Being in the Arena – Part 1

“It is not the critic who counts; not the ~man who points out how the strong ~man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the ~man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends ~himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if ~he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that ~his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”

An unrealistic web of conflicting & unobtainable expectations of who we are supposed to be – this is our living reality.

When I started this journey in STEM, I was probably six or seven years old. I never quite understood how pressing one squishy button on the remote changed channels on the tv and how the different channels came through two metal rods sitting on top of the tv. Boisterous in nature, taking things apart to understand why it worked was one of the things I did in between homework & naptime.

Growing up in the East, education was of utmost importance in our household. After 12th grade, it was time to decide what stream of engineering I wanted to get into, engineering was a given. Fortunately, or unfortunately, I have always had the habit of dancing to the beat of my own drum. I wanted to do exactly what everyone told me not to. With the grades that I got, and the need to do something different, I thought I could go for Mechanical Engineering. All hell broke loose. Not a single soul around me, friends, or family, encouraged that decision. You see, back home in South India, in most universities, for every 160 male students that had enrolled in that stream, there was 1 female enrollment. Sexual harassment and mental abuse were widely accepted as a part of becoming an engineer. You are a girl; you want to be an engineer? Expect everyone to misbehave with you and expect abuse, that way you will not be surprised, and you can be prepared and on alert. Do not complain or blame others if you are not treated fairly, this is a choice you are making. I want to mention that I am not 80 years old. This was in 2005.

Obviously out of legitimate concern for their wild girl child, my parents refused to enroll me in Mechanical Engineering. The common stream to choose at the time, was IT or Computer Science. That way, you get to sit safely at a desk and not be on a construction site. I cringed at this limitation. I hated everything about it. What had changed? All I did was grow up! Why was it ok for me to learn the mechanics of how stuff works when I was seven but not when I was sixteen?

I pushed back and told my parents if I cannot get into mechanical engineering, then I will take up Instrumentation Engineering. One of my dad’s friends, was a controls & instrumentation engineer. I loved the way his brain worked, I remember listening to stories that he shared with my dad and was fascinated by it. The enrollment ratio in this stream was not great either but it was not 160:1. My parents felt safe enough to let me join the Electronics & Instrumentation Engineering Department. We found a middle ground.

It has been fifteen years since. I speak to the next generation of engineers and find that even though the current generation is more aware of how to treat each other and how to be more conscious about conducting oneself, the ratio has gotten worse. There is approximately one female student for every three hundred male students. My heart truly aches.

Diversity, inclusion, belonging, equity & equality topics are now being discussed at large, I cannot get through 30 seconds of scrolling on LinkedIn without seeing these words. But when human-beings do things without understanding the “WHY” behind it, they are bound to repeatedly fail. There have been four waves of women empowerment movement in the west and three in the east. There is so much data floating around the internet it is quite overwhelming.

My attempt at starting this Being in the Arena series, is to educate myself and those interested, in learning the root cause of what this movement is about, and why it has taken so darn long for this remarkably simple and clear message to get across efficiently, focusing on the East– leading into why representation matters and how my journey can become a future/current 15-year-old wannabe mechanical engineering girl’s survival guide.