What is an engineer?

The dictionary definition:

A person who designs, builds, or maintains engines, machines, or

structures.

Before we started this project we got asked what we thought an engineer was. We came up with pretty much the same

definition as the dictionary has.

What do we think an engineer is?

What do we think an engineer looks like?

We then got asked what we thought an engineer looked like. We said that an engineer would usually be a man

that worked with very dirty and greasy machines but is that always

right?

Why were we wrong?

Our first mistake was that we jumped straight in to the stereotypes…MEN. Not all engineers are men, actually there are woman engineers but people just believe it’s a man’s job.

We also came to find out that engineers don’t always get their hands dirty like a lot of people think they do. Often they don’t even need to go outside to do their job.

We realised that there were so many types of engineers that it would be practically impossible to put them all into one box.

Some get dirty (like we originally thought), others don’t at all. Some help build cars, others help in natural disasters.

We discovered that there is a plethora of jobs that engineers do, some we had never heard of yet seemed vital for day to day life.

It’s safe to say that we won’t make that mistake again or underestimate how important engineers are to society.

This brought to our attention that female engineers were hardly ever acknowledged or made known except for a select few. That is one of the reasons we were and still are so eager to participate in this project. When we searched for images for engineers we found that practically all

the pictures were

of men, we searched

for statistics and

discovered that the

stats for a women

gaining a bachelor,

masters or PhD

degree in engineering were more than 5x smaller than men's.

There is still stigma about the job being dirty and not fit for women.

These views are still held by some people and we cannot wait to prove them wrong.

Engineers are problem solvers, organisers, communicators,

calculators and designers. They are capable of clearly defining a problem and its relevant constraints (such as

time, cost, etc.) and providing a simple solution. This sounds as much

of a women's job as it is a man’s…don’t you agree?