observations from the ieee iv 2010...

IEEE INTELLIGENT TRANSPORTATION SYSTEMS MAGAZINE • 31 • SPRING 20111939-1390/11/$26.00©2011IEEE

Amruta Mohan TrivediUniversity of California, Berkeley,E-mail: [email protected]

Aditi Mohan TrivediUniversity of California, Santa Barbara,E-mail: [email protected]

© iSTOCKPHOTO.COM/MARIA PAVLOVA

Abstract–A large discrepancy between males and females involved in the Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) and Intelligent Vehicles (IV) fields has been a trend for the last four years at every annual IEEE IV sym-posium. Significantly fewer females are involved in this field, and causes for this uneven distribution may arise from lack of exposure to intelligent systems, associating engineering as a difficult subject which detracts women from studying it, or perhaps current salary level. Young, success-ful, and motivated female engineers at the 2010 IEEE IV symposium, as well as renowned professors of engineering gave us their opinions about the perspectives, issues, and opportunities for females in the intelligent vehicles field. Raising the level of females in the field and possibly equating it with that of the males in the future will not only increase diversity for en-gineering areas, but also increase creativity—something that is essential in engineering and IV/ITS fields [1]. This paper seeks to bring to aware-ness this issue by analyzing the perspectives of three female students and professors and identifying opportunities for women involvement.

Observations from the IEEE IV 2010 Symposium

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MITS.2011.940474Date of publication: 6 April 2011

I. Introduction

This paper is dedicated to under-standing the discrepancy between men and women’s active partici-pation in the Intelligent Transpor-

tation (ITS) and Intelligent Vehicle (IV) fields. We first became aware of this inconsistency at the most recent IEEE IV Symposium that took place in San Diego, CA in June 2010. Manning the registration desk on the first day of the conference, we noticed that there were very few women registering. However, the few women that came were moti-vated, some had submitted papers to the event; young, many still graduate stu-dents; and enthusiastic, all intended to develop careers in the field. We began

IEEE INTELLIGENT TRANSPORTATION SYSTEMS MAGAZINE • 32 • SPRING 2011

talking to three of these female graduate students who submitted papers to the conference to understand their dif-fering reasons to study engineering, challenges faced for being a women in the field, and ideas about the changing role of women in the engineering community.

It’s important to note that even as an increasing number of women explore scientific fields, engineering remains a largely male-dominated field. Take, for example, women in medicine: they are beginning to share the playing field with men in equal proportions. A survey conducted by the

Association of American Medical Colleges reports that in 2007, 49.1 percent of M.D. degree recipients in the United States during the 2006–2007 academic year, were female. In contrast, women accounted for only 20.2 percent of the doctorate degree awardees in engineering in 2006 [2].

So, the question arises: why are there fewer women in engineering, and in particular, in the ITS and IV fields? In order to find out, we decided to seek the counsel of estab-lished women researchers and professors in the Intelligent Vehicles (IV) and Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) fields. Their responses, as well as our thoughts on the in-volvement of women in the ITS and IV fields follows.

II. Gender Balance: Observations from the IEEE Intelligent Vehicles SymposiumsWe analyzed the registration material for the past five IEEE IV Symposiums in the hopes of finding a trend among women participation. As Figure 1(b) shows, at the most recent IEEE IV Symposium in June 2010, out of the over 200 authors of papers, posters, or both, a mere 7.9% of the principal authors were women. However, as can be seen in Figure 1(a), 25.8% of the posters and papers pre-sented included the contributions of women investigators. The data from Figure 2 shows that while the percentage of women authors was highest in the 2008 IV Symposium, 2010’s Symposium marked the highest percentage of post-ers and papers presented with contributions from female scholars.

From Figures 3(a) and 3(b), Europe, specifically France, marks the area that most women at the conference were representing.

