Fantastic! I'm sharing these resources with my fellow teachers. 

Thank you so much, Jordan! If they end up using the videos and discussion guide, I'd love to hear how that goes!

Laura

Thank you so much, Lisa! The full documentary, Trailblazers: The Untold Stories of Six Women Engineers, can be found here. It's free and available for anyone to watch. This website also provides links to three educational videos and other resources. I'd be happy to answer other questions you have or to talk further about the documentary.

Laura

Thank you very much, Scott! Those are great questions. I would say that most of my interview participants did not focus on their early learning experiences and that there was quite a bit of variety in their experiences growing up. All graduated college in the 1970s, but they came from very different backgrounds (socio-economic, racial, geographic, etc.).

Here are some things that interview participants who did talk about early childhood commented upon:

• Having both typically male and female toys.
• Being very active outside (for example, in one case, helping her family around the farm).
• Realizing from a very young age that her brain seemed to work differently from everyone else's.
• Learning from a mechanically-oriented father about tools and fixing things. 
• Not letting rough and tumble play and scraped knees stop her from playing with the boys.

Again though, a lot of the interview participants did not talk much about their early childhood experiences. Thanks for your questions!

Very interesting. Thanks for sharing more about your project, Laura. In our research we have also seen an extremely diverse range of experiences or factors that might spark or support ongoing interest in engineering or other aspects of STEM. Clearly there is no one pathway. Thanks again for sharing!

Thank you, Scott. I look forward to following your research on this subject. 

Jen, thank you very much for your kind words! 

Nidaa, thank you so much for this feedback and for your thoughtful questions.

As for your first question, we hope that students will 1) come away from the videos with some tools to develop resilience and understand potential obstacles they may face during their education and careers, and 2) see the six trailblazing women engineers as role models and mentors, when they may not have encountered any or many women in engineering before. We worked hard not to send the message to girls that it's their fault if they feel discouraged; we wanted to acknowledge the structural challenges while also empowering girls (and young people regardless of gender identification). 

As for your second question, I would like to do more to measure the impact of the project and would welcome your suggestions about this. We have some information about impact, suggesting that the educational videos and documentary have gotten students talking and thinking about gender and STEM. 

For example, following a December 2020 virtual event, co-sponsored by Clarkson University and the New York State Master Teacher Program, in which we launched the educational videos and documentary, the trailblazing women engineers made virtual visits to some classrooms and school districts of teachers in attendance at the event. The engineers and, in some cases, teachers reported back about impact. In one case, a group of high school students was particularly interested in the comments in the documentary about wage discrimination. The students noted that their mothers had told them that wage discrimination still exists. They also said, following the video/documentary viewings, that they didn't feel that geeky students or girls doing science get discriminated against in high school, but do in middle school. 

Thank you for the detailed response! I agree that it's important that we communicate to young women who are interested in engineering that challenges that they may face are due to structural challenges that can be changed, and we should be working towards addressing them. 

You also raised a good point about the changing environment in high schools (being more open to girls doing science) from when the participants in the videos went through their school years. And while there are many efforts nationally to increase women participation in undergraduate engineering programs, the representation continues to decrease as you move higher on the education ladder. This is the same issue for tenure track faculty in engineering, where representation decreases as we go from assistant to associate to full professors. 

In terms of measuring impact, there are some existing measures that may get at some of the outcomes you are interested in (engineering self-efficacy, engineering identity, draw an engineer), but you can also have some survey questions targeting students' perceptions of obstacles facing women in engineering. 

Nidaa, thank you for all of this! 

You raised good points about representation decreasing as you move higher on the education ladder and in the academic ranks. 

Thanks for your helpful suggestions about measuring impact. Much appreciated!

Thank you very much, Peggy!

Thank you so much, Lizzy! I just went to watch your video and found it to be really well-done - and such important work. I commented on it there. 

Thank you very much, Seema!

Thank you so much, Claire. If people in your teacher network use the videos and want to provide feedback, or if they have any questions, feel free to have them reach out to me. 

Thank you so much for your comments and your excellent questions, Amy! It's very important to me to reach a broad audience with my work. I think the women I interviewed are amazing, and I want everyone to hear their voices and messages! 

I agree with you completely about the importance of changing hostile systems themselves. My answer above to Nidaa Makki was about the outcomes for younger students who watch the three educational videos. My hope there is that the educational videos will give the students strategies and role models/mentors - and importantly, help them to feel less alone.

The short documentary, which is aimed at older high school students and adults, is another story. My hope is that people who watch the documentary will have a better understanding than they might otherwise have about what needs to change to encourage women to go into and persist in engineering careers. I hope that by listening to the engineers' stories, higher education administrators, industry and government leaders, and others will think more about what they can do to change the culture of engineering, along with the policies and practices at their institutions, so the cultures and institutions are more inclusive and welcoming. I also hope that individuals who watch the documentary will think more about their own biases. And from the feedback I've received, many women - in a variety of careers (not just engineering or STEM) and of a variety of ages - who've watched the documentary have related to it. So, in that way, the documentary like the educational videos has the potential (I hope) to make viewers feel less alone. 

I think when people (of any age) feel less alone - when they realize they're not the only ones experiencing lack of confidence or micro-discrimination, for example - they're more likely to say that the hostile systems are hostile and unacceptable.

I'd welcome your take on all of this! I love thinking about the power of stories to create change. Thanks again for starting this conversation. 

Karen, thank you so much for your comments and for sharing some of your story. I'm sorry that your physics professor said that awful thing to you and that you faced many other barriers as well.

My teaching at Clarkson University inspired me to take on this project. Clarkson is a private technological university where a large percentage of students major in engineering. As a historian of women, gender, science, and medicine, I wanted to understand more about the context of the things my women colleagues and students in engineering were experiencing.

That led me to interview Clarkson women engineering alumnae who had graduated from college in the 1970s. I put those interviews on this website. 

Then, I decided that I wanted to tell a larger story. That led me to apply for a NSF grant to interview women engineers from throughout the US who graduated from college in the 1970s.

I feel so lucky to have met so many incredible women who have trusted me with their stories. Though I am not an engineer or in any STEM field, I find that I often connect to the engineers' stories. These women inspire me. 

Katherine, thank you very much for these comments. I'm so glad that this project speaks to you. My hope is that the educational videos and documentary could be helpful to your daughter and other girls her age. If your daughter ends up watching the documentary or educational videos, I'd be interested to hear her reactions to them!

Thank you so much for these comments, Jane! I agree with you. A short article I published in October, "Trailblazing women who broke into engineering in the 1970s reflect on what's changed - and what hasn't," gets at some of this.

Here's a question for anyone reading this thread: what do you think will have the most impact in encouraging girls and women to go into and stay in engineering? 

Francheska, thank you very much! 

Thank you so much, Jennifer! And thanks for sharing it with your colleague. If you or your colleague end up using my documentary and/or educational videos in any way, I'd welcome your feedback!