Representation Matters

Providing the Right Examples

Parisa Saboori, Ph.D., often begins the academic year by telling students the story of her 2-year-old daughter, who loved to cook. “I was too scared to give her a real knife,” she said. “So I gave her a child-safe knife that couldn’t cut anything. She had to work so hard to just cut a carrot that she was ready to give up. My mistake was not providing the right environment and not trusting her. Finally, I said, ‘Let’s try a real knife. I’ll hold your hand and we’ll do it together.’ It took time, but by age 4 she was using the knife perfectly.”

As professor and chair of the mechanical engineering department at Manhattan College in Bronx, New York, Dr. Saboori fosters a similar environment of safety, inclusion, and trust so students can develop their skills and curiosity. She also engages in a great deal of outreach to elementary and middle schools, focused especially on STEM. “We need to be out in the communities and schools, letting girls know they can do this,” she said. “It’s also OK to fail. Girls can feel like everyone is waiting for them to make that one mistake. Boys make mistakes all the time!”

Finding women mentors with time for her students was difficult, so Dr. Saboori took a different tack: pairing students in the same year of study, giving them a specific task, and making one the mentor and the other a mentee. “Having a leadership role, even among peers, doing research, and then teaching what you learn builds confidence and skills,” she said. “It’s been very effective.”

When Dr. Saboori first joined Manhattan College, she was the only woman engineer on the faculty, there were very few women students, and all outreach programs were led by men. So, she started the Mechanical Engineering Women’s group, known as MEW, with three sophomore women students, gradually branching into first-year, junior, and senior classes. In its first year, MEW attracted 10 students, and by 2020 it had grown to more than 45 members.

Dr. Saboori fosters a similar environment of safety, inclusion, and trust so students can develop their skills and curiosity. 

Dr. Saboori then added a mentoring program, bringing in speakers, conducting professional development workshops, and even wrapping in alumnae. “At that point, magic happens and outreach to girls takes off.”

Dr. Saboori realized it wasn’t enough to teach girls the how, what, and why of becoming an engineer. “We need to start teaching the boys,” she said. “It doesn’t matter how perfect women students are — they walk into the classroom and if they don’t feel like saying ‘Hello’ the men say, ‘Must be that time of the month.’ We need to start teaching boys that’s not OK.”

So she took a chance and began inviting male engineering students to MEW meetings. “The first few were tense because the men were outnumbered five to one,” she said. “To defuse that, I invited a male colleague to help moderate. By the third meeting, male students were opening up, and a year in, they [now] feel that the problems women face are also their problems. And it helped the women feel respected and able to speak up. Now these young men and women can take this understanding with them and change workplace culture for the better.”

— Seabright McCabe, SWE Contributor

Building an Inclusive Culture

A professor’s invitation in 1997 started the career of Helene Finger, Ph.D., P.E., F.SWE, as an educator. “That’s all it took — one person saying, ‘You’d be good at this,’ and me saying yes,” she said. “In 2000, I was asked to be faculty advisor for the Cal Poly SWE [Collegiate] Section, and I said OK, I’ll give this a try.”

Decades later, Dr. Finger — the director of the Women’s Engineering Program at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo — is still enabling students to take ownership of outreach and retention activities. “Our strategy is always to first develop the person, because people come in with different levels of exposure and ability,” she said.

Dr. Finger is a big proponent of Carol Dweck’s book on personal growth, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success (Ballantine Books, 2007). “Basically, [the author] says we all have the potential to do better. It’s not a matter of people having innate intelligence. You shouldn’t be limited by what you can do now; you can always learn to do more, learn to evaluate your own performance instead of looking for external validation.”

For Dr. Finger, supporting students means staying alert to who you can listen to and learn from. “A colleague and I had done research on recruiting women to engineering,” she said. “That was the first I’d heard of intersectional identities, and it planted the seed for me of supporting women of color. Since then, I look out for students navigating situations where their multiple identities conflict with each other.”