III. Learning from Young ResearchersIn order to learn more about the reasons behind why wom-en study engineering, we began by talking to three women who attended the conference in June. All of these women were graduate students who had presented papers and/or posters during the conference proceedings. Since we wanted to understand why there are so few women in the ITS and IV fields, our goal was to learn from the them why they became interested in ITS/IV as a research area, why they believe women are underrepresented in this field, and what in their opinion can encourage more women to suc-ceed in the field. The three women were Dr. Lili Huang, a recent Ph.D. graduate from UC Riverside; Ms. Asma Azim, a Ph.D. student in at INRIA in Grenoble and Ms. Eugenie Lioris, a Ph.D. student at INRIA in France.

Dr. Huang’s research proposes using LIDAR to detect vehicles around an intelligent car. The data from her ex-perimentation shows that the system can recognize other cars around it up to 40 meters away, as well as the velocities and accelerations of those cars. To increase the range of this system, Huang has added cameras to the LIDAR sys-tem. It subsequently tracks a wider range of surfaces and

Papers with at LeastOne Female AuthorPapers with at LeastOne Male Author

Percentage Posters Associated withWomen at 2010 IEEE IV Symposium

Percentage of Male versus FemaleAuthors at 2010 IEEE IV Symposium

Percentage ofWomen AuthorsPercentage ofMen Authors

(a)

(b)

8%

92%

FIG 1 (a)The highest percentage of posters with a female author was seen at the 2010 symposium. (b) The percentage of female authors at the 2010 IEEE IV symposium was low, but we are expecting a higher rate for the future.

30

25

20

15

10

5

2006 2007 2008 2009 2010Years

Per

cent

age

0

Papers with at Least One Women AuthorTotal Women Authors in Conference

Representation of Women at IEEE IV Symposiums(2006–2010)

FIG 2 For the past four years at the Symposium, there appears to be fluctuating levels of women participation.


thus, not only vehicles, but also pe-destrians and traffic lights to local-ize positions.

Huang attributes the imbalance of women and men in engineering and its applied fields, like IV and ITS to young girls’ lack of exposure. She says, “female undergraduate and high school students do not know much about engineering, So I think professors and engineering societies should give them [an exposure to] what engineering really is.” Huang recalls that her female friends would shy away from engineering believ-ing the common stereotype that engineering was very dif-ficult for women.

Huang, however, dispels this belief by encouraging the creative aspect of engineering problem solving. She is a member of the Women Transportation Society (WTS), where she notes, “there are lots of women researchers in transportation and the intelligent vehicles fields.”

Ms. Asma Azim recently began her doctoral work after completing a master’s thesis that involved tracking multi-ple objects, including pedestrians, around or approaching a vehicle. She used the Viterbi algorithm, a method used in speech recognition, to assist with data association and found that algorithm was able to track people with very good accuracy. She speculates that if this algorithm were to be implemented inside a vehicle, it could detect moving objects inside that vehicle’s viewing area and could predict the motion of those objects.

However optimistic her research is, Azim is concerned about young women’s lack of exposure toward engineer-ing. In order to broaden a young woman’s horizons, she en-courages her peers to attend conferences such as the 2010 IEEE IV Symposium. Azim said, “for the last 3 days that I’ve been here, I’ve found everything so interesting—all the forums/sessions and proceedings were very interest-ing and informative to me.” She first became interested in the field of Intelligent Vehicles after working on a project that involved finding problems in a vehicle’s engine. After noticing how much computer vision and sensor-based sys-tems incorporated in vehicles have increased safety and reduced accidents, Azim decided that she wanted to take part in this type of research.

Ms. Azim believes that research fields will benefit from the creative energy of young students. “The IV field,” Azim stated, “can be very interesting for a person who is creative, wants to help people, and has an interest in mathematics, or computer science because it has a positive technological as well as societal impact.”

Ms. Eugenie Lioris is also a Ph.D. student at INRIA Re-search Institute. Her work focuses on optimizing vehicle performance. She has developed an optimized mathemati-cal model incorporating industrial research dimensions

such as client behavior, networks, and finances. This is used in the vehicle to develop a collective Taxi transporta-tion system.

Lioris stresses that though opportunities for women in the IV field may seem to be few in number, and difficulty levels may seem high, the success of a woman is ultimately a matter of will. She says, “When you decide what you’re going to do, you’re not supposed to say, ‘I am a woman, I’m not going to succeed.’ Of course, it is going to be very dif-ficult, and you have to persuade men that you are able to do what they can do.”

