FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Needed: More women engineers
'Introduce a Girl to Engineering Day' registration opens for middle school girls

KIHEI -- Today's young women with a spark for innovation would find engineering a lucrative, surprisingly fulfilling and fast-growing career - even in these tough economic times.

Engineers are critically needed to develop renewable energy solutions to end our dependence on fossil fuel, medical equipment to save lives, low-cost materials to fight global poverty. As you read this, they are already helping to rebuild the Haitian capital after January's devastating earthquake, one of the biggest civil engineering projects for the next decade.

As part of the national effort to motivate more K-12 girls into engineering careers, Maui Economic Development Board's Women in Technology (WIT) Project has again teamed up with the County of Maui, Maui Chapter of the Hawaii Society of Professional Engineers, and a number of local organizations to promote "Introduce A Girl to Engineering Day" (IGED) on Thursday, February 18th.

Maui County's middle school girls will have the exciting opportunity to job shadow local public and private sector engineers to learn how engineers contribute to our island community.

WIT will be accepting a total of 30 seventh and eighth grade girls. The schedule will include onsite job shadowing at various participating companies, as well as a luncheon for students, chaperones, and volunteer engineers.

The IGED event is especially relevant because women are severely underrepresented in the engineering profession, making up only 12% of the engineering workforce across the nation. In Hawaii, women engineers represent 19% of the workforce.

WIT statistics have shown that IGED and other STEM events have increased local girls' interest in engineering careers by more than 80%, especially when introduced before they enter high school.

Here is just a sampling of comments from past participants:

"(This event) showed me what an engineer does and...that I might be interested in an engineering career. Before, I didn't consider it because I didn't know what it was." ~ Emily, Kalama

"It impacted my desire to (pursue engineering as a career) because now I learned all these things an engineer has done. I'm thinking more about becoming an engineer." ~ Aleina, Maui Waena

"I liked going around and having our Engineer explain how they work on the roads and why they do certain things on their job site. I was surprised that there aren't as much women in this type of work compared to how many men there are in this field." ~ Stacie, Iao

...what surprised me most was that engineers mean so much to the society. I did't know that engineers did. (This experience) has made me want to do it (engineering as a career) more!" ~Anna, Lokelani

Maui's IGED event is held in conjunction with National Engineers Week, February 14 - 20. Additionally, WIT is expanding their E-week outreach to include both boys and girls with "engineer in the classroom" presentations during the week.

For more information, please visit www.womenintech.com or contact Jenilynne Salvador at jeni@medb.org or (808) 875-2332.

The Maui event is made possible through MEDB's Women in Technology Project, in partnership with the Maui Chapter of the Hawaii Society of Professional Engineers and the County of Maui. Funding for this local program is provided in part by the County of Maui, U.S. Department of Education, and the Air Force Research Laboratory.

Diversity in the workplace is an issue that has been of increasing importance in the last decade, with companies seeing it as an opportunity to gain a competitive advantage due to reduced costs, resource acquisition, marketing, creativity, problem solving and system flexibility. As we

move into the new millennium, organizations and businesses are realizing the need to adopt new workplace strategies to be competitive in the fast paced global market. Workplace diversity is one such issue that is changing today's business environment and the way organizations operate. When it comes to defining diversity in today's global market, companies tend to favour the broadest definition, "one's that encompass differences in gender, race, ethnicity, age, physical abilities, qualities, sexual orientation as well as differences in attitudes, perspective's and backgrounds" (Robinson & Dechant 1997, vol.11, p21). Immigration, the globalization of firms and an aging workforce, all increase the need to effectively manage diversity in the workplace.

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Source: Associated Content

Counterpoint

By Jean Pudlo


I write as the spouse of a man whose ice hockey team has lost to the Greensboro Hookers, an all-female team. They've also beaten them.

That Charles Davenport (column, "Nicely traditional and enlightened," Jan. 10) can use this team of strong, athletic women (including a teacher, CPA, property manager and health care worker) as an example of how women are somehow not fit for certain activities truly amazes me.

The world is just not so black-and-white. Or male and female.

To use Davenport's example, there are some women I would probably not want to see on a firefighting squad at my house - but there are some men I wouldn't want to see there, either. I trust that whoever shows up is trained and deemed capable by their supervisors.

You wouldn't catch me playing hockey, but I would have loved to have competed in tennis or track at my high school, an opportunity not afforded me in 1972, when I started high school, but available to millions of girls since then because of Title IX.


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Source: News & Record

The social networking giant is providing graduate fellowships for PhD students that are doing research topics like data mining and social networks.

By John Timmer | ARS Technica

High tech companies and the academic world have a bit of a symbiotic relationship. Many companies follow academic research carefully, and use ideas and developments from university research. The academic community, in turn, often studies the behavior of networks and individuals using data obtained from the commercial world. Both are probably relieved that industry provides a place of employment for the grad students that academia produces. In any case, it looks like Facebook has decided to take the relationship one step further: it's offering fellowships to students pursuing PhD-level research in computer science.

Although it's possible for computer science grad students to make it through a degree program without external fellowships, obtaining one provides a degree of flexibility (and, often, better pay). Facebook's version will come with a $30,000 stipend for nine months, and kick in $5,000 each for travel to meetings and hardware.

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Source: ARS Tecnica

Nick Anderson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, January 6, 2010; A03

President Obama will announce a $250 million public-private effort Wednesday to improve science and mathematics instruction, aiming to help the nation compete in key fields with global economic rivals.

With funding from high-tech businesses, universities and foundations, the initiative seeks to prepare more than 10,000 new math and science schoolteachers over five years and provide on-the-job training for an additional 100,000 in science, technology, engineering and math.

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Source: Washington Post

Gender gaps linked to status of women, according to new analysis

WASHINGTON - Girls around the world are not worse at math than boys, even though boys are more confident in their math abilities, and girls from countries where gender equity is more prevalent are more likely to perform better on mathematics assessment tests, according to a new analysis of international research.

"Stereotypes about female inferiority in mathematics are a distinct contrast to the actual scientific data," said Nicole Else-Quest, PhD, a psychology professor at Villanova University, and lead author of the meta-analysis. "These results show that girls will perform at the same level as the boys when they are given the right educational tools and have visible female role models excelling in mathematics."

The results are reported in the latest issue of Psychological Bulletin, published by the American Psychological Association. The finding that girls around the world appear to have less confidence in their mathematical abilities could help explain why young girls are less likely than boys to pursue careers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

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Source: EurekAlert!