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TEDx Talks
Title: Recruiting women for science, technology, engineering and maths: Sheryl Sorby at TEDxFulbrightDublin
Published: 2014-06-18
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJZIhl28HFI
one %HESITATION I had an older sister who always wanted to be a teacher from probably the moment she was born and from the time I could talk we got to play any game I wanted as long as it was school and as long as she got to be the teacher I was never allowed to be the teacher so she was three years older than me and
when I started school then I was way ahead of all the other kids I always excelled at school every subject was easy for me math not a problem science on a problem English foreign language and everything was very easy I love secondary school and I rolled in %HESITATION the university and majoring in civil engineering I had no doubt I would be able to do it I
had my first quarter calculus chemistry English although subjects strays again no problem very easy my second quarter I took a course %HESITATION my very first quote unquote engineering course and it was called engineering graphics and for the first time in my life I had no idea what was going on I was struggling I had no idea how to solve the problems I had no idea what
the teacher was talking about and what made it worse for me is that all of these friends of mine they were having they said this is the easiest class I've had all year and I couldn't do it and I nearly left engineering because of that %HESITATION but I stuck with it and eventually you know got a PhD in mechanical engineering and %HESITATION eyes whom start looking
into what what had happened to me and I partner with some people and and I'm gonna tell you about that later but first I'm going to go through some things that we know about engineering that many of you who %HESITATION don't have an engineering background might not understand the first one is that a lack of diversity often means lower or a lack of creativity so when
you have engineers always work on teams and what they found is that if you have a very homogeneous group they all think alike they all come up with the same ideas and they don't understand %HESITATION for example that if you have young people designing things for old people that they have different needs or if you have men designing for women that their needs are different so
some of the %HESITATION early some of the more famous or infamous examples are are many of them are in the automotive industry where they have airbags that are perfectly fine for your average male but they can injure a woman or a child who's smaller you have a tail gate on a mini van that the average woman can't pull down you know a lot of things that
happen it's not that they're not creative it's just that they're not as creative as they can be so we really need to have diversity in order to have creative solutions but this is the big problem engineering is very non diverse in the US and elsewhere around the world about ten percent engineers are women and in for underrepresented minorities in the U. S. it's even less so
here we have this problem right where we we need creative solutions we have big problems in our society is today and we don't have enough women who are in engineering now one other thing is that engineering careers require high levels of three D. spatial ability and so what I was struggling in my class as a first year engineering student my problem was really that I had
poorly develop spatial skills not that I couldn't do the engineering so if you think about engineers they have to think about how things fit together how things work together hall the the ducks in the pipes and the wires are going through buildings it's a very spatially demanding %HESITATION field and this is a task that we give the students to determine their level of spatial ability and
this is it's called a test of mental rotation and you have an object on the top line it's rotated in space as you move from left to right there's a second object on the second line and you have to say okay if I rotate this by the exact same amount what would it look like for those of you who don't know the answer the answer to
this one is de next problem is that the three days special skills of women lag significantly behind those of men right so this is data that I've gathered over the past fifteen years and you can see that though women are always behind the men in terms of the three D. special skills and this is across the world so it's not just me I work with people
in Germany Poland Japan %HESITATION Ireland's anti finds week special skills among the women almost always %HESITATION in fact on this test that we give them about thirty percent of the women fail that test when they start their engineering course work but only about ten percent of the men fail that test so women are three times more likely to have problems with the three special skills when
compared to men but the one thing that I want to say is nobody really knows why women have weaker spatial skills and it doesn't really matter why they have weaker special skills because special skills can be learned a lot of people think that this is a fixed quantity you either started out you can either read a map or you can't read a map and you can
never learn how to read a map if you didn't learn if you didn't somehow if you weren't born with it but I want to say from my own experience as a learner as well as as a teacher spatial skills definitely can be learned so what should we do well about twenty years ago we developed a course aimed at first year engineering students to help them learn
to visualize and I got into this obviously because I had had my own troubles with spatial skills and I I was eventually teaching engineering graphics and I found that there was always kind of this core group of students who struggle with their special skills or struggle with that particular course and predominantly it was women so we started a course the course has been offered many times
