Ask yourself, “If not you, then who?”: Advice to girls from NASA’s top female engineers

[n2doc]

by Frida Garza

This year was the 15th anniversary of the best day you’ve never heard of: Introduce a Girl to Engineering Day. The event was launched in 2001, when the National Society of Professional Engineers (NSPE) teamed up with IBM to educate young girls about the career opportunities in engineering and embolden them to pursue it. The special occasion is part of Engineers Week, a weeklong celebration of the industry started by the NSPE back in 1951.

Today, women are still underrepresented in the engineering field: only about 14% of the engineering workforce in the US are women, according to the Congressional Joint Economic Committee (pdf, page 5). To celebrate the day this year (which fell on Feb. 15), the folks at the NASA Langley Research Center asked some of their female engineers for their advice to young girls interested in the profession. Here are some of their best answers.

On resilience:
“Know you are going to fail at things like everyone else does. It’s ok. When you do, pick yourself up, dust yourself off and try again. If you are making the grade and keeping up with your cohort, keep your confidence up accordingly!” —Angela Harrivel, aviation safety engineer

On not feeling like you have to speak for every single woman out there:
“Do not think you have to explain every woman’s choices, actions or behavior. You only have to answer for yourself. Explore what you like and probably more importantly, deliberately explore some areas you think you do not like. You may find some good surprises.” —Susan Gorton, head of NASA’s Revolutionary Vertical Lift Technology project

more

http://qz.com/625893/ask-yourself-if-not-you-then-who-advice-to-girls-from-nasas-top-female-engineers/

[Baobab]

1. Women may have some inborn advantages over men biologically

Back in the days when the word "computer" referred to a human being who would do calculations by hand - I think virtually all of the best "computers" were women!

That seems to me to indicate that women most certainly have areas where they possess advantages in the sciences, neurological differences which likely would offer an advantage, which we may not have fully understood yet, but which we likely eventually will. Certainly the fact that women cooperate more with others (for example, women are more likely to ask a passerby for directions if they are lost) offers them a substantial advantage!

I have also read that having a child introduces a significant number of new, genetically different progenitor cells (from the developing fetus) into a woman's body. So, a little bit of every child a women has ever had remains in her for the rest of her life, and those cells repair damage longer into her life with less likelihood of errors than her own because all cells except for cancer cells are subject to limits on replication due to their telomeres- the so called Hayflick Limit on cell division.

Those additional stem cells might be significant in slowing the aging process somewhat.