Opening the World of Women in Engineering through Mentoring and Service
By Margaret Bailey, Kate Gleason Endowed Chair and associate professor, mechanical engineering; Margaret Anderson, assistant dean for student services; Elizabeth DeBartolo, associate professor, mechanical engineering; Marca Lam, instructional faculty, mechanical engineering; and Jacqueline Mozrall, department head and professor, industrial and systems engineering—all in the Kate Gleason College of Engineering at Rochester Institute of Technology

At the Kate Gleason College of Engineering (KGCOE) at Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT), the only engineering college in the United States named in honor of a woman, young women are excited about engineering. Like Kate Gleason herself, who began her studies at the age of eleven through on-the-job training at her father’s machine tool manufacturing shop, these students are energetically pursuing their interests. Gleason (1865-1933), a native of Rochester, New York, whose parents were close friends of Susan B. Anthony, celebrated many firsts during her lifetime, including becoming the first female engineer elected to the American Society of Mechanical Engineers and the first female president of a national bank in the United States. Decades after her death, her legacy remains alive in the school that bears her name. 

Women at KGCOE are thriving, but that hasn’t always been the case. At the beginning of the current decade, RIT’s leadership recognized that although the college was named in honor of a woman, the percentage of enrolled women engineering students was below desired levels. In order to address this issue, Dean Harvey Palmer designated the inaugural Kate Gleason Endowed Chair position to attract a faculty member with an interest in improving gender diversity in engineering. When the chair’s first appointee, Margaret Bailey, joined the faculty in 2003, she found a group of women, including Professors Jacqueline Mozrall and Elizabeth DeBartolo and Assistant Dean Margaret Anderson, who shared her passion and commitment to gender diversity. These women collaborated to form Women in Engineering at RIT—or WE@RIT (we.rit.edu)—to increase the intensity with which KGCOE and RIT address issues related to gender. Dr. Bailey now leads a group of committed engineering colleagues, administrators, and students, which has grown to include Professor Marca Lam and program coordinator Julie Olney, among others. Their collective efforts are increasing the representation of women in the engineering workforce. 

Support Structures for Women and Girls

WE@RIT aims to establish and enhance a “pipeline” of precollege and college programs that will ultimately increase the number of women engineers entering the workforce. In support of this goal, the program organizes RIT students, faculty, and alumni to provide outreach to girls and young women in grades four through twelve. The program also fosters a supportive environment for women in engineering by providing social and service-related events within KGCOE. In combination, we hope that these programs and services will increase the number of women entering and remaining in the engineering disciplines.

The WE@RIT Organization shown in Figure 1 reveals the mechanism for achieving our goals. Membership consists of the executive director and coordinator, the assistant dean, three to four faculty members or department heads within the Kate Gleason College, and the Student Support Team. The WE@RIT Organization is primarily responsible for designing, planning, and facilitating programs. Student involvement is vital to this process. The Student Support Team, consisting of current RIT students, advises WE@RIT on program development, assists in program assessment, and contributes to program facilitation and design. Industrial partners fund and participate in programming in various capacities.

Figure 1: Organizational Structure

The program flourishes with limited funding thanks in large part to student and faculty volunteers and student employees, who shoulder the bulk of the work of designing and administering various programs (Bailey, DeBartolo, Mozrall, and Olney 2008). The team assesses and evaluates the program on a regular basis to identify potential improvements. The long-term strategic plan calls for the growth of comprehensive outreach, retention, and recruitment programs and the formation of industrial, government, and academic partnerships.

Reaching Out to Younger Students

WE@RIT aims to address the nation’s shortage of women engineers primarily through various forms of mentoring. Because women’s low rate of participation in engineering is a national problem, WE@RIT seeks solutions that are large in scope but personal in detail. While WE@RIT-affiliated faculty and staff actively engage in one-on-one mentoring with students, they cannot personally mentor every girl and woman WE@RIT aims to impact. Thus WE@RIT provides outreach and community-building programs that allow college students and other faculty to participate in mentoring efforts throughout the year (DeBartolo and Bailey 2007a; Bailey and DeBartolo 2005).

One of the earliest WE@RIT programs was Park & Ride: Amusement Park Design, a pre-engineering outreach program for middle school girls. During the two-day program, girls get hands-on experience with engineering, teamwork, and creative design (Figure 2). Under the mentorship of an engineering student, middle school students work in small teams using Lego Mindstorm® kits to create a vehicle that navigates an arena. Park & Ride has been held five times and is now offered biannually in order to meet demand. The program enrolled nearly one hundred participants last year and has become one of WE@RIT’s signature events.

