 Good afternoon or good evening depending on where you're joining us from today. Welcome to Engineering for Change or E4C for short. Today we're very pleased to bring you the latest in E4C's 2015 webinar series. Today's webinar is part of a focus series entitled Reflections on the Profession. Today we'll be focusing on women and taking their lead in engineering for global development. We developed a webinar in collaboration with Catapult Design, Water for People Uganda, and Dunya Health. My name is Yonah Aranda, and I'll be moderating today's webinar. When I'm not moderating webinars, I work with the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, where I am a Senior Program Manager in our Engineering for Global Development Department. I'd like to take a moment now to tell you a bit about today's webinar, women taking the lead in engineering for global development. The subject of careers in engineering for global development is a popular one with E4C members. So we've decided to explore the topic in a new multi-part series on careers of the intersection of technology and global development. Today's installment features women who've established careers in engineering for global development. Historically, women have made up only 10 to 20% of engineering workforce, but they make up a greater percentage in engineering for global development classrooms and are highly visible advocates for the profession. In fact, in a recent New York Times AlfaEd article, a female engineer who's actually been featured on E4C noted that women seem to be drawn to engineering projects that attempt to achieve social good. Today, we've invited three leading women in development engineering to explore this idea and share their perspectives on the profession. I'd like to welcome Heather Fleming, co-founder and CEO of Catapult Design, Diana Kisigau, Program Engineer at Water for People, Uganda, and Jordan Schimmerhorn, co-founder of Dunya Health. Welcome all and thank you for joining us today. Before we get rolling, I'd also like to take a moment to recognize the coordinators of the E4C webinar series generally. Along with myself, we have Michael Mater of AFME, Holly Schneider-Brown, Jackie Halliday, and Steve Welch of IEEE, who work on developing and delivering the webinar series. Thank you, team. If anybody out there has questions about this series or would like to make a recommendation for future topics and speakers, we invite you to contact all of us via the email address visible on the slide, webinar at engineeringforchange.org. Before we move on to our presenter, we thought it would be a good idea to remind you about engineering for change and who we are. E4C is a global community of nearly 900,000 people, such as engineers, technologists, representatives from NGOs, and social scientists who work together to solve humanitarian challenges faced by underserved communities around the world, such as access to potable water, awkward energy, effective healthcare, improved agriculture, effective sanitation, and others. We invite you to join E4C by becoming a member. E4C membership provides cost-free access to a growing inventory of field-tested solutions and related information from all the members of our coalition as well as access to a passionate, engaged community working to make people's lives better all over the world. Registration is easy and it's free. Check out our website engineeringforchange.org to learn more and sign up. Apologies a little farther. The webinar you are participating in today is one installment of the E4C webinar series. The free, publicly available series of online seminars showcases best practices and thinking of leaders in the field. Information on upcoming installments in this series, as well as archive videos of past presentations, can be found on the E4C webinar's webpage, which you see listed on the slide. If you're following us on Twitter today, I'd also like to invite you to join the conversation with our dedicated hashtag, hashtag E4C webinars. Our next webinar will be on May 20th at 11 a.m. Eastern Center Time and our topic will be manual drilling, a global perspective of local realities. Our speakers will include Dr. Kirsten Danert, who is the director of the Rural Water Supply Network, and Jose Guesti, our watch specialist at UNICEF. We're very excited to invite these folks to talk about this very important topic. Check out the E4C webinar's page for registration details. If you're already an E4C member, we'll be sending you an invitation to the webinar directly. All right, a few housekeeping items before we get started. On the screen you're now seeing there are a number of different tabs on the left-hand panel. The chat is where you will interact with your fellow attendees and post any comments about the webinar. You can access this by clicking the plus sign to the left of the tab. Use the questions tab to submit any questions for the presenter. This tab can also be accessed by clicking the plus sign on the left tab. Lastly, after the webinar concludes, a brief survey will appear with questions for you about the webinar. Please let us know how we're doing. So I know we have quite a number of folks on today's webinar. Let's see where everyone is from today. Using the chat, please type in your location. Unfortunately, I can't see the answers today, so I'm going to take a guess. I know that we have quite a few folks from around the world. I see we have folks from New Jersey, from Canada. Welcome, everyone, from wherever you are joining us. All right, during the webinar, please continue to use the chat to type in any remarks you may have for your fellow attendees. And don't forget to use the questions tab to type in your questions for the presenter. If you encounter any trouble viewing or hearing the webinar, you may want to try opening up GoToWebinar in a different browser. Following the webinar, to request a certificate of completion showing one professional development hour, please follow the instructions on the top of our web page and the URL is listed. Also, please make sure to take a moment to fill out our survey at the end. Your opinions are invaluable to the webinar series, and without your comments and suggestions, we wouldn't be what we are today. All right, so I'm going to go ahead and start off with our first panelist. I'm excited to welcome Heather Fleming. Heather, I invite you to tell us a little bit about yourself and how you began your career in Engineering for Global