Engineering Education Perspectives: Olin College on Gender Diversity

Engineering education has undergone transformations in the past, but a relatively recent push is to increase diversity among engineering students. Recruiting of women and minorities has been the focus of a variety of efforts, and though it has helped, much disparity remains. At Olin College, diversity has been an integral part of the culture since day one. Women make up 45% of their student population and will comprise 54% of the entering class of 2015. Those numbers are exceptional compared to the national average of 20% and indicate that something is working. I asked the faculty what makes Olin different, and what it means for other engineering institutions. Here’s what they had to say.

Olin College was founded with a radically different educational paradigm than most schools in general, not to mention most engineering schools. What makes Olin different?

Starting in the late 1980s, the National Science Foundation and the engineering community at-large was calling for reform in engineering education to educate engineers with an emphasis on business and entrepreneurship skills; creativity; and an understanding of the social, political and economic contexts of engineering. So when the first students entered Olin College in 2001, many schools had been attempting to experiment with new ways of educating engineering students. Some of these efforts were successful while others remained quite challenging (or impossible). Olin is not immune to the same difficulties in this “situation critical.” Yet what has helped us along the way is that we have a very high concentration of thinkers and movement leaders. Our journey is exciting, in part, because of our desire to learn from and leverage the insights of those who were ahead of us in rethinking engineering education as well as an unsurpassed passion for making engineering education a better place for all.

The gender bias in STEM disciplines has been getting significant attention recently, but talk is often cheap. How has Olin walked the walk in recruiting more women to engineering? What results are you seeing?

We cannot talk about recruiting without talking about “retention.” I place “retention” in quotes because it is much too clinical of a word for something that is really about nurturing, development, and support. Recruitment and “retention” are two sides of the same coin: to recruit women into engineering, we need to create an environment that is welcome to all students, including women. We must create an environment that cultivates creativity, encourages risk-taking, fosters recognition of diverse views, supports development of the whole person, and provides freedom for exploration. How can an environment like that not serve to recruit and hold on to more students, including women? That is what we need to strive for as a society and that is how we need to change the conversation about recruitment of women and other under-represented groups in engineering.

What do you think keeps more girls from pursuing engineering?

This is a big question that a great number of scholars have been attempting to unpack for a number of years. We cannot point to a single cause. Rather, a set of causes work in mostly tacit ways to keep girls and women away from entering and remaining in engineering. Here are some myths that exist around gender issues in STEM fields, including engineering:

·         Girls don’t like STEM.

·         Girls don’t have an innate ability to do work in STEM.

·         Women choose to stay away from STEM because, compared to other fields, it's difficult to

           retain  work-life balance in STEM careers.

·         Girls (and, later, women) lack preparation to pursue and succeed in STEM fields.

·         Achieving “critical mass” in STEM is all we need.

·         Add-on programs will solve the problem.

Every single one of these myths has been scientifically “busted” over the last few decades; yet, they persist. One of my social science colleagues says she explicitly chose social science over engineering because in high school and college it was clear to her that engineering was irrelevant to making a difference in real people's lives. How do we change that perception? At Olin, in courses, research, and competitions in diverse areas such as modeling and simulation, materials science, mechanical design, and signals and systems, students engage in projects that focus on people

Engineering is fundamentally about using technical knowledge to make the world a better place. The society-wide discourse around engineering needs to change to reflect that. I am confident that the myths about gender in engineering will go away only when more girls and women are reached with this more accurate portrayal of the field and when the educational environment is designed to "retain" students of all diverse backgrounds.  Additionally, going hand-in-hand with the perceptions of what engineers do, STEM fields are still seen as very “male” fields. Girls get the very early message that STEM activities are ones that boys do; later, women studying in STEM fields get that message when people express surprise that they are in engineering school, while they see their male colleagues praised for it. To date, the changes we have made to address these and other issues have been small. As one of my colleagues says, “marginal changes lead to marginal shifts.” These marginal shifts leave intact the myths we so need to dispel. We need dramatic change for the dramatic shift we seek: let's start with a new definition of what it means to be an engineer.

