Engineering access for all

UCLA’s efforts to encourage the participation of women and minorities in science and math are opening these fields not only to new people—but also new ideas.

By WP BrandStudio

Jayathi Murthy knows how it feels to be the only woman in the room. Inspired from a young age to follow in the footsteps of her father, an engineer, and her mother, a marine zoologist, Murthy always knew she wanted to enter the world of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). But her path hasn’t always been easy.

She was one of only two women in her undergraduate class of 250 students in India. After she moved to the U.S. to continue her studies, the gender disparity improved, she said, but not by much.

“I was the first woman Ph.D. out of my department at the University of Minnesota. I was the first woman full professor at Purdue in my department. I was the first woman chair of University of Texas’s Mechanical Engineering department. Now I’m the first woman dean at UCLA Engineering. So, yeah, it’s been like that!” she said.

Now the dean of UCLA’s Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science, Murthy is working to create a smoother path forward for other women in STEM. In 2016, she launched a new initiative called Women in Engineering, or WE@UCLA. The program has three main goals: to increase the number of women in both undergraduate and graduate engineering programs; to ensure those women stick with a program and complete it; and to cultivate resilience and self-efficacy skills in female students so they’ll have the tools to succeed as professional engineers after they graduate.

“This fall we will have about 33 percent women entering our freshman class,” said Murthy. “About ten years ago, our incoming freshman class had 18 percent women. So things are moving!”

This is just one of a series of related initiatives underway at UCLA. The engineering department’s Center for Excellence in Engineering (CEED), for example, has long strived to ensure equal access to education opportunities for underrepresented groups. And three years ago, faculty and alumni passed a diversity requirement mandating that all undergraduates in the College of Letters and Sciences take at least one of dozens of courses—in disciplines ranging from history to biology—that examines the impact of difference and diversity. These initiatives are part of a holistic mission, not only to improve access, but also advance creative-thinking and research outcomes in fields long dominated by white men.

Rethinking what a scientist looks like

In 1983, a famous experiment was conducted called the Draw-a-Scientist Test, which involved nearly 5,000 boys and girls from Canadian elementary schools. Asked simply to draw a picture of what a scientist looks like, only 28 of the kids—all of them girls—imagined that a scientist might be a woman. Subsequent studies around the world have yielded similar results, with only slight improvements over time in the number of female scientists drawn.

To those working to improve the representation of women and other underrepresented groups in STEM, such research merely affirms the challenge they face every day. In the minds of children and adults alike, the archetypal scientist, technologist, engineer or mathematician still tends to be, more often than not, a white male.

According to Tracy Johnson, the Cecilia and Keith Terasaki Chair in the Life Sciences at UCLA, part of the problem is connected to the rigor, or lack thereof, in early education. Johnson believes one of the biggest factors that prevents more minorities from pursuing STEM studies is the lack of equal access to high-quality STEM education in kindergarten through 12th grade, where it too often falls along socioeconomic and racial lines. Without good education, she argues, young people can have trouble picturing themselves in the role of a scientist.

Yet the issue isn’t only about recruiting diverse students into STEM; it’s also about finding ways to keep them from leaving STEM once they start. To that end, Johnson oversees an initiative called the UCLA-HHMI Pathways to Success Program, which aims to keep students from all backgrounds engaged and committed to completing their scientific studies through hands-on lab research, peer mentorship and collaborative workshops. Each of these three components has been consciously crafted to fill the gaps that can lead to alarmingly high attrition rates in collegiate STEM education, especially for the underrepresented students the program was designed to serve best.

“So far we’ve had close to 70 students who’ve gone through the program, and at this point, we’re very close to 100 percent retention in STEM,” Johnson said proudly.

Although programs like Pathways are clearly succeeding, Johnson believes hands-on lab work and peer support groups only address part of the need. In the end, she thinks, it’s having living exemplars to look up to that helps foster students’ ongoing interest, education and career paths in STEM. And she hopes she serves that role for her own students.

“I’ve been really fortunate to have amazing mentors, people who may have seen some potential and invested in me,” she said. “It proved to me the power of engaged mentorship, and they weren’t always people who looked like me. Several of my most impactful scientific mentors fit the common stereotype: older white men. But they were amazing for me because they invested in my success, and that made all the difference. That’s why I feel so committed to paying it forward.”

Diversity breeds creativity

Apart from the obvious fact of basic fairness, strategic efforts to create environments defined by diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) can yield a number of pragmatic benefits too, particularly in the arena of STEM.

Janet Ahn, assistant professor of psychology and director of the Motivation Lab, William Paterson University, has conducted extensive research into the role mentors play for high school students considering STEM career paths. She is also one of the staff scientists of the NeuroLeadership Institute, an organization that has explored, among other things, exactly why diverse work teams result in greater creativity, optimism and innovation. And for the various fields that make up STEM, of course, innovation is everything.

“Even the mere presence of diversity encourages and optimizes higher performance and stronger motivation,” Ahn said. “Not only that, diversity sparks more creativity for coming up with new solutions. Particularly in STEM, you need extraordinary, creative solutions for very complex, intricate problems. If everybody is the same—you’re all white males, for example, and all grew up thinking the same way, doing similar things—then your solutions are inevitably going to reflect your biases.”

Murthy agrees that fostering diversity is key to unlocking tremendous latent creativity in STEM fields. “Engineers are problem solvers,” she said, “and what problems you choose to solve depends on your background, your history and your mindset, and having the right mix of people means that you actually address a far bigger universe of problems.”

As Ahn observes, “Even one person that’s different in a room forces everyone else to think differently. Remembering that fact is essential for the future of STEM.”