Development. Thanks, Yana, and good morning, everyone. I apologize if my throat gets a little gross during what I'm speaking. I'm getting over a cold from last week. So they asked us to put together just a few slides to help provide some context and background about ourselves. So here's my few slides. I am the CEO and one of the co-founders of Catapult Design now located in Denver. And as the CEO, I just put some quick descriptors down of what I do on a day-to-day basis. Oversee project work, track a lot of the financial data, secure and vet some of the new project work, develop relationships with some of our key partners. I map out strategic vision and growth and track some of those indicators, and I lead Catapult Education Initiative. I've been in this role for about five and a half years and I came to it from the product design consulting industry. I was just essentially working in Silicon Valley for a boutique product design firm for a little over six years before starting Catapult with a group of friends. And while I was consulting in the Valley, I started volunteering with engineers without borders. I knew when I was in school studying design that I wanted to do this type of work, but there was very little opportunity to really engage in it. So volunteering with groups like EWB was one of the only outlets back then. So it's exciting to see that trend is kind of changing these days. I've also been teaching both at Stanford University and California College of the Arts. Now that I live in Colorado, that's no longer the case, but it's part of why I launched and lead Catapult Education Initiative. And I have a background in product design from Stanford. It technically lives within the mechanical engineering department over at Stanford. And the next two slides I just wanted to share a few quick stories. One is how I learned about the role of engineering and global development. This is a picture of the moneymaker pump from an organization called Kickstart International in Kenya. And their founder Martin Fisher spoke in one of my classes when I was in college. He was an ME who went to Kenya on a Fulbright and saw all the work that people had to do to irrigate their crops and decided to design something that could make that a little bit easier for them. And he started mass producing these pumps and selling them to subsistence farmers in the area. And I just thought that was really cool. In school, they hadn't really talked to us about how you design products in other contexts. It was mostly everyone who aspired to work for Apple or work for IEO or one of the more mainstream type jobs. But he was the first person to show me, you don't have to go down that route. There's other routes as well. There's this ample amount of people around the world who also need good product designers. So that was how I was first exposed to the industry. As someone in the CEO role, I only spend about 25% of my time actually doing the design work and the rest is more administrative and management. But I do get to the field still every now and then. This is a recent picture of me doing some field research in Rwanda with a small non-profit out there called the Ifungani Project. But most of my time is this sort of thing. It's webinars, it's going to events and drumming up new clients looking for new partners. And I'll just close out by saying that I'm kind of an introvert by nature. I definitely consider myself more of a creative person who kind of sticks to the wall in the back of the room. So this has been starting catapult with my friends and leading the organization has been a brand new experience. And if you're interested in global development and you're interested in applying your technical skills, there's definitely two routes to consider. If you create your own company, you could end up like this. Doing mostly speaking and managerial stuff versus doing the actual design work, which I think most engineers and creative problem solvers know and love. So I will leave it at that. Thank you. Thank you so much Heather. This is a really great introduction. And from here, I'm going to go ahead and hand it over to Diana for Jackie. Can you hand it over to Diana please? Diana, would you mind introducing yourself please? Diana? My name is Diana. I'm currently working as a program engineer. You're coming in and out Diana? Diana, are you on? These are having a little technical difficulty with Diana. Jordan, are you on? Apologies guys, this is what happens on live webinars. Diana, I've unmuted you. Please try again. My name is Diana. There we go. Thank you Diana. Sorry about that. I had a connection hiccup. My name is Diana. Can you hear me now? Yes, we can hear you. And now you're gone. I think you are cutting in and out. Diana? We can't hear Diana. Jackie, would you mind moving us to the previous slide? Just to give you guys a quick intro on behalf of Diana, she is a program engineer with Water for People Uganda who's got her civil engineering degree at McCarrie University. Next slide please. I love this fun fact about Diana. She's currently engaged to a very handsome man, which we should all be so lucky. And her parents are Reverend Cannon David Kisiga and Anne Tumushabe. Sorry, I'm not sure who's the dancing slide. I'm not sure who's the dancing slide. I'm not sure who's the dancing slide. I'm not sure who's the dancing slide. Sorry, I'm not sure who's the dancing slide. And she comes to us from the western region of Uganda in the Kanungu district from a small village called Kifunjo with about a thousand people. When she was seven years old, she decided to take on her dad's name so that whenever she went or whatever she acknowledged for, her dad would somehow also feel it would be in effect some autism. So Diana, are you back on? Yes. Fabulous. I'll let you take over because I think you'll be able to share this part much better than me. Thank you very much. I'm sorry about my internet issues. That is the reality in global development and we are representing it very realistically here. Thank you. So when I was young, through school I depended on scholarships and my dad was so outgoing and this one day he brought home a white lady. I don't know how they met but being the curious child that I was, I played around with this lady and out of the bush, he just asked my dad, can I pay for this girl's school fees? Can I be her good mother? Has she been baptized? And just like that, I got myself a sponsor. She took me through high school and looking at