Do you think Olin’s impressive gender balance is due to targeted efforts or a fundamentally different educational style? Maybe it’s a bit of both?

We cannot attribute Olin’s gender balance to any single factor. Yes, it is true that our early recruitment efforts were specifically focused on creating a gender-balanced environment, and to this day we aim to recruit entering first-year classes that are gender balanced. Yet, at the start we did not have a very clear idea of how to maintain this gender balance. In the late 1990’s and early 2000’s when Olin was conceived and opened its doors to the first student cohort, the popular discourse was that non-traditional educational practices, including project-based learning, would be effective for all students and even more so for women students. So, to my knowledge, this is all we had to go on: recruiting a gender-balanced population and figuring out how to educate this population in a project-based learning environment. 

We have learned quite a bit since then, have made a number of mistakes, and have had some successes.  We now understand much better what it takes to create an environment that women students are willing to enter into and, even more so, we continue to further develop this environment to nurture all students, including women.

We continue to learn every day.  We now know that it is only with a great cultural shift in both perceptions of STEM and practices in STEM education that we will be able to create, sustain, and continuously develop an environment where gender equity is the norm. It is not enough to change curricular and pedagogical practices to create such an environment. It is not enough to have a 50/50 gender balance. To create an inclusive environment in which all students, including women, flourish, we need to do all this and more. We need to change perceptions of STEM: We need to change our discourse about engineering and make explicit the fact that at its core engineering is about humans and human needs. That is, engineering education is about preparing students for solving our human problems. This is a definition that is a whole lot more inclusive and true to the nature of the field.  We need to change practices in STEM education: Education is about creating relationships (in addition to developing students’ knowledge, skills, attitudes, and behaviors). We need to make this unambiguous. Education is about nurturing students’ spirit, supporting development of their motivational attitudes, building their self-efficacy, and scaffolding their personal and professional growth. As a society, we need to create an educational environment of trust that students can and will self-assemble to learn in. Our role as educators is to support students’ development, not stymie it by erecting hurdles that we expect to cause many to stumble.

It could be argued that girls are naturally inclined to disciplines other than engineering. Should we be expending energy and resources to recruit people who don’t necessarily want to be recruited? Or do you think that is a misconception?

This argument is erroneous for a great number of reasons. Here is just one of them. Let’s start with some simple word substitutions to allow this statement to read as follows, “It could be argued that children are naturally inclined to activities other than reading. Should we be expending energy and resources to teach children to read when they don’t necessarily want to do so?” The ridiculousness of this statement is not in question here, yet the original question above persists in current U.S. discourse. It would be difficult to convince any child to attempt to read her first book without adults demonstrating the relevance of reading, creating a cultural discourse about the need for reading, scaffolding children’s learning experiences, nurturing their interest and motivation, and supporting early mastery experiences in reading. To invite more girls to engineering and to allow them to flourish in this field, we need to stop actively prohibiting them from accessing the field. We need to open the doors to girls and support and celebrate their entrance.

How hard do you think it would be for other schools to adopt Olin’s approach to gender balance in engineering? Does it require exchanging old ways for new? Can it be simply added on? Can it be done incrementally, or is it something that requires an entirely new foundation?

It is clear that there is no single pill that can fix the issues at hand.  We need to work together to dispel the myths surrounding girls’ and women’s participation in engineering by changing the culture within and outside of engineering and engineering education. We need to rethink what we teach and how we teach. We need to work together with scholars from all fields to create educational environments that are welcoming to all students, including women students. We need a fundamental shift and we need all involved parties to work together to make this shift happen. We at Olin welcome and thrive on connecting with the many educators who are on this same journey.

Thank you to all those at Olin College who contributed to this article. Answers were provided by  Yevgeniya V. Zastavker, Associate Professor of Physics, Director of Olin Grand Challenge Scholars Program with support from Caitrin Lynch, Associate Professor of Anthropology and Alisha Sarang-Sieminski, Associate Professor of Bioengineering, Director of SCOPE among others.

Images: Olin College