Engineering Jobs, But For Women!
On being glue, robotics teams, and gendered labor.
FIRST Robotics Competition is a sports league for high school students who want to get involved in engineering. It’s a fantastic program where students build working robots with the goal of accomplishing a different team-based sport every year. Some are as simple as “soccer, but with 120-lb robots” and others are as complex as “score points by launching frisbees while also climbing a pyramid and also there’s a period at the start of the match where your robot has to work to autonomously collect frisbees.” It’s challenging and exhilarating and I’ve made lifelong friendships through the program.
During my time in high school, I did FIRST Robotics all four years. It was in my high school’s metal shop that I learned to love engineering, it was there that I got guidance from volunteer mentors on how to think like an engineer, and it was there that I shouted with joy that I got into UConn’s Chemical Engineering undergraduate program.
My involvement in the team was not random. My parents moved to this particular town because of its strong STEM program. I had thus always been a nerdy white boy who hung out with other nerdy white boys. My sister had even been on the robotics team before me. It was destiny, or at the very least the inertia of society’s decisions for me. Nature or nurture, take your pick, all paths led to me becoming an engineer.
In those four years, there was a pretty clear gender divide amongst the team. With only a few exceptions, boys were in charge of making our robot, testing out different parts and strategies, operating the robot during matches, programming the robot for autonomous mode, etc. And with only a few exceptions, the girls (and those assigned female at birth who would later come out as trans and/or non-binary) were in charge of the other business; making signs for us to hold up when we were in matches, sewing together the outfit our team’s mascot, or writing the essays that would win us awards (such as the coveted Chairman’s Award).
Basically, boys did the technical work and girls did the creative and business work. Intentionally or not, we had replicated the structure of many STEM workplace environments. While being on a FIRST Robotics Teams is supposed to empower kids to pursue a career in STEM, it is unsurprising that all of the boys (and former boys) on my team now have jobs in STEM, while all of the girls (and former girls) do not.
When I was a boy on this team, I was enlightened enough to be aware of this discrepancy, but not brave enough to speak up or do anything about it. More boys are like this than we think. Not that it changes much.
I’m no longer the nerdy boy I was in high school, unsure of his place in the world; I’m a nerdy woman, post-grad school, and very sure of her place in the world. I’m a teacher at the undergraduate level, and because I teach Seniors, I’m always on the lookout for new and exciting STEM career paths so I can make my students aware of them.
Once you get a Bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering, the majority of your options are working for Big Chemical Company A or Small Startup B. Back at UConn, the most coveted positions were at places like United Technologies Corporation, Unilever, Eastman, Henkel, General Electric, or Alexion. Just as many of my friends from college went on to work for lesser-known startup companies in pharmaceuticals, biotech, plastics, or other very cool industries.
But there are lesser-known options too: you can become an engineering consultant. You can go to grad school and become a higher-level researcher than you could with just a Bachelor’s. There are even a multitude of other non-technical jobs for which an engineering degree would be useful. You can pursue a second degree in environmental law. You can go into patent law. You can even can become a technical salesperson for a company that makes engineering tools. (The saying goes that a good TV salesman doesn’t need to know anything about a TV to sell it to you, they just need to know about you, since their goal after all is to manipulate you into buying something. The same doesn’t apply to engineering, where a salesperson should probably know everything about the product they’re trying to sell, especially if that product is a bandsaw, PID controller, reciprocating pump, or plate heat exchanger.)
But here’s the thing: you can only pursue a career in something if you’re aware that that field exists in the first place. And for many women and historically-excluded students in STEM, most don’t know what their options are, due to a systemic lack of connections and knowledge.
Which is why I was delighted to hear that one of my TikTok mutuals was leaving engineering to pursue a job as a technical writer.
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Taylor is just one of many people who are taking up an emerging class of non-technical STEM jobs; the report-writers, the presentation leaders, the schedule-maintainers, etc. To be 100% clear, this is great news for her, and I think her example is instructive for those who actually want to do the more “creative”/“non-technical” aspects of engineering work. She even brings up a great point about how many of the job titles in this field of work can be strange, making them hard to find. As someone who’s a non-tenure track faculty, I understand the struggle: depending on the college, a my job can be called a “professor of practice”, “industry professor”, “clinical instructor”, or simply “lecturer” (my current title). Comment below with whatever wacky name ~your~ school came up with for us!
I want more students to know about jobs like this, especially marginalized students. I want students who are creative, artistic, and knowledgeable about justice and ethics to have a place in STEM, even if their math skills aren’t the best. Which is why I intend to share Taylor’s story with my students the next chance I get.
I just have one little concern.
“Being Glue” is the name of a talk given by Tanya Reilly, a principal software engineer at Squarespace, who found herself taking on most of the non-technical work on her team while not seeing much reward from it. The talk is required reading for anyone currently in or aspiring to be in an engineering field; the full slide deck and transcript can be read here, and you can watch the talk here.
Essentially…
Tanya points out several important factors when taking on non-technical “glue work” in engineering, but what I want to hone in here is how this work can be incredibly gendered. In a perfect world, every engineer would have a hand in the creation of reports/presentations and every engineer would have a hand in ensuring that solutions are made in accordance with design justice values. Or, at the very least, all engineering teams would be composed partially of “100% technical people” who consent to be doing that work and partially of “non-technical people” who consent to be doing that work. And in a perfect world, either of those teams would consist of diverse members laboring equally hard on fairly-distributed work.