what I was, I did my best and performed well and earned myself a scholarship with the government of Uganda for my degree at Macquarie University. I also performed well in the university and my good grades got me my first job as a water for people as a water and sanitation engineer in 2012 and I've since then grown to become a program engineer. Oh, just since last year. Can I go into the next slide? Sorry. So why did I become an engineer? While I was growing up, there were so many issues that needed taking care solutions and I kept on wondering who does such things. My parents were blessed with four beautiful girls and just one boy and back in my village and also in many villages in Uganda, the girl child is not really meant to be educated. All she's supposed to do is grow up and get married to give birth to other kids. Why would you take someone that is eventually just going to get married to school? So as I was growing up, I really had to prove a point. My parents tried so hard and took us to school and within my mind, I made it a point to not disappoint and I had to prove a point to the people in the village and told them that any child regardless of their sex with a girl or boy, they deserve a good education because it's the benchmark to what they will eventually be in future. So what do I do now? I'm so blessed and I'm happy to have gotten a job with wonderful people because they're helping me achieve what I wanted to actually do while I was growing up. At wonderful people, I'm best in the western region of Uganda, down in the villages and I work with rural communities to help them understand the benefits of using good water and sanitation services. We go out to communities and teach them what it takes to keep a good system working. So as we are talking to these communities, we also get to want to find out from them what would you want to be a source of water. You just want a borehole, you just want a pipe scheme, what it is that you want and if that's what you want, how are you going to keep it working? So we work with them, we teach them, we empower them to take care of these systems once they're in place. And then one of the things that we do at Wonderful People in Uganda, we have a system of management called community-based management system. When systems are put in place, the community is given the role of taking over the management of these wells on a voluntary basis, so a community is selected and they are told to once in a while collect some fees that they can keep and use these fees to maintain the well. However, the system has not worked out so well because the people that are on these committees are not paid any salary, so they do their work in any way. So what we've decided to do at Wonderful People is look at having this managed as a business model. So for the hand pumps, we have a case where we had to rehabilitate boreholes and instead of having communities manage these wells, we had entrepreneurs take on their management. And for the entrepreneur to make some business out of this, they had to manage at least five boreholes. And because they cannot manage to be at each of these five points all at once, they had to find a way of tracking the sales made at each of these points. And that's how we came up with this innovation, the meter hand pump. It's one of the things I was tasked to do while I had just joined Wonderful People. So we fixed a meter on the hand pump and this meter is now helping the entrepreneurs track the sales at each of their points. The meters themselves have enabled the beneficiary communities to understand that water is a resource. Water has to be paid for and it should not be wasted. So everyone now understands why water has to be paid for and why it has to be maintained because when the borehole breaks down, money has to be available. Where we have pipe water skins, we have these outlet points, Q6. And at Q6, we've also designed these to be a bit wider than the normal Q6 so that if someone at the point is selling water, they should not just be selling water. I did not provide a picture that has both sides open, but inside the Q6, there are shelves that allow the person vending water to also retail some basic domestic items like soap matches. So if someone comes to collect water, they can also pick these items. So that is basically what I do at Wonderful People. And I opted to start pursuing a masters at Laughborough so that I can improve and learn more about water and waste and design better facilities. That's me. Thank you so much, Diana. I love this photo. It's a very happy one. All right. So last but not least, we have Jordan. Excuse me, guys. Oh, allergies. Jordan, please tell us a little bit about yourself. Hey, everyone. So I guess like Diana, I come from this sort of a master's student perspective, though I also think I'm working on a smaller scale project, which might provide a little bit of a different perspective. So just to give you guys some of my background, I started out as a bioengineer at Rice University in Houston. And that was something I think I decided I wanted to be a bioengineer when I was like 12 or something absurd. But I didn't really gain interest in engineering for global development until my senior year in undergrad, I got tasks or assigned with designing a baby monitor for a hospital in Malawi and sort of exposure to that. And working on the particular constraints associated with that project, not only technology constraints, but different environmental constraints was sort of an intellectually appealing challenge to me. And that made me realize that this was a career path I was really interested in. I didn't know where I was going to work. My undergraduate program was really focused on Africa, so that was kind of where I was thinking. And I was very much a technical, like in the lab sort of person focused on hardware. So after that, I decided that probably the elements of the engineering for global development challenges that I thought were most interesting were those kind of associated with the more amorphous constraints of implementing technologies, less about designing the particular thing and more about implementing the thing and making sure it works in practice. So I decided to go get my master's in global health. I'm at Duke right now, and about three days from being done, so that's very exciting. Right now, my biggest project is a co-founded Junia Health, which is a mobile health company. In an effort to, I guess, reduce my