Yet, she agrees that perhaps the stereotypes about engineering being a difficult subject discourage many women from entering the field, but a growing number of “women in engineering” societies and programs provide

5%

53%

19%

23%

EuropeAsiaNorth AmericaSouth America

Distribution of Women Authors at 2010IEEE IV Symposium

(a)

(b)

Percentage of Women from CountriesRepresented at 2010 IEEE IV Symposium

40

30

20

10

0

Per

cent

(%

)

Fran

ce

Germ

any

Italy

Spain

Sweden

Japa

n

Korea

Singap

ore

ChinaBra

zilUSA

FIG 3 (a) At the 2010 IEEE IV Symposium, a significantly larger percentage of women from Europe is seen than percentage of women from Asia, North America and South America combined. (b) Most women at the 2010 IEEE IV Symposium are from France.

Lioris stresses that though opportunities for women in the IV field may seem to be few in number, and difficulty levels may seem high, the success of a woman is ultimately a matter of will.


support to the women who do enter the field. Although young women in America are encouraged to apply to engi-neering colleges, recent admissions numbers still reflect a large gender gap: of Caltech’s 951 enrolled students for fall 2009, 592 were men and 359 were women. At UC Berkeley, 26% of the freshmen in the College of Engineering for fall 2010 are women.

IV. Opinions of Established Researchers and ProfessorsWe also sought the opinions of established women research-ers in the specific IV/ITS related fields, as well as, more broadly, engineering in general. We sought to know how each began her involvement in engineering and how many other women were studying with her. As professors who have mentored a number of Ph.D. graduates, we were in-terested in knowing how many of these were women, and if that number is an increase or a decrease from when the pro-fessor herself was studying. Finally, we were also interested in knowing each woman’s ideas on how the involvement of women in IV/ITS will change in the future.

Professor Tara Javidi, an associate professor of Electri-cal and Computer Engineering at the University of Califor-nia, San Diego, met with us to discuss the current issues about women’s involvement in her field, and gave her per-spective as a student, and identified how that changed as she began mentoring younger female students. Professor Javidi completed her undergraduate education at Sharif University of Technology in Tehran, Iran, and received her MS and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Since becoming a faculty member at UCSD, Professor Javidi has graduated two Ph.D. students. Of those, one was female. This student is now a faculty member at University of Colorado.

Professor Javidi believes that there a distinct pyramid structure in terms of women involvement in engineering. For example, she noticed that as she moved from being an undergraduate to a graduate student, the number of female students slowly declined as the field of study became in-creasingly specialized. “Women are like the token minori-ty in engineering,” Javidi said. For this reason, she believes that some women “feel marginalized, discouraged and in-timidated” simply because of her gender.

Professor Javidi said that because many of her older pro-fessors were women, she felt encouraged that she, too, could succeed in engineering. However, she attributes the lack of enthusiasm for engineering among young students to the negative image it has in popular culture. “People don’t go to law school to read pages and pages of documents; they go to law school because they see the excitement of lawyers on TV,” she said, “On the other hand, everyone uses products designed by engineers, but no one is excited to study that.” She believes that a stronger outreach program to expose young students to engineering is necessary.

Yet, Professor Javidi believes that the “field of engineer-ing should be open to all genders,” rather than targeting only the female gender to open the field up to. In industry, engi-neers are well paid, so spreading this security and satisfac-tion may be a crucial step in reaching a gender balance.

Prof. Lisa Pruitt is professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. Originally from

(a)

(b)

(c)

FIG 4 (a) University of California, Riverside PhD student, Lili Huang with her PhD advisor, Professor Matthew Barth. (b) Eugenie Lioris, a PhD student at INRIA in France. (c) PhD student Asma Azim (left), with conference volunteers (right) at the 2010 IEEE Symposium.


the East Coast, she completed her undergraduate educa-tion in Materials, Chemical, and Oceans Engineering at the University of Rhode Island and did her doctoral work at Brown University.

