Active Engineering

I've come across this video, which is from a start-up requiring crowd funding to achieve its goal: to make (little) girls more into engineering through clever use of specialty (pink) toys. Besides making money, of course.

This would be a praise worthy goal, were it not twenty years late. Who cares if more women go to engineering in the future, when I'm done with college already? Now, it is only worth mentioning for the social issues it may raise. First of all, why bother with it at all? Would a world with more female engineers be a better one? [ spoiler alert: it would. Trust me, I'm an engineer. ] And then, isn't it wrong to try and machiavellianly push girls into engineering?

Although it may sound so, I would answer negatively to this last question. Truth is, girls are being passively (no evil master-mind behind it) pushed away from engineering. Western culture and education clearly pictures the role of an engineer as a male one, perhaps apart from the fields closer to biology or the environment. Or you can see it the other way around, it pictures men as engineer-like, and women not so much. Of course, one may argue that the skills and personality traits required in Engineering are more appealing to (or more common in) men than women. But, as always, the line between biological pre-disposition and cultural/educational biases is quite blurred.

That being said, this active manipulation (or engineering, as the woman in the video puts it) does not seem wrong at all. In fact, it simply shows some understanding in the way our society works, and actively tries to counter passive manipulation. A noble cause? Perhaps not. But it seems harmless enough as well.


Filipe Baptista de Morais