responsibilities, I'm focusing my thesis work on evaluating our program. I consult for random engineering for global development projects. I keep picking new ones up, which is very exciting. Right now I'm working with a refugee tent flooring system that's going to be testing in Lebanon this summer. And look at different elements of policies surrounding these technologies and user interaction. I've become really focused on the Middle East, I think, the past few years. I feel like that's a place where there's a need for these technologies, but it's kind of, I guess, averaged out in terms of income. They all look like middle-income countries with pockets of great needs. So I think that's an interesting place to work, especially in conflict situations or post-conflict situations. So right now, my big role is co-founder of Junia Health, and that should say software, I'm sorry. So we've really moved over. I've moved over, I think, unintentionally to the software side. Do I have slide control? Oh, thank you. So just to give you an overview of my work, this is a very, very basic mobile health program. I don't want to oversee what we do. We just send SMS reminders or text message reminders to parents who miss vaccine appointments for their children. Right now, my thesis project is coming up with a predictive model, so we can predict who's at greatest risk of missing their appointments and send them a reminder in advance to hopefully avoid the problem in the first place. So that's going well, and we're going to test that out this summer. Our partner is the UN Palestinian Refugee Agency on our lawn. That was organized by cold email in a very willing department head of their health department. So I think that sort of illustrates how these things can work by happenstance. One of the challenges we face is that sometimes our programs get interrupted by conflict. So for example, my co-founder was supposed to run a study in the Gaza Strip last summer, and that got interrupted by their war. So sometimes when our programs go a little bit astray, we end up focusing more on advocacy and sort of bringing to light issues, health issues among refugees in the Middle East. Probably the things I'm most proud of with this program are reducing time. The nurses have been trying to track down patients and follow up with patients. That's something we've heard that they really like. We've returned a number of babies to care to get vaccinated after six or more months away. The parents just forgot and never came back. And now those kids have their measles vaccines, which is always great. And then the other thing is that a lot of the mothers who receive our alerts sort of respond in a more emotional way. They'll say that receiving a text message makes them feel like the agency or the clinic cares about them. And I think that's a really important sort of hard-to-measure impact. So I'm still a student right now, and I started this right after I finished undergrad. And I always kind of have a personal, I guess, reluctance to start a new organization instead of working with an existing partner. But we really had a hard time finding existing mobile health partners in the Middle East. And nobody we saw was really focused on this particular problem of delayed vaccinations among Palestinians and refugees. So we thought we would just come in. The project worked with my timeline. A mobile health program is easy to work on from abroad. It's easy to work on in short bursts during breaks and during summers. And then finally this project was really, or the problem was something my co-founder really picked out as something she saw when she was abroad of the Zing family. And it just so happened that we emailed the health director of this UN agency. He happened to be really interested. And so a lot of actually implementing it was luck. So I guess the biggest question I get both from my global health colleagues and classmates and from other people in the engineering for global development field is like, why are you working in the Middle East? You're a young female entrepreneur. I think there are a lot of stereotypes about that. And some of them are true. Sometimes it's difficult. But really I found that being a female especially working with, I guess, maternal health programs and child health is just an outrageous advantage. Most of the mothers I talk to are younger than I am. So I think sometimes they're intimidated by either, by sometimes the older male staff of the UN agency we work with. Sometimes I am intimidated by the staff. So all of these 15, 16-year-old moms I think sometimes have a hard time being open with the agency or with the clinics about their needs or about the services they wish they had or about giving honest feedback. But I think maybe they're more open to talking to me about those sorts of things, which ultimately lets us design better products. And I think it's especially important to be able to talk to them about it because at the end of the day they do have more interaction with their children's health care and their appointments. Another thing I found is that it's really my role as an outsider lets me direct attention to the needs of nurses and female staff who might be overridden. I don't work for them, so there's really, aside from maybe creating an impression of my program, I have, I guess, fewer consequences if I am in a meeting and interrupt somebody or say that like a nurse is trying to talk or say that I feel like their opinion is being steamrolled. So that's sort of an inadvertent, I guess, benefit. And then finally, I think the biggest advantage I have is working as a young person on a sort of technical project in a very entrenched sort of older bureaucracy. They definitely trust me with the technology side of things. And I found that that is definitely also maybe a bigger divide than gender even is the youth tech expertise. So that's about me. I think that's all I've got. Thank you so much, Jordan. This is really, really interesting. And I think this positions us very well for our question and answers. So one thing I wanted to share with our attendees today is an interesting fact that we've come across in Engineering for Global Development and specifically in terms of the draw of women in Engineering for Global Development, primarily in the classroom. So what you should be seeing now is some information from MIT's DELA, which has been tracking the D-Stands for Development. So this has got a little background. It's a lab