The Crimes of Individuality and Empathy in Engineering
When I was in my second year of undergrad, I wanted to dye my hair blue - like Ramona Flowers blue. I went to the salon and tried to get it bleached and dyed. Unfortunately, I had been dying my hair with box dyes throughout high school and needed to let the dyed part grow out so the bleach would take. I waited a year and came back to finally get it done.
I loved my blue hair so much. It looked good on me and I got tons of compliments on it. My friends loved it too. Dying my hair has always been my favorite form of self-expression. Iâve been doing it pretty consistently since I was 14. However, it wasnât lost on me that I was the most easily identifiable person in my college of engineering.
The engineering stereotype isnât necessarily wrong in my experience. The dominating forces in my program were the stereotypical engineering guys; serious, white, cis-het men with poor social skills and big egos that lead them to dominate in-class discussion. They lead the culture. They defined acceptable behavior. You had to be smart, confident, quiet, serious, proud and your life had to revolve around engineering or else you werenât supposed to be here. If your life wasnât dominated by engineering and engineering-adjacent hobbies, you werenât an engineer.
Professors also seem to subscribe to this belief system. âIâm an engineer. Engineers look like me. These students look like me, so theyâre engineers.â The quiet part of this line of thinking is rarely directly said: âYou donât look like me, so youâre not an engineer.â
Obviously, Iâm not saying anything revolutionary here. We all know that engineering is dominated by white men. Engineering severely lacks diversity, not just in identity, but also in personality.
I met my friends in my second and third years of undergrad. We were all in the same program and met in class. I joke that we were just collecting as many of the women in our program as we could. Â We sat together in class, we studied and did homework together, we hung out outside of class and eventually many of us lived together for the last few years of college.
My friends are like my blue hair. Theyâre loud and funny and so full of joy and love. They love to play instruments and do crafts and bake and cook and read and write. We go to the renaissance festival every year. We love to throw parties and go to bars and concerts. You could tell when we were around in the engineering buildings. We would laugh and joke and complain and be ourselves as we walked through the halls to class or worked in the engineering lounge.
This wasnât incredibly welcome behavior by the dominating forces in the program and that was made known very clearly. Many of the men in our program started to make their distaste towards us obvious and oftentimes was even vocalized. We werenât serious and didnât spend time working on personal engineering projects as hobbies. Our personalities didnât change or rely upon our identities as engineers.
If you look at various subreddits related to engineering, you can find examples of people talking about how engineering changed their personality or how theyâre having an identity crisis or how they just donât have an âengineering personalityâ. I think that engineering culture can either force compliance or breed contempt. Or worse, both.
I think that as people go through engineering programs, and they start to understand and experience the culture, their personalities were either initially compliant to the engineering stereotype or not. If their personalities werenât compliant, then they would shift to be more compliant or they wouldnât shift and they would gain contempt towards engineering. In the worst case, someoneâs personality shifts and as a result they gain contempt towards engineering culture, taking it out on those who donât comply.
The last case seems to me to manifest itself most often in minoritized engineering professors. Women engineering professors who embrace the culture seem to tear down their women students, especially those who donât comply, rather support them. These women seem to embrace and amplify the sexism in engineering culture instead of trying to dismantle it from the inside. Is this internalized misogyny that grows during oneâs engineering education? Could this be her way of âgetting evenâ for her own experiences of sexism during college by punching down?
Why donât we celebrate individuality in engineering? Individuality promotes creativity which we know leads to better engineering design. However, despite numerous engineering programsâ claims to promote creative and diverse engineers, engineering culture prevails, and individuality and nonconformity are punished. We say that we want to promote person-oriented design and create more empathic and ethical engineers, but we socially punish those who embrace the very traits that lead to these ends.
If it wasnât obvious by the beginning of this post, my experience in undergrad left much to be desired. My friends and I didnât fit in, and never made an effort to fit in. We were excluded and looked down on by both our peers and our professors, and many of us, including myself, almost dropped out of engineering altogether. Despite this, Iâm doing my best not to repeat this cycle as Iâve begun my own teaching journey.
I taught a section of my institutionâs first year engineering course this past semester for the first time. I used this opportunity to see if empathy and individuality can have a place within engineering and how effective they can be. I was candid with students about the purpose of assignments and projects. I commiserated with them about problems with the class. I showed them examples of my own massive failures in undergrad and that one semesterâs worth of awful grades isnât the end of the world. You can almost drop out of engineering multiple times and still end up teaching it years later.
Unsurprisingly, this worked! My studentsâ grades were good; they scored the highest out of all sections on both the midterm and the final exam. Further, my students recognized my efforts and appreciated them. Course evaluations, despite the unpopularity of the class itself, were stellar. It turns out that if youâre honest, friendly, and understanding with students, even engineering students, they recognize that effort and end up performing well. Students, despite how aggravating they can be, are people too. What a revolutionary concept?
Now obviously this is all just a personal anecdote. This wasnât a properly performed study or anything, but I also donât think itâs insignificant either. Students recognize when they arenât being treated with dignity and respect and respond as such. Instead of repeating the behaviors that were performed by my professors during undergrad, I embraced my individuality in teaching and promoted that in my students and many of them thrived.
I think that individuality and empathy are the missing pieces needed to rehabilitate engineering culture. By maintaining and promoting these traits we can build studentsâ engineering identities without having to sacrifice their personal identities. Further, we can use these traits to promote and embrace diversity within engineering and strengthen engineersâ person-oriented design skills, ultimately improving the lives of everyone. Â Why do we criminalize the very tools that we need to embrace in order to thrive?