I am often timidly approached by bright and promising female students who ask me a simple yet powerful question: “Can I have it all?”
Some days I feel ill-equipped to answer, as I often find myself stumbling through the minefield of motherhood as a professor of engineering. The quest to “have it all” nearly broke me and makes me wonder if “all” may explain why, from study to study, women remain the minority in our engineering classrooms and even a greater minority in the field’s workplaces.
Nonetheless, I have a ready answer for young women who come to me with that question: “Yes, as long as you are the one that defines ‘all’ — not them.”
The fact that women routinely ask this question is both a biological and psychological given. It is because we must answer the series of complex questions that come with it — how to reconcile the physical and emotional demands of birth against the equally invasive demands of our careers. Projects, deadlines, deliverables, emails all still happen while we are on maternity leave. We fear being replaced, left behind, or just plain resented by our male peers.
Those fears may be unfounded in some cases; in others, tragically not. Either way, they feel very real to us. Compound all of that with the fact that this beautiful new life doesn’t just grow up in the six weeks we are away, but forces us to negotiate — even with the most supportive partner — how those same hours in a day, the same energy in a body, and the same space in a mind can now accommodate the second full-time job of motherhood.
I am an engineer. I am an educator. I am a mother. I am a researcher. I am a woman. And I don’t care who is keeping score because on the only score sheet that matters, I have it all.
Luckily, our psyche has been created precisely for life’s ultimate multitasking. Even if we do not become mothers, we will ask the question of “all” in some way. In fact, even before we are conscious of our desire to ask the question, we feel the effects of our biological uniqueness. We are born with a mind more interconnected between its right and left hemispheres than our male peers, with greater focus on socialization, memory, relationships, and emotions.
Our unique wiring affects everything from the way we solve problems — even as engineers — to the way we feel valued and the way failure affects us. We may not be able to compartmentalize criticism or office politics from our self-worth and feelings.
That has tremendous implications for women as we move through an increasingly competitive educational system toward a results-oriented workplace. In the workplace, the rules of the game are compartmentalized, and scored narrowly. That scoring often fails to fully resonate with women who may not derive value and satisfaction from the metrics designed by our male peers.
Sure, the game of life is easier to win when we segregate its facets and write rules for each in isolation. And it’s not that women refuse to segregate their personal and professional lives — though I would argue that no one should have to — it’s that many women simply can’t.
That was a personal realization that I believe is critically lacking in the way we mentor female students, particularly those in STEM fields. Those fields — prized for their logic and analytical approach to problem solving — often attempt to “solve” struggling students in the same way: The immediate mentor, statistically likely to be male, simply isn’t wired to experience the “all” in the same way as a woman. Moreover, the mentor, regardless of gender, has been incubated in an environment that rewards days spent hyper-focused on the technical dimensions of scholarship and student formation. The “all” that values the intersection between work and emotional, mental, and spiritual well-being is rarely confronted.
Frankly, we in higher education must do more to mentor the “all” in all of our students, regardless of gender — though I argue that this is especially critical for women. It is not just a matter of saying we are committed to mentoring the whole person. It’s ensuring that we create environments where students feel comfortable enough to express themselves and where mentors feel equally comfortable and equipped with the tool sets to guide our mentees.
Yes, I know that is a tall order for any educator, particularly engineers. After all, we are not supposed to think with that other side of the brain?
All kidding aside, we may even argue that mentoring the personal as well as the professional is outside our job description, something best left to psychologists and counselors. To some extent I agree. However, we are the ones modeling what it means to be a successful professional in the academic world. As such, we have to be conscious of the messages we send about how success should be defined and measured. Are we, at minimum, prepared to lead by example?
As we more broadly develop our sense of self and help our students to do the same, independent of the “rules,” we gain the courage to define success more broadly as well. We can become less apologetic about what “having it all” means uniquely for us and our commitment to achieve it. We become unafraid to dismiss the notion that life is just a sum of parts kept neatly in the mind’s compartments and bins. And women can celebrate our role as nature’s ultimate multitaskers, nurturing the connection between all things instead of dispelling it.
After all, there should be no boundaries between Tracy the mother, Tracy the professor, and Tracy the engineer. She is just Tracy, and as these lines are blurred in her mind so are they in her life. They are interconnected, inseparable as one sometimes messy life, one big “all” that ebbs and flows each day depending on what part of the “all” needs the most of her in any given moment.
I am an engineer. I am an educator. I am a mother. I am a researcher. I am a woman. And I don’t care who is keeping score because on the only score sheet that matters, I have it all.