that's focused specifically on development work and engineering. And what they've been tracking since 2002 when they launched is the enrollment of female students, which at MIT is approximately 45%. A fairly good percentage in comparison to a lot of other engineering schools, which again tend to be around 10 to 20. D-Labs enrollment of female undergrads in their programs is actually 65%. And in fact peaked at about 74% last year. So very recent data really indicates that the gender balance is in sync with what we mentioned earlier regarding what seems to be the draw of a woman to service-based learning, something that is meaningful and really shows in the numbers. In comparison where you have professionals, we're going to highlight engineers without borders, USA, and their membership, which is currently about 14,700, of which more than 40% are women and this is inclusive of students and professionals. So very interesting statistics in this case showing the obvious interest of students in the classroom and the obvious interest by some professionals. So really this is also a question. Oh, I thought if somebody can use their phone to me. Here is the little bit of background. So this begs the question to all our panelists. Are women taking the lead in engineering for global talent development as a full-time professional? Aside from what we see as statistics from the classroom, what are we seeing happening in the field? And I'm going to go ahead and kind of assign who answers first. So listen to your name. In this case, Heather, perhaps we can start with you and maybe you can share your perspective on this. Sure. I agree with the statistic about students for sure. And I read the New York Times article and also felt that I was completely in line. I know at Stanford, for example, product design is also the most popular engineering degree that's amongst women and it's graduating class every year is the minimum of 50% women, 50% men. And same with classes like Design for Stream at the D school. There's definitely a lot of women that apply towards classes like that. I though haven't seen that translate into the professional sector. Not to say that there's not a lot of amazing women in the global development sector with the technical background. There definitely are. But in terms of people who are at the forefront in the spotlight, I think it's primarily men and a lot of the, if you look at who's speaking at various conferences on technology and global development, to me it's still primarily men. And then when we're hiring for technical positions at Catapults, I mean, we've had a product design engineering position open for about a year now. And if you just look at, from our perspective, the number of resumes that we get from women versus men, we get very few women who apply for jobs with us. And I don't know why that is, because I definitely feel that there is more of an interest in the sector from women or there's an equal amount from women and men as opposed to just men. I don't know why that doesn't translate. I know the last thing I'll say is that one thing we've experienced at Catapult with some of the women on our team is that the demands of the job, I mean, we have to be in country for weeks at a time. And some of the women on our team have very young children. Karen Carter, a program manager, for example, has two kids. One of them is under a year old, so she just can't participate in a lot of the field's research until she's waiting until all of her kids are above the age of two. But we've seen that with other women that we've wanted to hire for various positions. They can't commit to a lot of the field's research, which is so essential to working in global development. That's a very interesting insight, and I wonder if that's reflective of what is generally seen in the engineering profession. Perhaps, Diana, can we have you weigh in on this topic as well? Do you see women taking the lead in engineering for global development as both time professionals? In Uganda in particular, it's statistically in my class, but then about 10% of us were girls. It's interesting to see that in Stanford and MIT statistics are going up to 50. That's really interesting. I don't know when that will happen in Africa, but people are starting to pick interest. Associations have been created. For example, we have Association of Women Engineers, Technicians and Scientists in Uganda, which is beginning to, it's out to encourage girls to take the lead in the profession. And then also the government has tried to award girls some more points that can go into university so that they can get enrolled into the engineering program. But when it comes to having women as leaders in engineering global development, it becomes a very tough issue. As Hilo said, it's still seen as a field that is more dominated by the men. And in the places, for example, where I work, people actually find it strange that I'm an engineer. They just can't seem to understand why a girl like me, I mean going to engineering school, they keep on asking, what was wrong with you? It's still seen as something that should have ideally been done by the men. So right now, I cannot say women are really taking the lead, but they are beginning to pick up speed. For example, the first female engineer in Uganda, the aerospace engineer Winneby, has opened the gap for more engineers and we have more that are picking interest in taking this up. But it's still male dominated. That's a really great insight. Thank you so much, Diana. And Jordan, what do you see happening on your side of the Atlantic? Yeah, I think it's interesting that Diana said 10% about our female just because it's the opposite of my experience. Just to throw my statistics out there, in my undergraduate bioengineering program, it was about 50-50. But I think every single one of us who specialize in global health technologies was female. In my current program of about 30 global health students, eight of us were engineers in undergrad and we're all female. So I think that might be some self-selecting going on. But as for translating to jobs, I almost think one of the problems might be, and I'm speaking probably specifically for health, but just a lack of a developed field in general. A lot of these organizations that are popping up are startups and that's risky. So maybe there's something to that. Another thing I think is interesting, I think for me, as I'm looking for jobs right now, is the hardware software divide. A