INDIANAPOLIS – Thursday is "Introduce a Girl to Engineering Day," and RTV6’s Hiring Hoosiers is finding out the best ways to encourage your daughter to become an engineer.
Only 13 percent of today’s engineers in the U.S. are women, according to the Society of Women Engineers.
But those female engineers are taking strides to show girls today that they can overcome peer pressure, societal biases and gender assumptions to become future engineers.
Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology professor, Kay C Dee, has four tips on how to do this with your daughter:
- Praise resilience and persistence instead of intelligence—and praise specifically and genuinely.
- When you hear negative self-talk, don’t negate it or ignore it.
- Let your daughter know that it’s OK if she doesn’t love math, and let her know that science classes (like any classes, in any subject) can be boring sometimes.
- Don’t propagate gender assumptions.
Watch the video in our player (above) for a full interview with Professor Dee.
