters, heating vents, stove parts, etc.) then repurposing or “upcycling” them for new applications, such as lighting devices. Later, students will have the opportunity to design a new product to solve a problem they have defined, or to redesign an existing object to make it more aesthetically pleasing or to improve its usefulness. The prototypes for this project will be designed in CAD and printed on a 3D printer.

Meanwhile, the school fields a FIRST Tech Challenge team and has arranged a space that the girls can use to work on their robot. The space was featured in Chapter 5, and the girls working on the robot are shown in Figure 10-3.

Darren Kessner teaches math and computer science. He has been developing a new computer science class that uses the Processing language (described in Chapter 2) controlled by Makey Makey interfaces (Chapter 8). He finds that the Makey Makey part is a good entry point for students who are not so into coding, and that the programming part is substantive enough that the enthused girls can really have substantive projects.

Science teacher Andy Witman, who advises the robotics team, won a FIRST’s Compass award for his outstanding mentorship. The girls have a video online nominating him for it in which they talk about how much they appreciate his faith in them. The group talks about Witman’s motto—“Fail Forward!”—and that it means a lot to them to have his support on the team. The team recruits members through a club fair at the beginning of the year and builds awareness by showcasing 3D-printed objects at a trade fair during the year.

The teachers hope to develop a more substantial makerspace and program at Marlborough and to build on the current enthusiasm and word of mouth among the students to get more girls onto lifelong math and science trajectories. The teachers also hope to incorporate some collaborative STEAM-based projects into their curriculum in order to encourage and support creativity, imagination, and innovative thinking across disciplines.

Castilleja School

The Castilleja School in Palo Alto, California is an independent all-girls school for grades 6–12 with 444 students in the 2014–15 academic year. The school has a makerspace it calls the Bourn Idea Lab. Angi Chau is the lab’s director. In an interview for this book, Chau said that the reason for starting the lab was for their FIRST robotics team to have a place to work. Robotics, however, was an after-school activity, so then they began to think about how to use the lab during the school day.

The Bourn Idea Lab is linked from the school’s home page (www.castilleja.org) and includes many links to descriptions and photos of projects for various grade levels (including building a microscope and replicas of Leonardo da Vinci’s machines). The students are using Tinkercad for design projects and OpenSCAD for geometrical ones. They are trying a Teachers Fellow program to get more involvement. In this program, Castilleja teachers commit to spending some time in the lab and get one-on-one coaching in ways to get their students making things.

Chau feels that it is important to have some things in the Lab that are familiar to girls already so that they feel like they have an entry point. To that end, she stocks some traditional craft supplies in the lab and tries to avoid having it feel too much like a man’s garage or having it be too cluttered and messy (while recognizing that making is not tidy, either). As she says, “Softer circuits [as in wearable tech, Chapter 7] teach the same thing as robotics.”

Many maker toys are aimed at making monsters, but it does not have to be that way. She has an all-girls environment to start with, but she says that coed schools have had a lot of success with some girl-only times in their makerspaces after school. Otherwise, she says, boys will appear to know how to use tools (even if they do not) and will tend to intimidate a girl who has not yet seen some of the tools in use.

Bridgette Mongeon

Bridgette Mongeon (shown in Figure 10-4 with some of her 3D-printed art) is a Houston-based sculptor who has been an early adopter of 3D printing. She is also a passionate advocate of teaching students that an art education can lead to many different careers other than being a studio artist. She visits schools and then takes on interns at her studio to work with individually. Mongeon encourages girls to get interested in the technology behind the art and to get past the idea of 3D computer-generated art as being nothing but monsters. Her book 3D Technology in Fine Art and Craft: Exploring 3D Printing, Scanning, Sculpting and Milling is coming from Focal Press in September 2015, and her blog is available at http://creativesculpture.com/blog/. Because she feels that a lot of 3D modeling is focused on monsters and more masculine examples, she tries to show that a different style is possible, too.

Vocademy: The Makerspace

Vocademy is a 15,000+ square-foot makerspace in the Los Angeles suburb of Riverside, California. Chapter 5 discusses it in general, but it is worth another look here because Vocademy’s community is 40% female. When asked how he did it, Vocademy’s founder, Gene Sherman says simply, “Cosplay.” Cosplay (see Chapter 7 for more) involves dressing up as a character from a game or a movie; it can be close to traditional costuming or can incorporate a variety of wearable technologies.