lot of engineering or technical global health roles that I see are very focused on software or mobile health software experience, whereas a lot of the women I know who have either worked on engineering projects for health or development are really interested in physical products. So maybe there's also something to that divide. I'm not entirely sure what it is, but I can report back in a month or two where my people end up Thank you so much. Yes, we'll definitely be interested in hearing updates. So moving on to our next question, and considering that obviously this career, this profession is not without its challenges, can you speak honestly to anything that really has made you consider quitting at any point? And I want to start with Diana. Has anything really made you kind of like this pencil want to break? Currently, my workplace is very conducive. Well, I'm the only female engineer among four other engineers, but it's very conducive and I wouldn't say lots of things that made me want to quit, but during my university, we usually have training programs, and we are taken out to the field to see what it feels like. And what I really found very challenging and almost made me want to quit the profession entirely was the way the men really treat the girls out there. It's really difficult and aggressive. At one point, you're being looked at as meat, as game. Everyone is out there to grab you. You're out trying to work, but people are not looking at you as someone trying to do something. They just want to sexually abuse, but that was during university. I believe situations have changed right now in the field. And I believe that's actually one of the things most of my classmates after school don't even bother going to practice engineering. Most of them become accountants because it's pretty rough out there, but currently my working environment is very conducive. I wouldn't complain. That's very challenging conditions in the field. Heather, do you want to have you have experienced anything like this? Do you want to speak to some of the challenges that you've encountered? I have not experienced anything like that, but I'm not surprised. I was just sitting here kind of in shock. That's rough. The things that have made me want to quit are more like... I think a lot of people who are drawn to this sector or to international development as a whole are very much interested in change, in positive change. But the reality is the changes that you're trying to implement are oftentimes on a generational scale. I feel like as designers and engineers, we create something and we want to put it out there and see this type of change that it makes. We have as a society this kind of quick turnaround reaction to things, especially in the U.S. change happens so fast, but it doesn't in other parts of the world. I feel like that can get really discouraging for folks to see things struggle to gain adoption or even if things are adopted, they don't bring about the impacts or the changes that were necessarily expected out of a society. Then you have to question what is my role anyway then if creating these things doesn't necessarily drive the change than what does. That can be extremely frustrating. Of course, I can completely understand that. Jordan, do you echo these kinds of experiences in any way? Yes, definitely both of them. I think I have a specific example that might tie both of them together. My big once-equipped moment came last summer. I was meeting with an organization about expansion of our immunization reminders. This was somewhere in Jordan. We had a big meeting and it was me, a nurse. He was also around my age and then a female staff member and then like 10 older men. This was probably a larger organization. This was probably the worst instance of gender barriers I've ever seen. It got to the point where there was a lot of talking over one another and it got to the point where I realized that every single time the nurse tried to talk or the female staff member tried to talk, they would be immediately interrupted. After seeing that go on for like three or four hours. After seeing that go on for about an hour, I realized that it was also happening to me. That was my big once-equipped moment. I had one champion in the room. He was very pro expansion of this program and clearly had somewhere to be. There was a point where he looked at me and just started laughing because it was so absurd. The nurse and I ended up making eye contact and she had the information that I really wanted. She knew how this might fit into the clinic. I guess the way I tackled this was I started asking her very specific questions and then I started not turning my attention away from her when other people began talking over her. There was a point where I did that and one of them started yelling my name and I just said, oh, I'm sorry, I'm listening to this nurse right now. That was the point where I think everybody realized that I thought this was kind of absurd and that ended up working. I don't know if anyone's ever experienced a similar situation to that, but the thing that works for me there was being very blunt and very almost commanding and then focusing on numbers and specific tasks. So sort of sticking to the facts as much as possible. And it worked so that all ended up well, but that was definitely my big once a quit moment. And it's passed. Of course. And I think you naturally rolled into our next question in terms of how to tackle that and what continues to motivate you. This is our carrot and stick here and considering the challenges that you've all experienced out in the field from whatever trigger, what continues to motivate you? Perhaps we can start with Diana this time. Why I didn't really decide to quit back then, I had the point to prove that to the people from home, I just couldn't quit and I had to keep on to the final point. And right now what makes me even want to continue doing what I do is seeing the people smile. You know, you find someone in this state and you help them get something affordable that they couldn't have afforded otherwise looking at what people feel and what our developments are changing out there and raising people's hopes that there's a better to mom like in Kamwingi where I am now. The education department usually takes me out there to go speak to the kids. Hey, the female engineer here has made it to this particular level. You see, you can make it. So, you know, wanting to give someone hope that this can