In a special keynote address at Hatch and Hatch Mott Macdonald for International Women’s Day 2015, U of T Engineering Acting Dean Brenda McCabe explored how female engineers are “making it happen” in their careers and beyond. Here is the full text of her address.
The theme of this year’s International Women’s Day — “Make it Happen” — is incredibly inspiring. It is a call for effective action to advance and recognize women everywhere, from those in this room, to girls and women across Toronto, Canada and around the world. And it is perfectly, perfectly suited to engineers, male and female, who make things happen every single day.
Today I want to talk about what engineers do best: we create things that never before existed, such as structures, tools, simulations and amazing technologies that stretch the limits of the imagination. Next, I will speak about gender diversification in the engineering profession — specifically the growing number of women in engineering programs.
I will follow up by sharing examples of building, making and creating in the field of environmental sustainability. I know many of you in this room have a special interest in the area, as do I. Sustainability encapsulates the spirit of engineers as makers and problem solvers who contribute groundbreaking, relevant research for the betterment of those around the globe while championing social and environmental responsibility.
I’ll wrap up with a discussion of how we can continue to transform engineering. At U of T we do this by training the next generation. I’ll show you some of the ways we are re-imagining engineering education for the future. Forgive my U of T references throughout — every school has equally inspiring examples of women in engineering, but these are the ones that I am most familiar with.
ELSIE MACGILL AND THE RISE OF WOMEN IN ENGINEERING
I wanted to kick things off with a story of one of the earliest-known female engineers who made things happen: U of T Engineering alumna Elsie MacGill (ECE 2T7). She was the first female aircraft designer in the world.
Born in 1905, MacGill was the first woman in Canada to earn an electrical engineering degree. And she didn’t stop there — after U of T, she continued her graduate studies in aeronautics at the University of Michigan, becoming the first woman in Canada and the United States to achieve an aeronautical engineering degree.
Life was not easy for Elsie. In her twenties, she contracted polio and was told by doctors that she would never walk again. But in her ongoing spirit of “making things happen”, she was undeterred and arduously re-trained herself to walk with the help of two metal canes. She spent her recovery period writing articles on aviation.
MacGill is most famous for her role as an aircraft designer during the Second World War. During this time, she converted an auto plant in Thunder Bay to produce airplanes. Overseeing a staff of 4,500 (mostly women), she designed a modification so planes could fly in colder weather, producing 1,450 Hawker Hurricane Planes. She was a wartime hero—there was even a comic book named Queen of the Hurricanes was devoted to her achievements.
After the war, MacGill started her own aeronautics consulting firm and was an advocate for women’s rights—she was named to the 1967 Royal Commission on the Status of Women. Her “make it happen” attitude not only gave us innovative aircraft technology, but also greatly helped in the ongoing movement for gender equality.
And it is exactly this “make it happen” attitude that we continue to experience and foster within our female engineering students, faculty, staff and alumni at U of T—which leads me to the present day and an exciting leap forward for diversity in our Faculty that was just announced last month.
Among this year’s first-year undergraduate engineering class, 30.6 per cent are female. This is the highest in the province (we were the only school to break 30 per cent), a 5 per cent increase from the previous year, and to the best of our knowledge, it is one of the highest female first-year engineering enrolments in the country. We were thrilled to see UBC is on a similar path, recently announcing first year female student enrolment at 29%. This is terrific news.
Admission for this undergraduate class was also more competitive than ever before! Interestingly, the admitted female students, on average, had higher grades than their male counterparts.
These gains for the field of engineering aren’t restricted to student enrolment. In the past eight years, U of T Engineering has more than doubled the number of female faculty members, from 21 in 2006 to 44 in 2014 (about 8 to 18%). This is an incredibly exciting time for the engineering profession and engineering education.
THE ENGINEER AS MAKER
U of T Engineering has a proud tradition of enabling (and empowering) creators like Elsie MacGill to confront the issues of their time with curiosity and a can-do, maker ethos.
Because of my work at the university, I’ve been privileged to talk to many of the first women to graduate from our programs. Two in particular told a story about getting their first summer engineering job in the 1950s. Having learned that their job applications were being ignored because their first names identified them as women, they smartly started using their initials only. Very soon, they both got offers at a remote mining camp in northern Quebec.
They traveled by train and then had to walk the final few miles into the camp. Upon their arrival, they announced that they were ready to start work. The foreman said that they were mistaken and that the company would not have ever hired women. They promptly showed their letters of offer. The foreman, impressed that they had sufficiently good resumes to get the job, and then walked in with a summer’s worth of gear, said that he would let them work (but he expected that they wouldn’t last). Well, they not only lasted the summer, they returned to work the following year.
