A couple of months ago, I made a presentation to a dozen engineering and food industry professionals. When I left, I removed the gathering’s only woman.
As I drove home, I thought about why I became an engineer to begin with, when on many days, I encounter almost exclusively white men who interrogate me. This is true even in my new home of Vermont, which the rest of the country believes to be either a blue-tinted utopia or an enemy leftist stronghold.
A therapist helped me excavate my motivations for pursuing engineering. I was surprised to hear, from my own mouth, that I wasn’t driven by passion or fascination, but by anxiety. In college science and math courses, even the most punishing ones, I knew I could make my way to the correct answer. Subjective evaluations in art and writing classes terrified me. I wanted control and perfect grades, and I found them by becoming an engineer.
I’ve known creative people in science, technology, engineering, and math – STEM artists. They embrace inspiration, unknown outcomes, and collaboration to amazing results. I was never one of them. I picked a STEM career because it felt safe.
As soon as I became pregnant, though, I learned that an engineering career was still only safe for men. I struggled for years to make any kind of progress.
Last week, I was asked to participate in a university event for women and non-binary people in STEM. The organizers want their students to have some climate-focused mentors.
We need these students to flood into all kinds of climate work, including in STEM. How can I tell them to do that, knowing they’ll have to fight to be heard, let alone paid and safe?
I love my work, despite my frustration. For years, I was so overwhelmed by the magnitude of our global climate predicament that I gave up. Now, working for a climate-focused non-profit, I get to find specific things to improve, then go help improve them. I also have colleagues I can talk to about my feelings, then listen to theirs. I’ve never had all of that in a job before. It feels good.
However, even here, the engineering side of climate work is neatly sliced away from emotions and “soft” issues. The men I work with in tech, as kind as many of them are, seem to want to step into a separate kingdom where they can feel good about their analyses, their salaries, and themselves. They direct their tenderness toward the environment or childrens’ futures, then set it aside to crunch numbers.
Sometimes I wonder if these male-dominated technology spaces serve the same purpose for the privileged that my engineering courses did for me – a chance to skip past tricky questions to an A+ score. Some people see climate tech as hard evidence of righteousness. Certainty is alluring.
I can relate. I was forged as a weapon of certainty in white evangelical Christian religion, and when I left in my twenties, I clung to scientific certainty instead. However, as Rebecca Solnit recently wrote in The New Statesman, certainty is the opposite of hope, and it led me straight to despair. As Solnit also wrote in the same essay:
For those of us whose lives are already easy, giving up means making life even easier, at least in terms of effort.
Rebecca Solnit, Why Climate Despair is a Luxury
I eventually accepted that it’s impossible to know exactly what will happen, and this led me to look for a new way to be in the world. The loss of certainty moved me to make an effort, and that led me, among other things, to my current job.
Lately, I think one of my purposes here is to be a voice of uncertainty. I need to be willing to say that I have struggles, and that there are no perfect solutions to the complex problems we deal with.
Uncertainty isn’t popular, and so my work experiences sometimes send me back into cynicism. The evidence of progress is so clear, though, that I can’t stay there for long. So much is still broken, but there’s also good to be found.
Before that all-male food industry meeting, I was advised to lower my expectations for its climate outcomes. A well-meaning younger man told me that price was always the bottom line, in the end.
However, the leader of the meeting listened carefully to my presentation then looked at his staff, and I watched them all nod in agreement. An expensive choice was made. When I drove away, I was angry that I’d been put in an unfair position to make my case, but I was proud that I’d made it. Good had been done, defying the most cynical predictions.
It can be difficult to notice and remember, but my expectations are shattered all the time.
This week, on the podcast We Can Do Hard Things, Kaitlin Curtice asked how it might affect our climate if we thought of Earth as a mother worthy of relationship and gratitude. I nodded as I listened, but didn’t believe these wise Indigenous ideas would translate into my professional world.
Then I visited a wastewater treatment plant, where I once again felt out of place among the men who worked there. After our tour of the facility, a technician leaned against a tree and told me that when he tends his machines he thinks of his kayak, where he thanks the river and the sky for all they give him. He said he sees his work as caring for them in return.
Another time, I wrote in my journal that I needed to accept that the industrial customers I work with will never treat me as an automatic expert. I’ll try to change things for those who follow me, I scribbled furiously, but I’ll stop wasting energy hoping for better for myself.
That same day, a grocery store executive met my eyes and thanked me for my help. Later in the conversation, he talked about climate engineers he’d worked with before. I was startled to realize he was listing womens’ names.
Sometimes I look back at my career a decade ago and marvel at how much better it is now. There’s more to do, more to fight for, but I know change can happen. I’ve seen it.
So that’s what I’ll tell those university students when I meet them. I can’t promise them an easy path, but I can tell them the truth: I hope they chase their dreams for a better future, wherever they lead, and I’ll be here to help.