At some point as a bright-eyed kid who loved STEM, I was told to “draw an engineer”. You can probably guess what happened. My little stick figure came with a hard hat, a wrench, and no indication of them being a woman. This matches over 50 years of research showing children drawing only 27% of scientists as female, with similar trends for drawing engineers. And when children don’t imagine women as engineers and scientists, that directly shapes the future. This already shows up with severe underrepresentation of women in civil engineering (16%) and the transportation industry as a whole (14.5%).
And this is just the tip of the iceberg of the many ways sexism pervades transportation. As someone who identifies as a man, I first encourage you to hear from women leaders in the field directly on this, such as Veronica Davis and tamika l. butler, members of TransitCenter’s…
Read the full article originally published at blog.ucsusa.org.