We have so many inspiring examples of engineers. It was hard for me to pick only a few.
U of T Professor Milica Radisic (IBBME, ChemE) is a world leader in the field of cardiovascular tissue engineering. Applying engineering principles, she created a platform that cultivates immature human cardiac cells, derived from stem cells. Through electrical stimulation, the platform encourages cell growth at the same rate as a developing fetus.
Why is this important? Because every year, nearly 900,000 people in North America suffer from myocardial infarction (commonly known as “heart attacks”), and Radisic’s cultivated cells enable other medical researchers to test cardiac medicines without having to experiment on live human patients. Before this, the pharmaceutical industry was never able to test medications on live human heart tissue. Her discovery has the potential to revolutionize the treatment of cardiovascular disease.
Professor Radisic is one of just three U of T researchers named to the inaugural cohort of the Royal Society of Canada’s College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists—a new initiative that recognizes the emerging generation of Canadian intellectual leaders. She is also a Canada Research Chair. She brilliantly represents the “make it happen” mindset. She is working across disciplinary boundaries to create new technologies with life-saving potential.
Another female engineer “making it happen” is U of T alumna Foteini Agrafioti (ElecE MASc 0T9, PhD 1T1)—an innovator and entrepreneur in the field of digital security.
She is the co-founder of Nymi, the maker of the Nymi wristband, a smart bracelet-like device that authenticates wearers according to their unique electrocardiogram signatures.
The wristband uses your heartbeat as a unique and incredibly secure password. Unlike conventional passwords, and even fingerprints, an individual’s ECG is difficult to forge. This is a crucial advantage in an era of cybercrime, hacking and other threats to Internet security. Agrafioti built both a solution to the problem of Internet security and a thriving enterprise.
And there is Hanna Janossy (IndE 1T3 + PEY, MASc 1T6), a U of T industrial engineering master’s student. She is trying to erase something that afflicts most people flying across time zones—jet lag. During her undergraduate engineering degree at U of T, Janossy pursued studies in systems optimization, “human factors” design and biophysics—even taking advantage of exchanges in Zurich and Budapest to learn more.
Then in our Faculty’s very first Multidisciplinary Capstone Design Projects course, Janossy’s entrepreneurial spirit clicked in. She collaborated with a group of undergraduate students from several different engineering disciplines, and through a partnership with the Department of National Defence, created software that helps military pilots (and citizens) manage jet lag.
The program tracks sleep patterns, flight details and destinations, and it suggests a tailored schedule for sleep and waking times, naps, ingesting melatonin and avoiding natural light. She’s currently cultivating this idea further through U of T’s Creative Destruction Lab, working alongside a postdoctoral fellow in biomedical engineering.
Radisic, Agrafioti and Janossy are all examples of engineers as creators and makers. All three are early-career women who are setting the stage as inspiring role models for future generations of engineers.
A DIVERSIFYING PROFESSION
Women have not always had role models in engineering. Elsie MacGill, as one of the first, had to carve her own path. In 1940 the Toronto Star featured an article on her work with the British Royal Air Force. The headline read: “She Talks Plane Design Like It Was [A] Recipe for Pie.” I don’t know if it was intended to be funny, but thankfully, times have changed.
Pioneering women—including those in this room—are making it possible for girls and boys today to imagine a future that involves building, creating and “making it happen.” Through their successes, they are also showcasing the diversity and vibrancy that is engineering.
And it is extraordinary. We want girls and young women to see the engineering profession for what it is—and what we want it to be—a vibrant, innovative field with the potential to solve more global challenges than ever before.
We don’t always realize how much of an impact we can have just by talking about engineering. Dawn Tattle (CivE 8T5) is president and CEO of Anchor Shoring, and she told me a great story. She went to a grade one class on career day to talk about engineering. She was enthusiastic in describing her work in the construction industry and how she found it very fulfilling and exciting. During the question period, a young boy asked if construction was just for girls or could boys do it too!
I think of U of T alumna Julie Payette (ECE MASc 9T0), who inspired us all though her travels to space. In 1992 the Canadian Space Agency selected her from more than 5,000 applicants to become an astronaut.
She flew on the Space Shuttle Discovery in 1999, and in 2009 as flight engineer on a mission to the International Space Station. She was the first Canadian on the International Space Station—and she happened to be a woman and an engineer.
Payette has received innumerable honours for her contributions to engineering on earth and in space. She was named to the Order of Canada and received several honourary degrees. She continues to promote science and technology education to the general public as chief operating officer of the Montreal Science Centre.
