President's Blog: From the Heart

By Eric F. Spina

As dozens of high school girls from eight states built and tested a heart monitor and learned ways to improve the lives of villagers in developing countries during last week’s annual Women in Engineering summer camp on campus, Margie Pinnell reflected on ways the School of Engineering is exploding gender stereotypes.

“Engineering has traditionally been a male-dominated field. At UD, we’re working hard to break stereotypes of the engineering profession,” says Dr. Pinnell, associate dean for faculty and staff development and the Bernard Schmidt Chair in Engineering Leadership. “We’re changing our messaging. We’re changing our culture. And we are making certain that groups that traditionally are left out have a place here at UD, including women.”

And as a president who happens to be an engineer, I’m proud to say those efforts are paying off in enrollment, recruitment, and advancement of women in our School of Engineering. Not to mention national recognition for Engineering Dean Eddy Rojas, who received the “Advocates and Allies” award from the Women in Engineering ProActive Network this summer. Just this week, the American Society for Engineering Education recognized the school as one of the nation’s leaders in inclusive education with a bronze exemplar award through its inaugural Diversity Recognition Program. This is a recognition that the entire School of Engineering community has earned, and the whole University should be proud of their hard work and achievement.

Only 13 percent of engineers nationally are women, according to 2018 research by the Society of Women Engineers. We’ve made impressive strides over many years to build a more inclusive, diverse School of Engineering, but, candidly, we’re still striving. Still, I’m heartened by the school’s upward momentum and the commitment and efforts the faculty and staff are making to encourage and support more women in the field. Consider:

Since 2014, two-thirds of new faculty hires have been women or persons of color. That’s transformative.

The school is breaking records in enrollment of first-year female students (an average 27 percent over the last two years vs. 21 percent from five years ago), according to Laura Bistrek, executive director of UD’s Diversity in Engineering Center. With more women faculty in the classrooms and labs, female students simply feel more welcomed.

In the advancement of women, the school is slowly closing the gender gap by its appointing its first female department chair, its first female associate dean in more than 20 years, and its first two female endowed chairs. A woman has been promoted to professor in mechanical engineering — a first — and three more serve at the center director/executive director levels. The school’s previously all-male leadership council now has one-third female representation.

As an engineering professor over many years, I’ve seen the historical paucity of women *and* the difference in quality of the classroom and lab experiences for all as more women have entered the field. Women and other underrepresented students bring new perspectives, fostering creativity and inspiring innovation.

Today, when I walk through Kettering Laboratories, I spot more restrooms for women and a lactation room, but much of the strategic effort to close the gender gap is going on quietly behind the scenes. In an attempt to attract a more diverse pool of excellent candidates, department chairs are writing position descriptions with more inclusive language and recruiting at affinity-based conferences, like the Society of Women Engineers. The School of Engineering is organizing workshops on hiring for diversity, inclusion, and mission for faculty and staff serving on search committees. The school has hired an equity adviser and encouraged male faculty and staff to take a “UD Men for Gender Equity” workshop and become proponents for gender equity. On the horizon: revised promotion and tenure policies to promote greater diversity and inclusion.

“You don’t go from Point A to Point B in one step,” says Dean Rojas. “You do it in small gains. But you need more than persistence, you need grit.”

The experiences of Margie Pinnell and Kristen Krupa-Comfort are cases in point.

After earning three engineering degrees from UD, Margie began teaching as an adjunct for three years before accepting a visiting assistant professor position in 2000 — one of very few females in the teaching ranks at that time and the only one in mechanical and aerospace engineering. Today, women make up almost a quarter of the faculty, and by next fall, two will head departments.

When Krupa-Comfort, newly appointed chair of the chemical and materials engineering department, joined the faculty in 2013, a half dozen women taught full time.

“Since that time, an additional 11 have been hired, more than doubling our numbers,” she says. Adds Margie: “I’ve gone to some engineering schools and haven’t seen any female faculty. We’re heading in the right direction.”

Every step on this journey matters.