Sherman says that for each subject taught at Vocademy, there is a free introductory class. More than half of the examples are gender-neutral or lean toward the stereotypically female, like shoes or jewelry. The intent is that girls and women will be drawn in by the familiar and then will have the confidence to go forward into areas that might otherwise be too big a leap. Sherman says, “Half the world is female. Why aren’t half the world’s products designed by females?”

Machines do not care about gender or ethnicity, he says, and he encourages people to think in terms of designing solutions for problems. Vocademy has a huge 4×3 foot laser cutter, because he wanted to enable using a laser cutter to cut patterns for sewing. Figure 10-5 shows a mostly female thermoplastics class at Vocademy—so it looks like his plan is working out well!

Construction Toys for Girls

Another way for girls to get into making is through toys. Traditional builder toys (like LEGOs) are at least in principle gender-neutral, and some LEGO kits have been developed that are intended to appeal to girls (but see the note after this section for some issues that this raises). Two companies founded by women engineers have developed builder toys intended in particular to appeal to girls.

One builder toy aimed at girls is Roominate (www.roominatetoy.com), which encourages building wired dollhouses. This company was founded by Alice Brooks and Bettina Chen, who met in the master’s engineering program at Stanford (and who hold, respectively, undergrad degrees from MIT and Caltech). The wired dollhouses make me very nostalgic, since my electrician dad was always helping me wire up a dollhouse—but the components were a lot bigger then, in the pre-LED days.

Kickstarter-funded Goldieblox (www.goldieblox.com) combines stories about Goldie, a girl inventor, with construction toys. The company launched on Kickstarter in the fall of 2012, aiming to raise $150,000, but raised nearly twice that from 5,000 supporters. The toys are now sold on the mass market.

This effort was helped immensely by the company winning a contest to advertise during the 2015 Super Bowl. The company’s founder, Debbie Sterling, herself a Stanford-trained engineer, wants to change girls’ toys away from the stereotypical pink boxes and princesses. Figure 10-6 shows one of their products, “Goldieblox and the Builder’s Survival Kit,” which includes a storybook, three character figurines, and 190 construction pieces intended to teach mechanical engineering.

One Girl at a Time

Any educational endeavor really is about helping out one girl at a time. Coco Kaleel and her parents tell their story in the Foreword to this book. Somehow it just happened that the authors sort of adopted her technical interests, and she has absorbed everything we could give her. She is shown in Figure 10-7 hard at work. If you are into making things, the easiest thing to do is to help out just one girl now and then. You never know what you might create!

What Do You Need to Learn To Get Started?

What you need to know depends on which technologies you decide to start with. If you are a parent, it could be as simple as buying an age-appropriate construction toy or one of the beginner’s kits discussed in some of the earlier chapters. If you are a school administrator trying to design a makerspace that will draw in girls, consider finding some female engineers or makers in the community to help think of fun ideas. (See also Chapter 5’s discussions of experiences with these spaces.) The most key point is not be so worried about what the users will learn that you suck all the fun out of it. Experiment! Fail! And figure out what went wrong for next time.

There are many groups and events aimed at teaching girls and women how to get started with writing code, building hardware, or combining both. In the case of learning how to code, type “girls learn to code” into an Internet search engine and you will find many options. You can narrow this down into online or in-person opportunities, camps, free events, expensive events, and pretty much anything else you can think of. Some groups, of course, are more reputable than others. As you would with any camp or after-school program, diligence the group and try to find out what they are about from places other than the group’s website.

In the case of learning hardware, you can check your local makerspace for classes. There are some interesting programs at some schools, too. Luz Rivas is an MIT-educated electrical engineer who grew up in the Los Angeles suburb of Pacioma. After a career as an engineer and working at a nonprofit, she decided to start a program at elementary and middle schools to encourage Latina girls in particular to enter science and math careers. The organization DIY Girls (www.diygirls.org) has been ramping up its program and as of this writing have served nearly 400 girls and created a meetup group of 700 women.

What Does It Cost to Start a “Maker Girls” Group?

As you can see from the examples already mentioned, projects can start at a variety of different levels. Consider your budget, how much space you have, and how many trained adults are available to help. The cost estimates in Chapters 2 through 8 should be helpful in determining what you can afford and what you might try first. Just as we say you should encourage experimentation and learning from failures in your makerspaces, so too should you try things out and adapt as needed.

Summary

In this chapter we talked about the issues facing girls and women in getting started with making, and what barriers remain in later technical careers. We referenced a lot of research on girls and women in technical careers. We wound up our chapter with stories of efforts by a variety of individuals and groups to create events that will draw girls and women into making things.