Just a few weeks ago, actor Emma Watson — Hermione from the Harry Potter movies—in her role as United Nations Women Goodwill Ambassador, received a tweet from a young girl who asked: “My dad says I can’t be a engineer ’cause it’s a ‘men profession’. What do I do to change that?”
Ms. Watson replied with three powerful words: “Become an engineer.”
When I read those words, it took me back to my own experience. I was very lucky. I grew up in northern Alberta on a farm with three brothers. The only high school in the area was a technical high school, so I had the opportunity to take drafting instead of home economics. That drafting training started me down a technical career path.
Out of high school, I worked in land surveying as a draftsperson. After a few years, I decided that I wanted some field experience as a surveyor’s helper. After presenting my request to the senior partner, he suggested that if I wanted to know what went on in the field, he could set up a transit at the window and I could look through it to get a sense of it. Fortunately, the junior partners heard the conversation and opened that opportunity to me. I was lucky to have them as mentors.
In about 1980, we were at a drilling rig near Nojack, Alberta and we had to determine the elevation of the kelly bushing so that the drillers would know the elevation to which they had drilled. My job was to hold the rod on the bushing, which was in the middle of the drilling platform. Being a woman created quite a stir on the rig, and several of the guys all but carried me up the stairs, trying to help out. The party chief couldn’t help but laugh, saying no other crew had received such celebrity treatment.
Trying to keep up with your peers is natural, but sometimes I was just doing things the hard way! I was at a gravel pit to collect samples of their products, and was directed to stop in the site office. I approached the trailer, which had a deck going around it. In front of me was a ladder going up to the deck, but the bottom rung of the ladder was almost three feet off the ground. Not to be outdone, I hauled myself up the ladder, got onto the deck, and went in search of the door. Upon rounding the corner, there was the entrance door, at the top of a lovely set of stairs that all the guys used.
Eventually I started my undergraduate degree, 11 years out of high school. I became an engineer.
Today, we recognize that really good engineers handle more than math. They embrace complexity, understand the interrelationship between science, people and the environment, and take into account the broad range of perspectives affected by and influencing to their work.
Researchers like Milicia Radisic, engineering alumnae like Foteini Agrafioti and Julie Payette, and students like Hanna Janossy represent the many ways engineers combine excellence with global, diverse perspectives and entrepreneurial skills. Engineers are creating groundbreaking work with practical implications, and finding creative ways to make that work available to the public.
FURTHER TO GO
This momentum toward a more diverse profession is incredible—but I must say something that many of you are likely thinking: there is still much further to go.
According to Engineers Canada, women accounted for less than 12% of all professional engineers in Canada in 2013. As a result, they initiated the “30 by 30” campaign that is targeting 30% female engineers in industry by 2030—this is a strong motivator to draw attention to and build momentum around improved gender diversity in engineering.
Our rising enrolment numbers are evidence of this. But, when it comes to our first-year engineering students, 30.6% female is not 50%. Nor is 18% female professors. And we need 50% enrolment to achieve Engineers Canada’s goal.
There is a part for all us—as parents, educators, peers, mentors and role models—to ensure more women pursue careers in this dynamic, rewarding field. It is up to us to continue changing the image and the reality of the profession.
One way that U of T is contributing is through our outreach programs. In the last year, more than 560 girls and young women—from grades 3 to 12—participated in hands-on science and engineering programs. Surrounded by their female peers, these girls are encouraged to explore STEM fields in fun, confidence-building environments where they learn the value of building, creating and making.
And as role models across virtually all industries and aspects of society, it is up to female engineers to show the next generation how to “make it happen.”
Engineering alumna Anne Sado (IndE 7T7) is an incredible example of this. As president of George Brown College, she is doing this for higher education.
She became the first college president to be inducted into the Women’s Executive Network Hall of Fame after being named one of Canada’s Most Powerful Women in 2010, ’12, ’13 and ’14. Among many other honours, she was also appointed a Member of the Order of Canada in 2013.
President Sado is a model of what training in engineering can lead to. She is building, making and creating at the forefront of polytechnic education. She is responding to real world problems in her community by developing innovative new structures and methods to educate young people. I also want to point out that both in her professional and volunteer activities, she has been a champion of diversity.
ECONOMIC AND ENVIRONMENTAL SUSTAINABILITY
One area that exemplifies the coming together of diverse perspectives is environmental sustainability. Engineers working in this area show global, big–picture thinking and operate at the very frontier of technology and imagination.