it's actually not I tell people all time it's not really rocket science %HESITATION it takes about fifteen or twenty hours of instruction so it's not I'm overly %HESITATION difficult but what did we find them well the first thing is that we improve people special skills which is good if you're gonna develop a course designed to help you improve your special skills you actually want to have
them to improve their special skills at the end of the day this show six years worth of data I could show you twenty years worth of data it's about the same students in the class are about fifty percent on this test and they end up at about eighty percent and what's interesting is that the eighty percent that's about where the first year engineering students as a
whole start out so these people are starting out way behind and they end up and about where everybody else's great we improve their special skills what else well we improved also their grades in a lot of their stem courses so here you can see they're earning about a half of a letter grade better by going through the spatial skills training and not just in their engineering
graphics course but also in their calculus course chemistry a little bit physics and computer science so help so all of these fields all of these %HESITATION science and engineering fields are high spatial fields and by improving a student special skills we then %HESITATION improve their success in that course we also look at overall success so this crowd shows the graduation rates for students who come to
the university and they initially have good spatial skills so you can say that for the women they're graduating from engineering and about a seventy percent chance and the man at about a sixty percent chance so this shows you the I think the importance of spatial skills for success in engineering but what happens to the people who come with poor spatial skills I see a big drop
off for the women right so instead of Greta seventy percent of them graduating we only have now less than fifty percent is about forty seven percent the man drop off as well not by as much the drop off is really dramatic for the women and personally for me if we're trying to get more women to go into engineering we should try really hard to keep the
ones there who say they want to do it so what happens now if we take students who have initially week spatial skills and we give them just this little bit of training well now the women our graduating not only at a higher rate than the people have poor spatial skills but neither graduating at a higher rate than the people who start out with good special skills
so the women went up to about seventy seven percent compared to seventy percent graduation the man basically they went back up to where they had been if you have good spatial skills %HESITATION but %HESITATION that's good too we ought we need more men in engineering as well as women I've always said that I want to make the need for my course to go away what that
means is I want every child to come to the university with well developed spatial skills so they can be successful in the science and engineering and math feels so what can you all do I assume you have children grandchildren nieces nephews friends somebody in your life that you would want to encourage to go into engineering or science or math what can you do to help them
develop their special skills well the first thing if legos and I I don't own stock in lego so I'm I'm not profiting from this but %HESITATION really if you have a picture of something that you're supposed to be building and you give your child some lego bricks and they can build that that's the first step on an engineering or science path %HESITATION now unfortunately many of
the lego kits don't always appeal to the young girls so there's a new product to town and again I don't own stock in this but it's called Goldie blocks and it's supposed to be kind of a legos but more aimed at the kinds of things that young girls like to do so legos Goldie blocks what else can you do maps not GPS so when you take
that family vacation a set of relying just on the GPS give your child a map and say help me plan the route and have them learn about the relationship between what is on that piece of paper and the space around them there was a study that showed that because we're using GPS right now %HESITATION were actually losing some of our spatial skills as a as a
society I kia again I don't own stock in his company I keep yeah %HESITATION we've all purchased furniture it comes in a box and we take out all the parts and there's a picture and we have to put it together a bookshelf a chair a foot still a table have your daughter help you put that together she can figure out how the parts fit together where
those screws go in those holes she'll be better off and still probably be developing or spatial skills as a result sketch real life objects don't just do it all don't just draw funny things sketch real life things and then turn them over and I a different vantage point and have a daughter schedule from that new vantage points of sketching is one of the things we found
very important for developing spatial skills finally three any computer games now I know that you probably as a parent don't want to tell your child no dessert for you unless you do twenty minutes on your computer game tonight because that doesn't sound like a good parenting technique but three D. computer games have been shown to help develop three special skills now to the computer games are
not helpful at all so you don't get credit for doing angry birds but if you can get your child to do three computer games that's great and will help him or her develop their special skills same thing with legos so there's not a lot of games that appeal to young women so you really have to look to try to find the ones that will appeal to
