Did you know that the first airbags ever to be put into cars were engineered only by men and only tested with male dummies?  For this reason, women and children were severely injured by airbags when they deployed.

Maybe if there had been just one female engineer helping in the creation of the airbag, this problem would not have occurred. An event called GEARS Day hopes to attract more young women into engineering to help solve issues such as this one in the future.

In 2004, only 10.2% of employed engineers were women.  In 2005 only 17.2% of undergraduates enrolled in engineering were women, 22.3% of graduates who earned masters degrees in engineering were women, and 18.4% of those graduates who earned a doctoral degree in engineering were women.  Luckily, these numbers have gone up from being under 10% in the 1980s and 1990s.

However, the number of female engineers is still far less than the number of male engineers.  This is the reason why an event like GEARS Day took place.  Girls are trying to level out the playing field in work areas such as engineering to prove that women are just as able to obtain jobs in engineering as men.

On March 22^nd, I attended GEARS Day at the University of Pennsylvania.  GEARS stands for “Girls Engineering and Related Sciences.”  The Society of Women Engineering (SWE) sponsored the day, which was organized to inspire high school girls to pursue education and careers in engineering.

In order to participate in GEARS Day, I filled out an application in early February.  As part of the registration process, I wrote a few sentences explaining why I wanted to participate in the event, something along the lines of, “I don’t know a lot about engineering but would love to know more. I really enjoy science and want to pursue a career in science when I grow up.”

Then I checked off fields of engineering that interested me.  The options were electrical engineering, computer science, mechanical engineering, aerospace engineering, bioengineering, chemical engineering, and civil engineering.  To say that I knew anything about these areas of engineering is a bit of an overstatement.  In fact, I knew absolutely nothing.  However, I was about to learn a lot on the 22^nd.

I arrived at Penn at 8:30 to sign in and receive my T-shirt, a snazzy folder with an even snazzier Penn Engineering pen, and a schedule.  Every girl was put into a group based on the engineering fields we checked off in the application.

Each group then went to four different workshops. There were 10 different workshops with hands-on activities such as making lipgloss, extracting DNA from strawberries, designing logos on computers, designing bridges, creating windmills, looking at robots that could play soccer, and much more.

There was even a question and answer session with undergraduates, graduates, and professional female engineers.  We were able to ask them questions about college engineering courses, what classes to take in high school to make those college courses easier, and what an average day as an engineer is like.

The women stressed that you do not have to know exactly what you want to do with your life when you get to college.  In fact, one of the undergraduates had just changed her major for the third time.

All in all, I learned a ton of information about engineering and the fields of engineering that do and do not interest me.  GEARS Day was an incredible event that I am extremely glad I was able to attend.