Engineers are confronting complex environmental challenges and building a culture of sustainability in out-of-the-box ways. I’m especially impressed at the ways students and young professionals are taking on the challenges in this field.
Parisa Najafi (MSE 1T6) is a third-year materials science student at U of T. She said: “sustainability is a mindset. It is a way of tackling problems that values efficiency and reduces waste.” I agree.
In her first year of studies, Najafi worked on a project to determine why ice on similar trees affected them differently—causing some trees to bend, while others crack and fall to the ground. It fascinated her to examine the microscopic structures of birch and quaking aspen, and sparked an interest for the natural world that has informed her education ever since.
Building on this, Najafi pursued a collaborative opportunity as a research associate with nanOntario, an outreach program aimed at teaching high school students about bio-inspired technologies. The program is supported by the Ontario Research Fund For Research Excellence and led by engineering professor Uwe Erb (MSE).
There are countless other examples—but let me tell you about a few other women who are leading major advances in environmental sustainability.
Professor Yu-Ling Cheng (ChemE), director of U of T’s Centre for Global Engineering, recently received a Grand Challenges Canada grant for her work on improving access to clean water.
In areas like coastal Bangladesh, large parts of the population depend on rainwater that is collected from roofs during the rainy season. The water is stored in cisterns for use during the months-long dry season. This rainwater is polluted to begin with, and during months of storage, dangerous pathogens can multiply in the water, creating a great health hazard for millions of people.
Through collaborations with partners in Bangladesh, she developed a system to harness the sun’s UV light to improve the quality of the water as it is collected, treating it during storage and then further decontaminating it just before consumption. Called Enhanced Solar Disinfection, the method uses an ingenious cistern design and a small “just-in-time” solar-activated disinfection and dispensing module to increase the effectiveness of UV disinfection.
Closer to home, civil engineering professor Jennifer Drake (CivE), an expert in low-impact storm water management, studies the challenges of protecting urban water resources in cities, especially Toronto.
Drake advocates for integrated, distributed management and better investment in water infrastructure. In her model, urban run-off is handled through various stages, including permeable pavements and bio retention systems, as well as green roofs.
Drake sees green roofs as an essential part of storm management. They absorb and filter water, which reduces the strain on the sewage system and restores the natural stages evaporation and transpiration. Green roofs not only enable more sustainable management of storm water, they also help moderate temperature, filter the air and make the city more beautiful.
Professor Drake’s approach works with nature to protect the future health and economic prosperity of cities. She is ensuring water availability in the future and minimizing the effects of extreme weather events like droughts and floods. She also shows how engineers anticipate problems and solutions that most people haven’t even imagined yet.
Another engineer anticipating the future is alumna Rachelle McCann (ChemE 1T2 + PEY). A recent graduate in chemical engineering, with a minor in sustainable energy, McCann is a consultant at Compass Renewable Energy, where she helps companies implement eco-friendly energy projects.
During her degree, she held an internship at the Ministry of the Environment, was a research assistant in green manufacturing at the University of Strathclyde in Scotland and travelled to Mumbai for a course on the energy futures of India and Canada.
She was also one of 30 inspirational female engineers profiled last year by the NSERC / Pratt & Whitney Chair for Women in Science and Engineering for Ontario. Personally, I am really excited to see where she will go, and to see the mark she will make on sustainability.
These are just a few examples of engineers building a sustainable future for us all. For me, these three women are among many more who illustrate what engineers can accomplish as innovators, makers and entrepreneurs when they take on significant environmental challenges.
RE-IMAGINING ENGINEERING EDUCATION
Aside from profiling these incredible role models and motivating girls and young women to pursue STEM careers, how do we continue the transformative impact of engineering on the world?
At U of T, we do this by training the next generation of global engineering leaders to create new technologies, to be entrepreneurs and to collaborate across fields, addressing critical global problems.
And we are not the only engineering school to do this. The Canadian Engineering Accreditation Board (part of Engineers Canada) sets national standards to ensure that the Canadian engineering education system remains amongst the best in the world—and that we continue to equip engineering students with the competencies and experience to succeed in either industry or academia.
One tremendous opportunity for engineering students is our graduate course on Interdisciplinary Approaches to Global Challenges. Last year, students from science, business and public health, as well as engineering, came together in the course. They explored creative solutions for preventing childhood malnutrition in urban centres of low-income countries. This is a crucial part of economic sustainability and a key millennium development goal.
One group of students targeted breastfeeding. They proposed partnering with garment manufacturers to give women working there access to breast pumps during their work days in factories. They also developed a device to pasteurize breast milk, allowing it to be stored for longer periods of time.
