Molly Stieber has wanted to build robots since she joined her Oconomowoc, Wisconsin, high school robotics team 14 years ago. But she’s had to push back against assumptions about women in science for almost that same amount of time.
In high school, Stieber was often the only girl in her technical classes. But it wasn’t until her junior year that she realized just how much of a gender wall she would need to push against.
“I was the leader of my robotics team, and there was this guy who would heckle me about various things, saying, ‘Oh, you’re a girl, you can’t do that,’ or ‘Oh, you’re really short, you can’t do that,’” Stieber recalls. She ignored the digs, but they escalated, and it wasn’t long before he began attacking her leadership. She tried reasoning with him and reporting him to the adult mentors on her team, but nothing seemed to help.
Eventually she dealt with her classmate through a combination of persistence and a steady focus on her ultimate goal of making robots — traits that have helped her stay on her career path, even as many of the women around her dropped out. On average only 40 percent of women who graduate with engineering degrees end up in the field. A recent study shows that the biggest reason women drop out of engineering is because of the all-male atmosphere they’re often working in.
That’s starting to change. GE has set goals of having 20,000 technical women in its workforce by 2020 and a 50:50 gender representation in all of its entry-level programs by then as well. Stieber is currently 15 months into the Edison Engineer Development Program at GE Global Research in Niskayuna, New York. Aimed at creating strong technical leaders, the program enables her to do rotations in three to four separate areas.
Top: Molly Stieber, who is 15 months into the Edison Engineer Development Program at GE Global Research in Niskayuna, New York, completed a graduate degree in mechanical engineering from Oregon State University in 2015. Now she mentors students in her local high school’s robotics team. “The girls often ask about prejudice in high school and college,” she says. “I tell them that they’ll get pushback from guys, but if they work hard, they’ll be fine.” Above: Steiber (in the front) discovered her own love for robotics in high school.
Stieber’s on her second rotation, in the metals discipline, where she’s testing heat-resistant ceramic matrix composites — ceramic materials that are as strong and durable as steel superalloys, but have just one-third their weight. GE is using them to improve efficiency in its jet engines.
Stieber’s had to fight to get here. As a college student at the Milwaukee School of Engineering, she quickly learned that she needed to fight the same battles she had fought in high school. In college, much of the work was done in group projects. “The professor would tell us to split up, and all the boys would immediately go to each other,” she says. “Finally, I’d get to the one group of boys that still had a spot. They’d let me in, but they were clearly unenthusiastic about the situation.”
Stieber didn’t let that deter her. She kept showing up and working as hard as she could. By the third or fourth project, she found her classmates were more enthusiastic to have her, and the other women in the program, on their teams. “By the next year, they learned that we were the real deal and they came around,” she says.
But Stieber says few of her female classmates stayed with the program: By the time she graduated, she says, there were only six women out of 150 graduates.
Stieber (second from the left) was among six women out of 150 graduates in her undergraduate mechanical engineering program at the Milwaukee School of Engineering in Wisconsin.
Stieber hopes that the next generation of women won’t have to work quite as hard to be accepted. She mentors students in her local high school’s robotics team and often talks to middle school and high school students at GE, which hosts panel discussions and other engineering events for students. “The girls often ask about prejudice in high school and college,” she says. “I tell them that they’ll get pushback from guys, but if they work hard, they’ll be fine.”
Ultimately, Stieber sees these students as a part of a changing engineering culture. “I usually end up saying, ‘You know, you guys can change that, right? It will always be a male-dominated culture if you don’t get in there.’ ”
Stieber mentors students in her local high school’s robotics team and often talks to middle school and high school students at GE, which hosts panel discussions and other engineering events for students.
