Yesterday was International Women’s Day 2016. Microsoft Philanthropies has a page with video devoted to the topic of women engineers/inventors. The point, of course, is to show how we know the names of great male inventors but not female inventors. And a Google search of “woman aerospace engineer” mostly returns pictures of astronauts, such as Sunita Williams.
This is all a way of saying we need to remember to show girls that engineering is not a gendered activity. Women are often associated with handcrafts, but they can just as well craft robots, computer code, electronics, or airplanes. And we need to remember to show young people that their intelligence and creativity is valuable regardless of their ethnic heritage, religion, or genes.