Aeronautics whizz inspiring young women to reach for the stars

Professor Karen Willcox didn't plan on becoming an engineer until two girls spoke at her Auckland high school about the field. Photo / File

Professor Karen Willcox reached for the stars and very nearly got there.

Now, the Kiwi who almost became our first astronaut and went on to become a top engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) worries there's still not enough women aspiring to join her field.

A decade ago, Willcox made it to the final 40 applicants for Nasa's two-year training schedule for astronauts but just missed out.

As a professor of aeronautics and astronautics, she helps oversee MIT's Centre for Computational Engineering and leads two large research projects the US Air Force focused on the design of next-generation drones and aircraft.

She also works closely with aviation giant Boeing on the design of the blended wing body, a concept for a future passenger plane.

All of this might not have happened had some girls not visited her old high school, Auckland's St Cuthbert's College, to talk about engineering.

"I was in 7th form, approaching the end of high school, and I really didn't know what I wanted to do," said Willcox, back home this week to speak at the New Zealand International Science Festival in Dunedin.

"They talked about engineering and that was something I hadn't thought about – until that point, I thought engineers were mechanics like my Dad."

As she came to discover, engineering involved much more than workshops and overalls.
But, as a young woman, she still felt out of place in a male-dominated world.

"As an undergrad at the University of Auckland, we had to do machine workshop training.

"I'd never been in my Dad's garage, he'd never taught me how to use tools, but all of the boys around me seemed confident – that was really terrifying, and almost enough to put me off doing it."

Later, while carrying out work experience at a rural workshop, she did see more women around her – only naked, on posters on the walls.

"I spent a summer working in that environment and things like that definitely made it hard."

Professor Karen Willcox speaking at the NZ International Science Festival in Dunedin this week. Photo / Supplied

Still, she counted herself fortunate to have had some inspiring mentors on her path through training, and on to bigger things in the US.

"The really disappointing thing, I guess, is if you dig up the data, you see that when I entered engineering school, it was right around the time there was a real positive focus on recruiting women.

"They'd just created a diversity outreach position, and in my first year, there were 20 per cent women, which is a significant achievement if you look back to the 70s and 80s.

"But fast-forward more than 20 years, and we are still around that low 20 per cent mark.

"So while a whole lot of progress was made in the early 1990s, we've kind of stagnated."

She was however encouraged to see more people becoming aware of what have long been barriers to diversity in STEM; among them unconscious bias toward women and others.

"I'm really optimistic that in coming decades we'll start to see those figures coming closer to parity."

A recipient of a Blake Medal for leadership from the Sir Peter Blake Trust, who was also made a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit in last year's Queen's Birthday honours, Willcox hoped her own story might inspire young women to become engineers.

"Seeing other women doing it, and just seeing it from their perspective, really helps," she said.

"I still think about the day those girls came to school. If they hadn't, I probably wouldn't have become an engineer."

Her visit comes soon after the launch of a new campaign featuring videos of Kiwi women speaking about what led them to become engineers.

Part of a wider initiative, inKIND NZ, which promotes entrepreneurship, science, technology, engineering, art and math, the campaign also saw the women read their favourite part of Andrea Beaty's popular children's book, Rosie Revere, Engineer.

The book's eponymous character is a young girl who constructs inventions from odds and ends, but is afraid to let anyone see them.

"Engineers have an image problem and Rosie breaks the mould of what kids think an engineer looks like and behaves," said inKIND NZ's founder Megan Darby.

The campaign also aimed to capture more women engineering role models in the media, as research has shown children who are inspired by other's stories are more likely to do what they see, she said.

Ultimately, Darby expected there would be no quick fix to making engineering a more diverse space, given the complexity of the issues, and the cultural and institutional change that needed to happen.

Keeping diversity in engineering would also be a challenge, with a nearly third of female engineering professionals leaving within the first decade.

"We can only hope it doesn't take as long as it has to get to where we are now."

But Darby didn't see success as a target number that had to be hit.

"For me success is when a child doesn't restrict their exploration of career choices due to the limits society and circumstance of birth place on them," she said.

"Success is when someone can pursue the career they want without fear of being isolated or marginalised and where they feel psychologically and physically safe."