NAE Perspectives offer practitioners, scholars, and policy leaders a platform to comment on developments and issues relating to engineering. 

Gary S. May (NAE) is chancellor of the University of California, Davis.

Surf the internet. Turn on the lights. Use your GPS to find a restaurant. Sit down at the computer to check email and begin the work day. It’s difficult to imagine a day without the many conveniences and life-changing innovations that various feats of engineering have made possible: electricity, potable water, sanitary sewers, radio, television, computers, smartphones, roads, bridges, planes, trains, and automobiles.

Engineering impacts everyone. Diversifying the field is imperative if we want to build on engineering’s legacy of extraordinary impact. Why? Because diversity leads to better outcomes, as explained below.

The world needs future engineers, innovators, and leaders to address some of our greatest challenges, including clean energy, food production, health care, infrastructure, and security. The National Academy of Engineering identified many of these areas of concern in the 14 Grand Challenges for Engineering in the 21st Century. These goals for improving life on the planet, particularly in the areas of “sustainability, health, security, and joy of living,” were developed with input from leading technological thinkers around the world.

There is a 15th challenge that must be addressed: Increasing diversity in all engineering disciplines. Diversity is at the root of innovation and technological advancement. The greater diversity we have in engineering research and product development, the more likely we are to make discoveries and solve problems. A wide mix of backgrounds, experiences, and ideas helps make this happen.

We’ve seen some of the results that stem from a lack of diversity. The first airbags in the auto industry almost killed women passengers when they deployed in accidents because they were tested on crash-test dummies with male anatomies. Some early speech recognition systems didn’t recognize female voices.

Fast forward to today. The pulse oximeters used to monitor oxygen levels for covid-19 patients don’t work as well on people with darker skin. Some artificial intelligence programs used for facial recognition have racial and gender biases. Dr. Joy Buolamwini, an African American researcher, tested various facial recognition systems and found that they worked better on men’s faces compared to women’s and on lighter-toned faces. In fact, she recorded error rates up to 47% for darker-skinned women like herself (Buolamwini and Gebru 2018). Another recent study found that people of color are more likely to get hit by a driverless car, and that such cars may better detect pedestrians with lighter skin than those of us with darker skin (Wilson et al. 2019).

These are just a few examples, but they make a clear point. Diversity, as a practical matter, leads to better outcomes. If there were diverse engineers on those design teams, they may not have overlooked those particular glitches. We don’t just need the next generation of engineers to solve the world’s greatest problems, we need the next generation of diverse engineers.

Women and minorities are abysmally underrepresented in engineering. It’s been an intractable problem in our field (National Academies 2007; NCEE 1983).[1] We can—and must—do better. Diversity must infuse every aspect of engineering, with diverse research, diverse faculty, and diverse students who will become the diverse workforce of the future.

To accomplish this, targeted programs with dedicated ongoing funding and resources are needed. This is true at all educational levels: K-12, undergraduate, and graduate. I focus here on higher education.

Funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF) is making a difference by supporting research, students from underrepresented backgrounds, and diverse faculty. I was the beneficiary of NSF funding, beginning in the early years of my education and throughout my career; I was an NSF graduate fellow while earning my master’s and PhD degrees at UC Berkeley, then I was a National Young Investigator (1993–98).

During my time as a faculty member and dean at Georgia Tech, the NSF also provided significant support for students from historically underserved backgrounds that helped make the College of Engineering the largest and most diverse school of its kind in the nation. Beyond the personal benefits to me as a graduate student and faculty member, NSF funding allowed me to pay it forward and help others—by creating opportunities for women and minorities to succeed in STEM.

This kind of support is making a difference at institutions across the nation. At UC Davis, NSF support is helping to increase faculty diversity. For example, with the help of an NSF ADVANCE Institutional Transformation grant, the university created the Center for the Advancement of Multicultural Perspectives on Science (CAMPOS). Since 2012 we’ve successfully recruited 30 CAMPOS faculty scholars who are engaged in promoting diversity in STEM through their research, teaching, or service to the university. The center is focused on expanding the ranks of women and underrepresented faculty. This has a ripple effect because these scholars serve as role models and mentors, both of which are especially important for underrepresented groups. In the words of Joycelyn Elders, former US surgeon general: “You can’t be what you can’t see.” 

For those who doubt the need for this kind of targeted support, it’s important to remember our history. Many of us are only one generation removed from the era of Jim Crow laws that enforced segregation. My mother was among the first group of students to integrate the University of Missouri during the 1950s. Needless to say, she endured a lot of adversity in her pursuit of higher education. During my own undergraduate years, I was often the only Black student in lecture halls and laboratories. The same was true when I went on to graduate school. In fact, when I got my PhD from Berkeley in 1991, I was one of only about 30 African Americans to earn a doctorate in engineering that year. That’s 30 in the entire United States!

Throughout my career of more than three decades, I’ve repeated the same refrain: “Diversity is everybody’s job.” To successfully advance diversity in higher education and in the workforce requires collective effort. Each of us must do what we can to support inclusive policies and to actively support diversity in our research programs and on our campuses.

As an engineer and higher education leader, I’m encouraged by how engineering education continues to evolve. We still teach the fundamental math, science, and engineering principles that are needed to design, build, test, and apply systems. But today’s engineering programs are doing so much more. They’re providing hands-on experience through internships and other experiential programs. They’re building more sophisticated infrastructure for learning, building, and testing. They’re creating spaces that excite the imagination and inspire innovation. They’re focused on interdisciplinary collaboration, demonstrating that when engineering teams up with other disciplines, we can have much greater impact. In the best cases, engineering programs are also integrating a focus on diversity and how it can improve outcomes.

In fact, a plethora of models and programmatic interventions provide explicit examples of actions that can be taken to enhance diversity in engineering (May and Chubin 2003). What has been missing is not how to accomplish this goal. What has been missing is the consistent allocation of adequate resources and the national will to do so.

Today’s students will enter a workforce that is increasingly global, collaborative, and diverse. Exposure to diverse faculty, staff, and fellow students—as well as diverse engineering disciplines—is part of the roadmap for a well-rounded engineering education that will prepare students to continue engineering’s extraordinary legacy of benefits for society. When our field embraces women and people from all backgrounds, then our work and future achievements will better serve all segments of society. That is the grand challenge that our nation must meet.

Notes

[1] ASEE, “By the Numbers,” https://ira.asee.org/by-the-numbers/.

References

Buolamwini J, Gebru T. 2018. Gender Shades: Intersectional Accuracy Disparities in Commercial Gender Classification. 2018 Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, Feb 23–24, New York.

May G, Chubin D. 2003. A retrospective on undergraduate engineering success for underrepresented minority students. Journal of Engineering Education 92(1):27–40.

National Academies [National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine]. 2007. Rising Above the Gathering Storm: Energizing and Employing America for a Brighter Economic Future. Washington: National Academies Press.

NCEE [National Commission on Excellence in Education]. 1983. A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform. Washington.

Wilson B, Hoffman J, Morgenstern JH. 2019. Predictive inequity in object detection. arXiv:1902.11097.

Disclaimer

The views expressed in this perspective are those of the author and not necessarily of the author’s organization, the National Academy of Engineering (NAE), or the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (the National Academies). This perspective is intended to help inform and stimulate discussion. It is not a report of the NAE or the National Academies. © National Academy of Sciences. All rights reserved.