She is the advisor of a mentoring group at UC Berkeley that works with K-12 students to teach them about the scien-tific and engineering design process. Dr. Pruitt believes that while there are more women in engineering now than 20 years ago, the ratio of men to women is still disproportional because grade school students are not exposed to engineer-ing like they are to the humanities and hard sciences like biology, chemistry, and physics. “Many undergraduates en-roll in the College of Engineering because they liked math and physics in high school, but many more avoid engineer-ing because they did not like math and physics. What is not taught in grade school is that engineering is so much more than deriving and applying equations. It requires creativity, leadership and passion,” Pruitt says.

Unlike Prof. Javidi, Prof. Pruitt did not have any female professors in college to serve as mentors. She, however, came from a family of engineers. Her father was an aero-space engineer who instilled in her and her sister a “love for science and inquiry.”

As the diversity officer for the Mechanical and Bioen-gineering departments, Dr. Pruitt has noticed that women tend toward the fields of engineering in which they can make a substantial societal impact. For this reason, “wom-en are more attracted to interdisciplinary topics in engi-neering.” At UC Berkeley, the ratio of men and women in bioengineering is almost 50/50, as is the ratio in the Mate-rial Science and Engineering department.

There are fewer women in the more traditional fields of engineering, like mechanical engineering, civil engi-neering and electrical engineering. Dr. Pruitt says this is because students are not exposed to the inquiry behind sci-ence and the new research done in these fields. According to Dr. Pruitt, 50 years ago, mechanical engineers were the de-signers and manufacturers of machines. But now, mechani-cal engineering is also very interdisciplinary. Mechanical

engineers can work on nanosensors and systems with elec-trical engineers or medical devices with material scientists and bioengineers.

In order to encourage more women to study engineer-ing, Prof. Pruitt believes that “we need to put the excite-ment for science in K-8 education.” Once students reach the undergraduate level, though, it is necessary that the school expose them to the “depth and breadth of engineering” through not just coursework, but also lab experience and team-based projects since many women do not know what engineering is.

V. Lessons for Moving ForwardThe United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) recently launched a mentoring program to encourage young girls in the science and math fields. The organizations cites societal and cultural atti-tudes towards girls in science, as well as differences in the way boys and girls learn as reasons why there are fewer girls in math and science. But, perhaps the most striking reason, which UNESCO’s program has been attempting to combat, is the lack of confidence many parents and teachers have in girls pursuing scientific and mathematical studies.

In her book, In a Different Light: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development [3] Carol Gilligan, asserts that women place a greater priority on interpersonal satisfaction and integration than do men. That leads us to believe that the role of mentors is to encourage a girl’s, mathematical and scientific mind. They cannot display any lack of confi-dence in a young engineer’s ability. In a study on Gender- Informed mentoring strategies, Naomi Chester, a professor at the University of Vermont, and Mark Chester, a professor the University of Michigan, synthesized Gilligan’s research and compiled data that showed women are motivated best by encouragement, compared to men, who are motivated best by challenge; and a woman’s vision of success is through group affiliation, while a man’s is through individual achievement. [4] And while the said generalization does not apply to all men and all women, we do believe that mentors,

FIG 5 Prof. Tara Javidi in her UCSD office. FIG 6 Prof. Lisa Pruitt in her UC Berkeley office.


whether parents, teachers, professors, or advisors, should take into account the different learning styles of men and women to inform more women about engineering and at-tract them to stay. Perhaps, this idea is best summed up the words of female graduate student, Eugenie Lioris, “There are people who don’t trust you, they say ‘oh, she’s a woman she’s not going to be able to (succeed)’ But everyone has brains and if we want to use them, we can use them. A man or a woman can use their brain; it’s just a matter of will.”

