YATW #3 Women in Engineering

Welcome back to my third and final blog post!  This blog post will focus on my agent of change which was a presentation to my advisory.  In my first blog post from way back when I introduced my You and the World topic, Women in Engineering.  I talked about some possible reasons that there was such a large difference between the men and women in this field among other things.  In my second blog post I used quotes that were said in my original research to see what others thought about the problem.  I also included new research I had found.  For instance, how more girls participate in physics in single sex schools than in co-ed schools.

When we were asked to think about our agent of change projects I didn't know how I wanted to go about it.  Finally, I decided that the best way to help my issue was to make people aware of it.  From doing my original research I saw that there were a lot of facts and people having to do with women in engineering that weren't known.  While making my slide show for the class I included the information that more people in my survey were unaware of, like who Ada Lovelace is and even the percent of women engineers worldwide(13%)  I also included the song, Rosie the Riveter, which explained about the fictional character during WWII.  You can learn more about her in my first blog post.


By doing my agent of change project I brought more awareness to my YATW issue.  I think that that’s the most important thing to happen for women in engineering.  Many people don’t know the number of women engineers worldwide to men.  There are also girls and women who are under the impression that they can’t enter into certain careers because of gender bias.  It’s important, for young girls especially, to not feel as though they don’t have the opportunity to be what they want to be and do what they want to do.

Although I am proud of the presentation I gave to my advisory there is definitely some things that I could have done better.  Being a high school student, I know how boring presentations with just a person standing there talking can be.  The videos I included made me just speaking slightly more interesting but I think that it would have been better if I included a more indepth activity to do with everyone at the end.  When teens and kids can get involved with something it sometimes stays in their minds longer and makes it more interesting.  Hopefully the people who saw my presentation will still remember it and will spread the word about the difference between the number of men and women in engineering.  

I was very nervous when we started this project in the beginning of the year.  I didn't want people to think that my writing was bad and my ideas were boring.  Once I started doing research and learning about women in engineering I was so intrigued that it didn't matter.  The YATW project is all about researching and doing something about an issue you’re interested in, not someone else.  I would like to give a quick shout out to Kayla Cassumba for taking pictures of my presentation, Ms.Dunn for giving me ideas, and anyone who’s read these blog posts.
YATW presentation

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