In an attempt to expand its outreach offerings, WE@RIT developed Traveling Engineering Activity Kits (TEAK). Engineering students develop the TEAK kits, which include hands-on, team-based teaching aides and lesson plans, as part of a senior design course supervised by Professors DeBartolo and Bailey (DeBartolo et al. 2006; DeBartolo and Bailey 2007b; Bailey and DeBartolo 2007). RIT students take the kits into area sixth-grade classrooms, where they work directly with students (Figure 3). The kits increase the younger students’ knowledge of engineering and engineering careers while exploring topics like solar and chemical energy. This exercise provides sixth-graders with college-aged role models and gives RIT students the opportunity to reap the cognitive and personal benefits of teaching engineering to others. TEAK is open to all RIT students, but many WE@RIT students see TEAK as an opportunity to teach younger girls in particular about engineering as a possible career choice. Information about TEAK and detailed lesson plans are available online, and an interactive Web site is under development (teak.rit.edu).

Figure 2: Middle school students work with an engineering student at Park & Ride 2008. Photo by Daniel Brewer. Figure 3: An engineering student uses components from the TEAK to instruct middle school students.

To provide a more sustained experience for even younger audiences, WE@RIT launched Everyday Engineering in the summer of 2006. This project has evolved into a two-week-long engineering day camp for females in grades four through twelve. Like WE@RIT’s other projects, the camp introduces women and girls to engineering through hands-on activities. But Everyday Engineering allows for longer-scope projects and more interaction with the students than the typical short-term workshop. Women engineering students lead the camp in collaboration with education majors from neighboring colleges, since RIT does not have an education program.

Strengthening the College Community

By 2005, WE@RIT had made great strides toward providing mentoring and outreach for girls and young women in the community. But KGCOE still needed a more gender-diverse student body. Therefore, in 2005, WE@RIT created a unique recruitment program for admitted female engineering students. The WE@RIT Retreat is a two-day session for accepted female engineering students designed to increase awareness of student life and the engineering community at RIT. The WE@RIT Retreat (Figures 4 and 5) has grown annually, and a record number of women attended in 2008. Participation in this program has successfully increased the percentage of admitted women students who choose to enroll at RIT. Over 80 percent of WE@RIT Retreat participants pay tuition deposits to enroll at RIT.

Figure 4: Students paint a mural at the WE@RIT Retreat. Photo by Daniel Brewer. Figure 5: Student participants in the 2008 WE@RIT Retreat. Photo by Daniel Brewer.

Figure 6: A student participates in a pumpkin-carving activity within Kate’s Community.

Of course, successful recruitment means little without successful retention. To support women engineering students and encourage retention, WE@RIT established Kate’s Community in 2005. Every other Friday, female students gather for one hour to participate in a rich variety of workshops, lectures, and social events. This extremely popular program has brought female engineers to campus to give workshops on topics such as resume writing and job negotiation skills. Some of the workshops are not gender specific (for example, the “What Not to Wear to a Job Interview” workshop). Kate’s Community also hosts fun, seasonally appropriate activities, including pumpkin carving (Figure 6), cookie decorating, and celebrating Kate Gleason and Susan B. Anthony’s birthdays. Each year, Kate’s Community hosts a kick-off dinner and keynote address during the first few weeks of the fall semester. In 2007, seventy-two women attended this event, a three-fold increase in participation over the previous year. The evening focused on exploring the impact that Susan B. Anthony had on Kate Gleason through their mentor-mentee relationship, with an expert from the Susan B. Anthony house addressing attendees.

To supplement the WE@RIT Retreat and Kate’s Community, WE@RIT developed WE’re in Motion in 2006 to help incoming women engineering students transition to life on campus. WE’re in Motion includes four days of hands-on workshops, social events, and various activities that enhance participants’ self-confidence in labs and machine shops while instilling a sense of belonging to Kate’s Community. WE’re in Motion activities introduce students to outreach opportunities and build WE@RIT’s volunteer base. Mentoring is an essential component of this program. Over eighty-five percent of eligible students participate annually.

Figure 7: Engineering students visit IBM through the SHAPE Initiative.

With the success of these initiatives, WE@RIT continues to develop new programs. In 2007, WE@RIT piloted a new SHAdow Program in Engineering (SHAPE) Initiative for first- and second-year women engineering students. The SHAPE Initiative aims to improve students’ understanding of what engineering occupations are like, especially for women. The program provides students opportunities to meet professional engineers during workshops, luncheons, and facilities tours, like the inaugural trip to an IBM manufacturing and testing facility (Figure 7).