happen. You know, you don't have to give up. It really makes me want to go on. That's really encouraging. How about Heather, what motivates you? Oh, I agree 100% with Diana. I remain skeptically optimistic about the global development sector despite my experiences. But I think a little bit like she's saying, I think it's built into my DNA just to continue to try. I think it would be such a depressing world if at every time you were, you know, tempted to just give up if everyone just did all the time. So, I too feel like, I don't know, I like how she says she has a point to prove. I think there's a little bit of that in me too. I just don't want to work on anything else. These are the types of problems that I want to work on. I'm just realistic about whether or not I or Catapult or whatever organization we're working with will actually be able to solve them. For me, it's more of the process and the continuing to try. That's very important. And I think you raise a good point regarding kind of being grounded around what is really solvable and understanding what you can contribute. But obviously, recognizing the potential to really inspire all of us to really make a difference. Jordan, do you want to speak a little bit about what continues to prevent you from quitting whenever you have those tough moments where you're being talked over? Yeah. I'll maybe speak to like a more practical level. So, when I want to quit and I'm in the field, I think what I normally do is leave the sort of NGO, bureaucratic level, headquarters level, office level environment and go talk to people who might be interacting with my technology or just ask for feedback on different issues and sort of talking to patients and talking to normal people who aren't sort of in the theoretical space around either technology or development and who just wants the solutions or want the end result that we're trying to provide. Doing that I think really provides me with perspective and makes me more optimistic and sort of excited and encouraged. If I'm in the States, I think what I'll do, like right now I'm finishing up my thesis that I want to quit like every five minutes. So, when I do that, I go back and like look at patient interviews and look at the good that's been done so far and look at the feedback we've gotten so far and I feel like that's really encouraging. So, for me definitely like sort of leaving the bureaucratic space and returning to like the practical normal person impacts is really helpful. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense and I think like we resonate with all of our presenters today. So, we're running kind of short on time so I'm going to combine the next two questions. You spoke into some of this already, what has surprised you as a woman working in this field. And I think this actually fits quite nicely with our final question is which is what do you wish you had known when you started. So, perhaps you can combine the two of these in your answer and speak to what do you really feel like you wish you had known when you got started in this field. And I'm going to start with Heather for this particular question. I was just thinking, I hope she doesn't take my question. I'm thinking on you, Heather. Let's see what I wish I had known. And I know you even sent us to think about this is the one that I was thinking, what do I? I don't know how to answer this one. I'm almost glad I knew nothing when I started because most of what I do is about running the business. I think it was good to be naive about how challenging and annoying a lot of the day-to-day tasks are. But in terms of doing actual project work, I don't know how you prepare for something like that. It's like going into the field for the first time. I feel even it's a little bit fortunate having come from my background growing up near the Navajo Reservation, which is so similar to a lot of the countries that Catapult now works in. I feel like that type of context or getting exposure to, I don't know what you would call it, kind of the mindset of poverty or a lot of the barriers that resource-constraining communities face is a good thing to get exposed to before throwing yourself into the global development world. In terms of what has surprised me about being a woman working in this field, going back to the very first question that was asked, I am surprised all the time that we don't get more females applying for jobs within Catapults because I agree 100% with the New York Times article and with the statistics that definitively show that there is greater interest in women in the global development sector than men, or at least they're more proactive about it. I don't know why every time where Catapult's on a panel somewhere, it's still mostly men. It baffles me, but I'm trying to think of something more concrete. If I do, I'll let you know. I'll hand it over to my other colleagues. Thank you so much. And just for the participants, we do know that we're running a little bit over time, but considering some of the technical difficulties that we've experienced, we will extend the webinar by 5 to 10 minutes. So if you can stay with us, please do, but we believe that this is such a rich opportunity to have these three amazing women together that we don't want to cut it short quite yet. So with that, I'm going to pass the baton over to Diana. And Diana, can you speak to what you wish you had known when you started out in this profession? Diana? Uh-oh. What I wish I had known when I just started out. Can you hear me? Yes, you can hear me. Oh, sorry. What I wish I had known when I just started out is when you're out there in the field, I always thought this was a field for the experienced. You must know it for you to get out there. You must have hands on experience for you to do this, to do that. But what I have actually come to realize is situations are different, and they always call for different solutions, some of which have never existed before. And when I was starting out, I was very scared, I was very timid, I made so many mistakes just because I always felt, you know, you have to have known how to do this for you to do it. But if I had known that, you know, you don't have to know, you just have to be open-minded and apply what you've learned, then things would be easy. I didn't really, I was very scared just because I had an experience and I was just starting out. What still surprises me is the way the male genders still can't get hold of the fact that a woman