Sarah stood over her desk at work, reading an invitation to speak at an event at her alma mater. The event was called Steel Toes and Stilettos, and was an event celebrating women in engineering. When Sarah was in college, the group of women engineers was quite small. Most of them were married or divorced young women who had gone back to school for a second degree, and really the only degree that even could compensate for the loss of a person's extra income was an engineering degree.Now it seemed that the flier held promise in the future. In addition to the women in the engineering college, the event also included high school girls. Sarah remembered high school, and its painful lessons, particularly when she was told by a female math teacher that she just wasn't good at math. Every day in high school, she was constantly overlooked by female teachers who favored male students in her math and science courses. When they made a mistake, they were given opportunities to learn. When she made a mistake, she was told, "you're just not good at this, and you're not going to use it later in life, so why bother?"
Sarah had been beaten for the position of valedictorian by a boy who had managed to squeeze in some AP credits that she wasn't able to receive. Even though she and the boy had the same GPA, the school was more willing to work with him to incorporate more AP credits into his schedule. They barred her from an AP physics course, saying that the class was too full of people who were actually going to use it for the rest of their lives, and that she was only going to be a teacher.
She did become a teacher, of sorts. She preferred to think of herself more as a professor and researcher, though. She was the only female professor in the department, and without tenure, her position was precarious.
She decided after reflecting on her position that she would accept the invitation to speak in front of a crowd of women, who like her, shared the same special experience of being a female in engineering. What would she say?