“Girls need role models who look like them, especially in communities where they get mixed messages about what they’re capable of doing.”

For nearly 10 years, Dr. Finger has put particular focus on recruiting Hispanic students, who make up a significant percentage of California’s population but are not well represented in the university’s demographics. She’s excited that in the new first-year class, 29% of the women students are Latina.

“Girls need role models who look like them, especially in communities where they get mixed messages about what they’re capable of doing,” she said. “Also, we’re recruiting first-generation college students, so a lot of K-12 outreach is in communities with those demographics. We have a multicultural engineering program, and, in recent years, our Women in Engineering program has started a mentoring program for women of color. We’re also promoting Black women in STEM, in collaboration with the College of Science and Mathematics.

“One thing I love about my job is that we’re building a culture around love and empathy,” she said. “Saying the words ‘engineering’ and ‘love’ really wasn’t done when I started, and now it’s part of why we attract so many women. Our current freshman class is 33% women, and some of our departments that were in single digits are now close to 30%.”

Dr. Finger stresses that she hasn’t accomplished this alone, and that her key to success is relationships and collaboration. “I’ll tell you one thing I’m proud of,” she said. “We were doing outreach in Spanish, and for kids to visit campus, their parents had to sign a waiver that was only in English. My students pushed translating it all the way up to the chancellor’s office, and now that form is in seven languages. That’s huge — and it’s the students making things happen.”

— Seabright McCabe, SWE Contributor

Reaching the Vocal Minority

After an 18-year career at Swagelok Company in Ohio, Sunniva Collins, Ph.D., returned to teach at Case Western Reserve University — where she had earned a master’s and a doctoral degree in materials science and engineering — at the request of a department chair. There she found many women students but very few women faculty.

“I look back at how many students I’ve had since 2013; it’s well over 1,000,” she said. “Some are having great careers, but some of them leave engineering. As an educator, I’m always thinking about how to keep women from giving up because they hit a roadblock.”

Dr. Collins, who is now the associate dean for professional programs and a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at the Case School of Engineering, looked for answers in the U.S. Department of Education’s 2010 report, Why So Few? Women in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (American Association of University Women, 2010). “One of the first things I realized was that being a role model was way more important than I thought it was going to be,” she said.

“Second, I learned to give people opportunities to form their own networks and work together. When I put together project teams, I made sure the women weren’t isolated, because when there’s only one, she often ends up doing administrative tasks and not the technical work. I do a lot of that — shaping teams and looking for that vocal minority.”

Dr. Collins emphasized that while a strong technical background is essential, women also need to see their ability to connect with others as a strength.

Dr. Collins emphasized that while a strong technical background is essential, women also need to see their ability to connect with others as a strength. “The college years can be difficult — growing up, people responding to you differently. At least once a semester, I have a conversation with someone who’s thinking about leaving because they feel disrespected or minimized. I always ask, ‘Do you really think it’s going to be different somewhere else?’ The answer is often no. So why let somebody else determine your future?”

Sometimes the best option is just listening. “If someone decides to leave, it’s never a good idea to try and talk them into staying,” she said. “I always leave the door open; they can always change their mind and try again. But the type of young women I’ve seen succeed in engineering? They want to solve problems, make the world better, help other people. There’s a strong altruistic quality.

“Nobody becomes an engineer on their own,” she continued. “I’m a big believer in organizations that give students experience and help them feel what they do is valuable. We have a lot of young women who’ve been very active in organizations like Baja SAE, Design for America, and the Case Rocket Team. SWE is obviously important, and there’s also our Women in Science and Engineering Roundtable. I honestly think they learn as much if not more in those environments than they do in the classroom.”

Over the years, Dr. Collins has monitored the percentages. In 2013, Case’s mechanical engineering department had about 20% women students and stands at roughly 28% to 30% today. “I’m really trying to get it to a full third, because at that point women become such a vocal minority that everyone just accepts them, and nobody feels isolated,” she said. “They don’t feel like an edge case anymore.”

— Seabright McCabe, SWE Contributor