But we do not live in a perfect world. We live in a world where on a team of engineers, often all with the same job title, cis white boys default to delegating schedule maintenance to the women on the team, coffee runs to the person of color on the team, and the production nice-looking PowerPoint slides to the gay person on the team. We give qualified engineers glue work all the time, either without knowing it or by very much knowing it and not being brave enough to stop it.
Which is why I’m glad that we can now say “okay, no more giving scheduling and report-writing responsibilities to Katie; we’re hiring a new person, Stacey, to handle this glue work so that Tanya can devote just as much time to tinkering as the rest of you boys”.
But still, I’m inclined to ask: as we restructure our work environments in this new way, as we create positions for “non-technical engineers”, are we building an environment where everybody is doing the work that they signed up to be doing, or are we recreating my high school robotics team? Are we being accommodating to diverse learners and workers, or are we formalizing the gender divide?
Once we say “okay, your job title is now ‘requirements analyst’”, we are indeed taking away the possibility of a Katie, the qualified engineer, being piled on with glue work and opening her up to opportunities for advancement. However, Stacey, the glue worker, is now forever locked into this job, probably one that pays less than Katie’s. Stacey, the woman with a STEM degree who now merely makes PowerPoints so that the boys—and Katie—can play in the lab, perhaps has no opportunities for advancement. At least before, Katie could have put her foot down, picked up a wrench, and gone back to technical work while renegotiating her responsibilities with her team. Now, the gender divide is formalized (institutionalized, locked in), in favor of a mostly-male technical team. Hypothetically.
This is a fine line to walk. In this analogy I’ve made up, Katie and Stacey are now only doing what they consented to be doing. Feminism wins! And yet, a tension remains. It’s good that more career options exist for engineers of all genders, but also, we all know that at scale, more women will be nudged down this new path, right? “Leave all that hard math and coding stuff to us men, sweetie; you can just write the report for us!” It’s homousian to the way that women are pushed into un- or underpaid care labor through forces outside their control; the same currents that led me to my high school robotics team drown millions of women in their undertow. Also, as Tanya Reilly acknowledges, when people are pushed into these glue work jobs, they might be left at a dead end.
If we are to continue making these “non-technical STEM jobs”, and start composing our engineering teams with “some 100% technical people and some 100% glue people”, I have a few conditions…
Pay equity. Those who take on exclusively glue work are to be recognized, institutionally, as being equally as important as the “technical” engineers. Ideally, they should have equal employment protections as well.
DEI initiatives. Companies should do everything in their power to prevent their technical teams from becoming all white men while their glue workers become all women and POC.
Opportunities for advancement. Just as top-performing technical-team members can be promoted to project leads, top-performing glue workers can climb the corporate ladder along with them, with increased pay and management power.
Unions. You knew this was coming. If we are to give glue work to marginalized folks, the least we can do is give them collective bargaining power to avoid exploitation at the hands of corporations.
Representation. More early-career engineers should be aware of what they’re getting into when they sign up for one of these jobs. Have these jobs represented at STEM career fairs at colleges, create events with panels of engineers who work in “alternative” fields, and destigmatize “non-technical” STEM work so that it’s not something thought of as “just for the girls”.
What do y’all think? Have you been given glue work before? Did it benefit you, or did it not? How did you handle that situation? How would you solve the problem of glue work as it comes up in your workplace? Let me know in the comments, and don’t forget to share this newsletter if it resonated with you!
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Currently Reading
More on the systematic shift from public to private ownership of Puerto Rico’s power grid, which left it highly vulnerable to Fiona. (IEEE) (Reuters) (Al Día)
Since we’re talking about creating diverse work environments, here’s an article with 10 steps for building an anti-racist lab, plus tons of resources on being inclusive to trans people in STEM and a similar listicle for LGBTQ+ scientists.
Watch History
Intelexual Media’s series on 1980s America continues to amaze, with the latest entry on life for women of the decade.
Let’s reminisce once more on when Demi Adejuyigbe still made September videos. Truly among the most wholesome things on the Internet.
Bops, Vibes, & Jams
Ahh, yeah, now THIS is the Alvvays I always knew. (Side note: I’m obsessed with how Alvvays has been slowly replacing the men in their band with non-men. We love to see it.)
I’m loving Brent Faiyaz’ new album “WASTELAND”!
And now, your weekly Koko.
That’s all for now! See you next week with more sweet, sweet content.
In solidarity,
-Anna
Even as an intern, I was stuck with glue work! It was incredibly infuriating to consistently excel at technical work *and* glue work but only get recognition for my glue work (and get harsher criticism for small mistakes in my technical work). It was really hard to walk the fine line between actually being good at glue work and wanting to do glue work.
In high school, I took AP Lang. and AP Lit., so writing was never an issue for me. If anything, I tended to sign up for report writing because I knew I would do the best job and I would be the most efficient person for this role. However, I wonder if it solidified the gender divide in my teams and made my team members assume I would always want to be this person. It's still a problem I struggle with today.