VEX Robotics Competition team submission to the Girls Into STEM initiative

1. What is an engineer?

2. The dictionary definition:
A person who designs, builds, or maintains
engines, machines, or structures.

3. Before we started this project we got asked what we
thought an engineer was. We came up with pretty
much the same definition as the dictionary has.
What do we think an engineer
is?

4. What do we think an engineer
looks like?
We then got asked what we thought an
engineer looked like. We said that an engineer
would usually be a man that worked with very
dirty and greasy machines but is that always
right?

5. Why were we wrong?
Our first mistake was that we jumped
straight in to the stereotypes…MEN. Not
all engineers are men, actually there are
woman engineers but people just believe
it’s a man’s job.
We also came to find out that engineers
don’t always get their hands dirty like a lot
of people think they do. Often they don’t
even need to go outside to do their job.

6. We realised that there were so many types of
engineers that it would be practically impossible to
put them all into one box.
Some get dirty (like we originally thought), others
don’t at all. Some help build cars, others help in
natural disasters.

7. We discovered that there is a plethora of jobs
that engineers do, some we had never heard of
yet seemed vital for day to day life.
It’s safe to say that we won’t make that
mistake again or underestimate how important
engineers are to society.

8. This brought to our attention that female engineers
were hardly ever acknowledged or made known
except for a select few. That is one of the reasons
we were and still are so eager to participate in this
project. When we searched for images for
engineers we found that practically all
the pictures were
of men, we searched
for statistics and
discovered that the
stats for a women
gaining a bachelor,
masters or PhD
degree in engineering were more than 5x smaller
than men's.

9. There is still stigma about the job being
dirty and not fit for women.
These views are still held by some people
and we cannot wait to prove them wrong.

10. Engineers are problem solvers, organisers,
communicators, calculators and designers.
They are capable of clearly defining a problem
and its relevant constraints (such as time, cost,
etc.) and providing a simple solution. This
sounds as much of a women's job as it is a
man’s…don’t you agree?