Sidebar: Meeting the Image Head-on

sidebar: meeting the image head-on

Congress established the Commission on the Advancement of Women and Minorities in Science, Engineering, and Technology Development (CAWMSET) in 1998. Among its five major objectives is one to change the public image of engineering and science to encourage more women and minorities to enter the field.

Without a concerted effort to meet the marketplace demand for technical expertise, the United States is faced with importing foreign professionals as has been done for the computer industry.

According to separate studies done at Yale, Harvard, Princeton, and Stanford, female and minority students are deeply affected by small reminders of their public personae. Just listing their race or gender on a test seems to have affected the scores of women and minorities, who scored lower than a control group that did not have to enter this information.

The studies also found that response to stereotyping did not fade with age. It showed that those who had already succeeded in school and scored well otherwise were affected the most in the test, demonstrating that even the most confident students still react to a public's perception of them.

At the University of Waterloo in Ontario, researchers found that commercial stereotyping convinces women and minorities to withdraw from math and sciences because they feel targeted as one of so few in the classes. CAWMSET calls its mission a national imperative because, while college enrollment is rising, the numbers of those in math and sciences is declining.

Late last year, women engineers at Lawrence Livermore and Sandia National Laboratories along with the Society of Women Engineers, sponsored a one-day CAWMSET meeting through a grant from ExxonMobil Foundation. The diverse group sought to bring together the private and public sectors with those in education to focus aggressive intervention efforts in encouraging a diverse domestic workforce to meet the nation's strategic science, engineering, and technology needs.

The recommendations reach into all areas of science, engineering, and technology, as well as into all levels of education. Given the results of studies on the effect of stereotyping, it will take that kind of national cooperation to bring about any change in the public image of engineers.

—Barbara Wolcott