In a conversation with electrical engineer Cherish Bauer-Reich, we consider factors that encourage or dissuade women from entering the engineering profession.
Over the past thirty years, Jeff has seen a definite increase in the number of women attending engineering school.
The American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) reports that women now comprise around 14% of the U.S. engineering workforce, as compared with less than 6% in the early 1980s.
Our guest is electrical engineer Cherish Bauer-Reich, who specializes in electromagnetics, antennas, and RFID systems.
Carmen mentions that North Carolina is dealing with a rare snowstorm, and the results are not pretty.
Our guest is working on her PhD in the area of geophysics.
Cherish says she notices distinct differences between the problem-solving approaches of scientists and engineers.
In her early college experiences, Cherish says she encountered open hostility from those who felt women did not belong in science and engineering courses.
In many cases, our guest points out, the slights to women are not intentional; one example is an IEEE headline about the Arduino being so easy that “even your Mom can program.”
While the percentage of women in her Physics and Electrical Engineering courses have remained in the range of 10-20%, Cherish says that there is a much higher percentage of women in the field of geology.
Cherish believes that the mentoring of students by faculty members has a significant influence on the number of women that stay in a particular field.
When she talked with friends and mentors about pursuing an engineering degree, our guest was advised on several occasions to avoid the engineering profession.
In high school, Cherish was dissuaded from taking math and science classes by school counselors.
Carmen mentions a blog post, “I only wear goggles while swimming,” in which Cherish references a story concerning the reaction of middle-school students to learning about the lives of scientists.
Blogging, and communicating with others through the internet, helped our guest deal with some difficult times.
There was a dustup over a Reddit comment concerning the EEweb interview that featured Cherish.
Adam inquires as whether there are regional differences in the sexism that women face.
Not only is Cherish married to an engineer, but she gets to work with her husband as well.
Carmen presses our guest on how she represents imaginary numbers; the electrical engineering “j,” or the wrong way.
Cherish has mixed feelings about the “pinkification” of toys and tools intended to encourage girls to develop an interest in science and engineering.
Carmen notes a recent video, intended to motivate young women to pursue science careers, that received criticism as being “offensive” and “insulting.”
Jeff mentions a recent newspaper article that discusses the inability of engineers to effectively share engineering’s positive influence has on human welfare, especially with girls and women.
Thanks to UN Women for the photograph titled “Solar engineering student from Malawi, training in India.” Podcast theme music provided by Paul Stevenson.
In a 2010 presentation for the National Book Festival, Dr. Petroski talked about how the sciences and engineering are treated when successes and failures occur.
Our guest feels that studying the designs of other engineers is a great way to get an intuitive feel for potential problems.
Carmen references a Jim Williams tale about design titled “The Zoo Circuit: History, Mistakes, and Some Monkeys Design a Circuit.” This case study is told as a chapter in the book “Analog Circuit Design: Art, Science and Personalities.”
Not all information on the internet is reliable, as Bob discussed in his recent blog post, “The C.R.A.P. Test.”
It makes sense to ask experts for help in problem-solving, but one has to be cognizant of other demands on the expert’s time and attention.
An engineer’s physical senses can be quite useful in troubleshooting problems.
“Debug by division,” or “divide and conquer,” is a useful methodology for solving problems.
Adam discusses how the debug process is applied in road building.
Watching others apply the “debug by division” process is useful means for learning the methodology.
Bob’s book offers a few “warnings” that should be heeded if you think you’ve successfully solved a problem:
Correlation is not causation.
Your theory of causation had better show good correlation in your experiments.
There might be more than one correct answer.
Undo your fix and check to see if the problem returns.
There can be multiple paths to good solutions. Your way is not the only way.
Never allow a defect or problem report to go by without documenting and fixing that problem.
Additional “challenge” questions that one might ask about a possible solution include:
How did other people solve problems similar to this problem in the past?
Good writers of design are good readers of other people’s designs. Are you a good reader?
Could it ever have worked that way?
Does it work that way now?
Are you suffering from optimism bias?
How complete are your checklists?
Are you doing big debug or little debug?
Our guest feels that engineering schools should emphasize troubleshooting as an integral element of the design process.
A project is defined by the PMI as “a temporary group activity designed to produce a unique product, service or result.”
Jeff wonders whether the company NeXT Computer would therefore have qualified as a project.
Project that do something for the very first time can become “science projects,” placing unlimited demands on time and money. (With apologies to scientists, who find ways to live within their time and cost constraints ;^)
Brian notes that engineers, when constructing complicated systems, rely heavily on solutions and technologies provided by vendors.
Adam and Brian feel that the skills set needed to be a strong technical expert are fairly independent of those needed to be a good project manager.
Carmen likes “take charge” project managers who quickly get down to business in meetings.
Jeff mentions President Kennedy’s 1961 proclamation that the United States would send a man to the moon as an example of a leader who didn’t necessarily have strong technical skills, but Brian notes that Wernher von Braun’s engineering expertise was needed to make the project a success.
A “strong matrix” organization allows project managers to easily pull resources from functional groups, while a “weak matrix” organization gives functional supervisors the authority to deny resources to project managers.
Project managers have to balance the constraints of time, money, scope, and quality, as represented by the Project Management Triangle.
A work breakdown structure decomposes a project into smaller tasks that can be carried out to ensure that the project is completed.
Jeff notes the need to break personal tasks into smaller sub-tasks, such as a “next action,” when working with the Getting Things Done (GTD) method of time management.
A lot of engineers first get introduced to working with a Gantt chart via the Microsoft Project software program.
The “critical path” defines the series of events that have to occur on schedule for the project to be completed on time.
With due credit to Donald Rumsfeld, Adam breaks risk into four categories: known knowns, known unknowns, unknown knowns, and unknown unknowns.
Risk management methods include acceptance, mitigation, avoidance, and transference.
Projects typically involve the five stages of initiation, planning, executing, monitoring and controlling, and closing.
In a conversation with electrical engineer Cherish Bauer-Reich, we consider factors that encourage or dissuade women from entering the engineering profession.