In addition to these programmatic events, WE@RIT provides ongoing leadership opportunities for women engineering students. Each academic quarter, several undergraduate students serve as paid and volunteer program assistants for WE@RIT. They gain experience in teamwork, program design, research, program evaluation, and event planning. This team of student assistants plays a critical role in building community and recruiting volunteers to help with outreach events. Their enthusiasm for the program is pivotal, as they are the face of the program to the general student body.

Tightening the Joints along the Engineering Pipeline

The impact WE@RIT has had on the lives of current women engineering students is perhaps best summarized by Peggy Meszaros, William E. Lavery Professor of Human Development at Virginia Tech. Dr. Meszaros’s current NSF-funded project (Investigating the Gender Component: Cultures that Promote Equity in Undergraduate Engineering Departments) includes RIT as a sample school. In gathering information for the project, Dr. Meszaros recently spent two days at KGCOE interviewing deans, department heads, women faculty, and women students. Reflecting via e-mail on WE@RIT and its impact on women students within KGCOE, she wrote:

The support for female undergraduates in engineering at RIT is especially strong in both recruitment efforts and retention programs. The women I interviewed exhibited a strong sense of their own identity and ability to achieve and noted consistently the individual and group support they have received from WE@RIT as a major factor in their development. They cited example after example of both recruitment programs that provided experiences of ‘helping’ their communities through engineering and retention programs through their academic departments and WE@RIT that reinforced their ability to touch the lives of countless individuals and communities through engineering. This sense of engineering as a helping profession is truly unique in my experience of trying to recruit and retain females in engineering, specifically in information technology programs. Something quite unique and successful is happening at RIT and WE@RIT is a central part of that success.

Dr. Meszaros stresses the importance of “engineering as a helping profession” in recruiting girls and women, and responses from project participants of all ages seem to confirm her assessment. After one WE@RIT program, a group of girls in grades six through eight were asked to fill in the blank in the statement, “If I were an engineer, I would….” Their responses included:

• Try to find ways to end or stop pollution in our world.
• Work on developing and improving a water purification system for countries with sanitation problems.
• Try to make the world a better place by designing products to help people.

Members of the Student Support Team, too, have expressed their sense of the importance of service. After an outreach event for fifty-one middle school students, all twenty-one student volunteers said that they would volunteer again. As one student said, “I love to volunteer and work with younger people. I like the feeling that I am needed and that I can a make a difference in someone's life.” For these reasons and others, WE@RIT has had a profound impact on individuals’ decisions to pursue engineering careers. A parent of a WE@RIT Retreat participant recognized this effect, writing:

I would like to thank you all for the wonderful WE@RIT program that my daughter…attended....It was an amazing experience for her and has helped her to finalize her college plans. It also opened the world of women in engineering to her.

In 2007-08, program participation exceeded 2,300 with support of 175 volunteers. WE@RIT’s success is demonstrating, as Margaret Mead observed, that “A small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world.”

References

Bailey, M., and E. DeBartolo. 2005. Creating a community for women engineers at RIT. In Proceedings of the 2005 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition. Portland, Oregon: American Society for Engineering Education.

Bailey, M., and E. DeBartolo. 2007. Traveling engineering activity kit—Heat transfer: Designed by engineering students for middle school students. In Proceedings for International Mechanical Engineering Congress and Exposition 2007. Seattle, WA: International Mechanical Engineering Congress and Exposition.

Bailey, M., E. DeBartolo, J. Mozrall, and J. Olney. 2008. Creating a comprehensive women in engineering organization using a managed resource strategy. In Proceedings of the 2008 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition. Pittsburg, PA: American Society for Engineering Education.

DeBartolo, E., M. Bailey, M. Zaczek, T. Schriefer, P. Kelley, M. Ramaswamy, and N. Ryczko. 2006. Traveling engineering activity kits--Energy and the environment: Designed by college students for middle school students. In Proceedings of the 2006 American Society for Engineering Education Conference and Exposition. Chicago, IL: American Society for Engineering Education.

DeBartolo, E., and M. Bailey. 2007a. Making engineering appealing: Programs for grades 6-12 girls. International Journal of Engineering Education 23, 850-860.

DeBartolo, E., and M. B. Bailey. 2007b. Traveling engineering activity kits (TEAK) – energy and the environment:  Designed by college students for middle school students. In Proceedings of the 2007 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference and Exposition. Honolulu, HI: American Society for Engineering Education.