Most faculties now have close to 50 per cent men and women, with just a few exceptions to that rule. Nursing and education still count an extraordinarily high number of women, while engineering continues to have only around 20 per cent female enrollment. Of those 20 per cent, most realize by the time they get to university that they don’t fit in well when every second screen saver is a half-naked woman, and every pair of safety boots only come in men’s sizes. But these resilient few who have found their way into engineering are the exception, not the rule. It is clear that by the time most girls are deciding what career they want to pursue, they are either uninterested in, or have never thought about the possibility of engineering. Many studies have concluded that women just don’t like engineering subjects or that they don’t have an inherent aptitude for it like men do. Are girls not enrolling in engineering because we’re unexposed to it or because our genetic make-up makes us more inclined to choose another career? This classic nature versus nurture debate has begun revealing the root of the issue. Is there more to the way that society shapes girls differently from boys from the time that they’re picking toys from the pink aisle, that makes the odds of becoming and engineer not in their favour?Perhaps the pink aisle is creating doctors and teachers but not engineers.
Debra Sterling is a Stanford engineer who decided that there must be more to why so few women enroll in engineering. She, like many others before her, wanted to understand why this anomaly still exists when other faculties, such as medicine, now have more women than men. Using case studies of thousands of young girls, she considered that the toys that little girls are exposed to and expected to like best when they are young are the common denominator. While boys are learning spatial skills with Lego, girls are taught nurturing and sympathy skills with dolls. Very little overlap exists. While a variety of skills are important, boys have “boy toys” as their first planted seed, creating future engineers. Even cartoon characters, some of a child’s first role models, contain this clear gender bias: Thomas the Train and Bob the Builder versus Strawberry Shortcake and Sailor Moon. Sterling wanted to find out if these toys were what each gender was respectively most interested in or if these toys were simply being marketed to a specific gender, negating the probability of a child ever getting the chance to cross this imaginary gender line. So she created her own company called Goldiblox; a company that makes toys marketed to girls specifically designed to teach them the necessary spatial skills to be an engineer while incorporating toy qualities like reading that little girls consistently like most. This is not to say that every female engineer was once a little girl who played with Lego instead of Barbies, but instead suggests that had they all played with toy cars and blocks there might be more female engineers in the world. The inverse is likely true; boys playing house or having My Little Ponies could bring more diversity to the roles they play in society. Although the pink aisle is far from a transformation, a diverse set of toys is one of many steps in the right direction.
Engineers are actively changing the world; they imagine, design and create the society we live in. The less women who pursue engineering, the more it is a man’s world. From the cars that we drive to the internet browser at our fingertips, every aspect of our world has been designed by an engineer, and women need have a say in the shape of it. Starting with the reinvention of the pink aisle, toys should be designed to spark a girls interest and lead them into diverse paths which will hopefully inspire them to build a world of their own. Given the opportunity to learn about engineering at a young age, perhaps engineering won’t always be a male dominated field.
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