In my opinion, young women joining engineering has been the second best thing to happen to the field,” says Richard Kenyon, professor of mechanical engineering and dean of engineering at Union.
And what's the first?
“When we stopped thinking of engineering as applied science and started thinking of it as a social endeavor to make things better for people.”
Both changes are part of the new engineering curriculum being designed with major support from a
grant from the General Electric Foundation. A goal of the new program is to encourage us to think about engineering as a social enterprise-a profession that solves problems and works towards the betterment of society.
“If engineering is seen as offering one route to solving the world's travails, it might be appealing to those who might not ordinarily be captured by it,” he says.
According to Kenyon, women were never consciously excluded from the field of engineering.
“It was just assumed that they were uninterested,” he says. “It was very much a cultural thing. We just didn't recruit young girls into engineering.”
But in the mid-1960s, he says, someone realized that half the population was being excluded from a profession that was in no way gender bound. A large “latent pool” of women enrolled in engineering programs, and it was thought that before long the number of men and women in engineering would be equal.
But that has yet to happen, and in fact the number of women in engineering has decreased since its peak in the mid-1980s.
Kenyon says increasing the numbers is important for two reasons:
- “The more we make all disciplines gender blind, the sooner we will erase stereotypes and professions will be enriched.
- “We must try to reach a point where no one is denied access to a discipline or profession simply because of a societal belief that it's inappropriate. No one should be inhibited from pursuing a profession because of sex, race, religion, or ethnicity.”
The aim of the new engineering curriculum is to create professionals who are prepared for all aspects of the world they live in.
“Liberal arts, the social sciences, becoming well-rounded are not the frosting on the cake,” Kenyon says. “They are the cake, and engineering is the frosting.”