by Roja Bandari, NWI rapporteur, PhD student in electrical engineering
I don’t know how one can sleep after such a day! I stayed awake in my bed until 4 am thinking about it. So many outstanding speakers from all over the world pumped information into my head all day. It was surreal and I shouldn’t really try to describe what it was like. I was especially surprised by these extraordinary women’s humility and sense of humor (Jody Williams is very funny) and I definitely wished I could pull off wearing the gorgeous bright yellow clothes that Wangari Maathai was wearing. I’m genuinely jealous.
I don’t think a woman engineer has ever had the chance to be in my position. Engineering is a masculine field (not in nature, but by current social norms) and my fellow woman graduate students in engineering and sciences at UCLA have recently started regular meetings that address issues of women working in these male dominated fields. During a section of the conference talks yesterday, the point was made that many weapons producers are from the US. As an engineer, that makes me think about who develops these weapons? In electrical engineering and especially in telecommunications – my area of graduate studies – much of the leading research is funded by the defense companies and a large portion of research funds is often spent by the government in defense projects. More often than not, a novel method or product is invented for a military application, and after several years it gets commercialized or used in urban spaces by the general public. A good example is the internet or wireless communications. This is accepted among the engineering community as something natural and research professors and scholar constantly seek projects funded by the US department of defense because of both the generous funding and the opportunity to work on the most exciting cutting edge technology. If an advisor gets funding for his or her student through a defense company, the student usually will not decline because there are not that many other funding opportunities.
It means engineers are passively contributing to the weapons development simply because of a passion for our profession, and shortage of other forms of funding. But is it ethical to contribute to a technology that can be used to kill others? To me this seems to contradict the first canon of the engineering code of ethics, “Engineers shall hold paramount the safety, health and welfare of the public.” I understand that this is not a black and white matter since the choice of the government to heavily fund research in defense projects is certainly something that has to do with policymakers and not engineers. An engineer can develop the internet for the public or for the military and it’s the government who decides which of these two has priority. But in either case you can’t ignore the personal choice that an engineer has to make in whether or not to be a part of a defense project.
What I will take away from this day is a plan for a more serious and in depth examination of this issue following a discussion about the engineering ethics of working with a defense company. Presence of more women in engineering will inevitably change the nature of this profession and maybe a harder look into our role in the cycles of violence in the world can enlighten all engineers in making career choices and maybe improve the nature of our profession. I plan to take this discussion into our next meeting with other UCLA women scientists and engineers.
