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Preeti on the Web |
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Providing Food for Thought |
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Why Im Not an Engineer |
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If Summers comment about innate sex differences happens to be true, then I must be a female anomaly: I completed my engineering courses with a 4.0 GPA. Lack of mathematical talent certainly hasnt kept me from being an engineer. |
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For me, engineering didnt provide fulfillment |
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March 5, 2005 |
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To Contact Preeti: preetiontheweb at yahoo dot com |
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Please note that all text on this webpage is copyrighted ©. Please do not quote or paraphrase without using proper citations. |
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My senior year of high school, I was voted Most Likely to Discover the Meaning of Life Through Differential Calculus. The following year, in college, I received an A in my calculus IV class. Five years later I graduated with a bachelors degree in chemical engineering. Now Im working on my Ph.D. at MIT and hope to one day have a successful career as an engineer. Actually, that last sentence about MIT and the Ph.D. is a lie; everything through the bachelors degree in chemical engineering, however, is the utter truth. What actually happened after college was that I parted course from my mostly male classmates. Instead of securing a job with Exxon or pursuing graduate school, I headed to sunny California. There, I spent a year and half working for a couple of non-profits before making the decision to return to school. Today, Im pursuing a masters degree in public policy at Duke University, and I love it. Why didnt I become an engineer, a career with a starting salary of $51,000? Why, instead, have I placed myself on a trajectory that will launch me into a lower paying career in government or the non-profit world? In the wake of Harvard President Larry Summers inflammatory hypothesis of why women are underrepresented in science and engineering, I find myself wondering why Im one of the women contributing to those statistics. If Summers comment about innate sex differences happens to be true, then I must be a female anomaly: I completed my engineering courses with a 4.0 GPA. Lack of mathematical talent certainly hasnt kept me from being an engineer. Perhaps womens underrepresentation isnt so much about ability as it is about preferences, whether innate or socially conditioned. For example, in his book The Blank Slate, Harvard psychology professor Steven Pinker cites a study of mathematically gifted seventh graders who were selected in a nationwide talent search. The gifted girls reported that they had greater interest in people, social values and humanitarian and altruistic goals. Gifted boys expressed interest in things, theoretical values and abstract intellectual inquiry. While eight percent of the boys ended up pursuing doctorates in engineering, math or physical sciences, only one percent of the girls did. Instead, the girls pursued biology, medicine, law, and the humanities. Are these differences in preferences nature or nurture? I dont know. What I do know, however, is that those girls interests match mine exactly. Chemical engineering left me unfulfilled. Working at a chemical plant just doesnt lead to direct, immediate improvement of the human condition. Thus, its no surprise that Im now studying public policy, a save-the-world field focused on solving economic, social and political problems. When I consider other reasons why women are underrepresented in science and engineering, I suspect that Summers hit upon another important explanation: mothers cant work 80 hours a week. Women are the primary caretakers of children, yet they work in a world where the default worker is assumed to be a man who has a wife to manage the household and care for his children. This antiquated view of workers is an institutional barrier that limits womens advancement in many professions. So too is the societal view that children are some kind of indulgence, where if you have a baby, thats your choice; you deal with it. These beliefs ignore the biological reality that women bear, nurse and disproportionately care for children. They ignore the economic reality that children cost women money (both in direct expenses and forgone wages from working less), while society benefits from the productive adults that mothers raise their children to be. Employers benefit from the skills and work ethic parents endow their children, yet parents arent compensated for the costs of producing those new workers. The government relies on mothers to supply future taxpayers, but doesnt let them accrue Social Security benefits if they stay at home raising children to be hard working taxpayers. (And benefiting from something without fully paying for it is freeloading.) So why are women underrepresented in science and engineering? Well, lets first remember that over the past f40 years women have steadily expanded their presence in these fields due to changing societal attitudes. As a recent New York Times op-ed explains this increase, Scientists are made, not born. As for me, my career choice stems from both my innate abilities and my personal preferences, which are as much the product of my life experiences as they are of genetics. While engineering wasnt my cup of tea, and while I may never discover the meaning of life through differential calculus, I do enjoy applying my mathematical talent to my economics and statistics courses here at Duke. I have found my niche, and I am happy. |