This solution improves childhood nutrition, and benefits the economy by improving the well being of mothers, increasing their earning power and reducing absenteeism and turnover in factories.
I see the course as a wonderful opportunity for engineering graduate students to learn from other disciplines and share their own disciplinary perspective with colleagues across the University.
It shows how students can use the classroom as a laboratory to develop an idea into a business plan, create a prototype, and in this case, implement it to create positive change in the world. Throughout this process, they learn to communicate, manage, innovate and understand the interconnectedness of global challenges. These are essential skills for the engineers of tomorrow.
That’s why at U of T we’re re-imagining engineering education through opportunities like this and many others. Students come to us with tremendous knowledge of the digital world and new technology. They know so much about mobile computing and social media.
What they are often missing is the experience of “learning by doing.” The experience of converting an idea into a design and then a prototype is essential to engineering education. At U of T, we’re finding fresh ways to give students this kind of hands-on experience in the classroom and beyond.
As Professor Emeritus Joseph Paradi (ChemE, MIE) put it: “Sometimes you find the skills for success only when you learn how to fail. We give students a safe environment to try things out.”
For many years, our first-year and capstone design courses have been the foundation for engineering education at U of T and key spaces where we nurture the “maker” in each of our students.
In these courses, student teams meet specific client needs through a creative, iterative and open-ended design process. They apply their engineering competencies while learning teamwork, project management and client-relationship skills.
The first Multidisciplinary Capstone course that Hanna Janossy took part in is an example of this—directly linking inter-disciplinary student groups to industry partners, such as Bombardier and Magna.
We also just offered a new cross-cultural capstone course, where students from the Department of Mechanical & Industrial Engineering partnered with students from Peking University in China to bring international perspectives to their design projects.
In Civil Engineering, students can participate in a global development capstone experience, where they take on international challenges, such as garbage city in Cairo. Dynamic, experience-based classes of this type are one way we take coursework beyond static content delivery to actually applying concepts.
Our students aren’t just learning-by-doing through their courses. We’re building co-curricular spaces for learning and doing—incubators for future leaders in engineering. The most important new space is the Centre for Engineering Innovation & Entrepreneurship, which will break ground soon on the St. George campus.
The new building integrates smart design with leading-edge learning technologies to create a collaborative, multidisciplinary space for students, faculty, alumni and industry partners like Hatch and Hatch Mott MacDonald.
It will house state-of-the-art collaborative classrooms and fabrication facilities. The design moves beyond the traditional lecture hall model to incorporate spaces for hands-on experiences. For instance, we are currently piloting a major innovation for the new building—Technology Enhanced Active Learning (TEAL) classrooms.
Instead of a traditional podium format, TEAL classrooms have 12 hexagonal tables. The tables and chairs have wheels, and students are encouraged to move the furniture to reflect their learning needs. The room has state of the art technology, with eight large screens spaced around the room. And each table is equipped with multimedia ports, so students can share their work, and learn from one another.
The room is just one way we are experimenting with course delivery by incorporating new technologies to enhance the student learning experience. The TEAL classroom and new CEIE allow engineering education to take the leap forward that we all believe is necessary.
The Centre will also be a new home for the Entrepreneurship Hatchery, and the Institute for Leadership Education in Engineering (known as ILead). Both programs give students the chance to learn essential workplace skills—entrepreneurship and leadership—outside of the standard curriculum.
CONCLUSION—MAKING IT HAPPEN
From inspirational historical figures like Elsie MacGill, to modern-day exceptional role models like Milica Radisic, Hanna Janossy, Foteini Agrafioti, Julie Payette, Anne Sado, Parisa Najafi, Yu-Ling Cheng, Jennifer Drake and the many, many others including engineers in the room today…
There is incredible momentum building for women in the engineering profession. We are seeing growing numbers of women in engineering programs, a surge of media interest is exploring the barriers and solutions, and many institutions and organizations are rallying behind the compelling business case for gender balance in engineering.
If we are to maintain this traction, we need to inspire children and youth to build, make, test, fail, and to try again. We need to help young women and men to realize the incredible career potential that engineering offers. We need to champion more role models—engineers just like you—who are showing the next generation how to “make things happen”. And we need to give more engineers—both male and female—a greater voice in public discourse, to benefit society as a whole.
As the number one engineering school in Canada—and one of the best in the world—U of T Engineering is doing what it can to champion gender diversity.
Together, we can inspire, motivate and encourage the next generations. There is plenty left in the world to create—for girls and boys, women and men—so let’s make it happen, together.
