Widnall champions female engineers

What are the factors that can encourage more women to succeed in the engineering fields? Sheila Widnall can give you a list of 10. In fact, she can give you several top-10 lists, from the reasons women belong in engineering to ways to improve engineering education for men and women.

On Tuesday, April 16, Widnall, Institute Professor and professor of aeronautics and astronautics at MIT, will present a lecture called “Digits of Pi: Barriers and Enablers for Women in Engineering.”

Widnall has a lifetime of experience finding success where few women do. As a woman who received her doctorate from MIT almost 30 years ago, she was a pioneer in an exclusive world dominated by men. As a civilian appointed Secretary of the Air Force, she oversaw all of the organization’s affairs, including the issuing of its long-range vision statement. Widnall is internationally known for her work in the fluid dynamics of aircraft turbulence and spiraling airflows. She received the Distinguished Service Award from the National Academy of Engineering in 1993, and was inducted into the Women in Aviation Pioneer Hall of Fame in 1996.

The barriers to success that Widnall discusses can range from unconscious attitudes held by some professors, who may convey their discomfort with teaching female engineering students, to crude jokes that male colleagues make about female engineers. Widnall says that such signals make women feel that they are not welcome, and that they are invisible.

Widnall sees other barriers that work against increased numbers of female engineers, such as the way that tests, the math SAT in particular, are used as predictors of academic performance. Widnall cites a study that showed that women perform overwhelmingly better as students than their test scores would indicate. Her influence at MIT has changed the way the admissions office weights the scores when evaluating female applicants. Today, women compose 50 percent of the freshman class.
The Caltech Presidential Lecture Series on Achieving Diversity in Science, Math, and Engineering was established to bring to campus speakers who have had highly successful experiences in promoting women and underrepresented minorities in science and technology.
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