The American Society for Engineering Education pub -lishes an annual publication, “Engineering by the Numbers,” that points out that women receive a larger percentage of degrees in newer engineering fields than older engineering fields. For example, women received 36.9% of the Bachelor’s degrees awarded in 2009 in the field of Biomedical engineer-ing, and 43.7% in environmental engineering. Compare that to electrical engineering bachelor degrees in 2009 (11.5%) and computer engineering (7.9%) (2009)[2]. In our minds, this may be the most hopeful trend: it identifies the popu-larity of engineering in the newest fields—the places where the most progress has yet to be made, including, perhaps, where the participation of women will grow as well. Simi-larly, a recent report published by the American Association of University Women called “Why so Few,” focuses on build-ing a departmental culture in such low female to male ratio subjects, which is supportive and welcoming to female stu-dents. It proposes the idea that, even though the foundations for a career in science or engineering can be laid while a girl is growing up, her real test comes in college. Their research shows that by providing overview of the field in introduc-tory courses, computer science and physics departments, departments that are very male-dominated, can attract more female students [5].

With that said, an area of engineering that will grow con-siderably in the next 10 to 20 years is applications of alter-native energy. The world needs engineers to build the next generation of cars: where safety, eco-friendliness, as well as aesthetics and comfort will become important. The age of gas-guzzlers is coming to an end. Our increased aware-ness of carbon-emitting actions has prompted this green revolution, and tomorrow will see the demise of crude oil as a staple of industrialized and post- industrialized soci-ety. As environmental pressures spur popular demand for an eco-friendly, safe, smooth, and pleasant ride, engineers must be ready to develop such a vehicle. And women engi-neers can and should become leading and visible players in the future.

Call us romantics, but, even after this statistical anal-ysis, we like to believe that the reason women choose to succeed in ITS/IV and other types of engineering is out of enjoyment. Perhaps, Lili Huang’s words explain it best, “[Engineering] sounds like it is scary, but it is interesting, I really enjoy it—I love it.” And like Lili, we hope that this inspires more women to enjoy this field as well.

AcknowledgementsWe would like to thank the 2010 IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium organizing committee for inviting us to volun-teer at the event and for suggesting this research topic, UC-SD’s CVRR Lab for providing us with the proceedings of the past IV Symposiums and access to other research resources including papers and people. We sincerely appreciate the participation of the three scholars featured in this article for their willingness and openness in sharing their experi-ences, opinions, and ideas. We would also like to extend our gratitude to Prof. Javidi and Prof. Pruitt for their time and insights and Prof. Carol Greider of Johns Hopkins Univer-sity for her recommendations about the AAUW paper “Why So Few?”[5]. We thank Mr. Doug Ramsey for his help with interviews and finally, we thank the reviewers and the edi-tor for helping us improve the quality of this paper.

About the AuthorsAmruta Mohan Trivedi is an engi-neering student at the University of California, Berkeley. She is also inter-ested in Journalism and Technology Policy. She served as the editor-in-chief of Pulse Magazine which won the NSPA Pacemaker Finalist Award, in 2010 as well as the editor-in-chief of the Youth

Town Meeting Newspaper of the World link Program orga-nized by the Institute for Peace and Justice at the Univer-sity of San Diego in 2010.

Aditi Mohan Trivedi is a student at the University of California, Santa Barba-ra. She is studying molecular, cellular and developmental biology. She is also interested in exploring connections be-tween music and neural mechanisms. She served as a youth board member of the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation from

2008–2010, and was the recipient of the Canyon Crest Acad-emy Principal’s Award and Scholarship in 2010.

References[1] J. Grimson and C. Roughneen, “Diversity in engineering: Tinkering,

tailoring, transforming,” in Engineering in Context. Denmark: Aca-demia, 2009, pp. 197–220.

[2] M. Gibbons, “Engineering by the numbers,” Am. Soc. Eng. Educ. Prism Mag., 2009.

[3] C. Gilligan, In a Different Light: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development. Harvard Univ. Press, 1983.

[4] N. C. Chesler and M. A. Chesler, “Gender-informed mentoring strate-gies for women engineering scholars: On establishing a caring com-munity,” J. Eng. Educ., 2002, pp. 49–55.

[5] C. Hill, C. Corbett, and A. St. Rose, Why So Few? Women in Science, Tech-nology, Engineering and Mathematics. American Association of Univ. Women, 2010.

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