can be as good or even better in this. I still can't understand why it's taking so long for some people. Okay, in the urban areas, it has sunk in quite well, and the male gen appreciates, but down in the villages where I'm currently serving, it's still a myth. Women are still not looked at as people that can really be engineers, but with time, I believe they are starting to see that it's something that can happen, looking at them out there and doing something. Absolutely, it's great to have that example from you. So how about Jordan? Jordan, do you have any story to share on what you wish you had known? Yeah, I feel very similarly to Diana, I think. What I wish I had known when I first started out is that this work is still messy, a lot of the time. I have a very similar, I guess, sort of desire to know what I'm getting into and to feel like I know something before I start working on it. And I guess what I wish I had known when I started out is that nobody really knows what the product is going to end up looking like or nobody has the entire skill set that they're going to need for doing this sort of work before they start out and that a lot of it is learned as you go and that for product design and for technology implementation, I think that's really a good thing and it forces you to ask more questions. As to the other question for women in this space, I think kind of what I spoke to earlier, I think I wish there were more focus or I guess more advertisement of the advantages of being a woman and working in engineering for global development. Just some quick examples. I remember being at a technology presentation from Maternal Health Technologies and there was an all-male design team who had a device, they were presenting a device for resolving obstructed labor and when they went up and showed their technology, every woman in the room physically cringed back into their seats. It was very obvious that nobody had brought this design to somebody who might be in labor and who might need to use it at some point. It was just like a very physically intimidating, very scary looking device and so I think almost having a soft perspective on things like that can be very helpful and again I just want to reiterate having access to a whole half of the population who might be more open and speaking to you and giving you feedback and being honest with you about the challenges they face is very useful. I would like to see women probably advertise these advantages more when they're applying to jobs or thinking about careers in this field. It's definitely an advantage, it helps them and it can help their organizations as well. Jordan, as always, you seem to have rolled naturally into the final question in terms of how we encourage and support more women in this space and I really appreciate the fact that you're noting how important it is to highlight the advantages of being a practicing female in engineering for global development. So I'm going to quickly roll to Diana for her thoughts on how we encourage to support more women in this space and then Heather and then we'll take a participant question. So Diana? I think we can do this by, for example, as Jordan mentioned if you're designing a facility for women in labor, I mean the best person to design something is someone that is actually that has a feel of what they want it to be like. So Diana? If you want something done, you know, have them. Can you hear me? There we go. Now you're back. It was a little choppy. Please continue. Sorry. So I was saying if we could let all the women out there know that if you want something and if you want your ideas taken up then you have to be involved. You must, you know, do something about it. If you want a very good labor suit that caters for all your needs you have to be one of the engineers that is participating in the design. So if you can do that, I believe. Okay. Thank you so much, Diana. That's very, very encouraging and I agree with you entirely. Heather, do you want to give us your final thoughts on this? Yeah, I'm glad Diana brought that up. One thing that I was hoping would come up in this webinar is the fact that the majority of products that are being designed for base of the pyramid type markets are being bought or consumed by women and yet we still have, like in the U.S., majority males designing these products. I think there's a dire need for more women in the space to be designing products for other women. And as to how you do that and how you encourage that, I think there could be, we need better representation on some of the people who are profiled in the industry making sure that we can show that there are a lot of women in this field and that there's lots of opportunities for women in this field and even exposing this type of career choice to girls earlier on. Like back when I lived in the Bay Area, I used to volunteer with this group called TechBridge. It was kind of a STEM education program for middle school girls. And that's about the time when people are learning what an engineer is and I think when a lot of young girls think about engineers, they don't think about global development or helping people. They think about, I don't know, gears or computers or something like that. But as the engineers' role in global development hopefully becomes more prominent in the next few years, I hope that will appeal to girls at a younger age and give them something to aspire to and not just discover further on down their career or once they're in college. Absolutely. That is such a good point. So we'll take our final question from our participant because we are close to time. And this is a nice long question and kind of a story of the participant's personal experience. So the question to all of you is, how do you balance your personal life in your career? I'm lucky enough to have found design engineering jobs and global development, but abroad. Before, in India, now in Cambodia, for a total of four years, this participant is originally from the US. As she gets closer to the age of 30, she's becoming more concerned about dating. Apparently, eligible men are hard to find at now 10. She enjoys living abroad, working on the ground is the best way to get understanding of the consumer. But how do you maintain a career in this field? We're also trying to start a family. So why don't we start with Jordan on this one and then the rest of the panelists. Wow, yeah. I'm not sure I have the best perspective on this case. I mean, as a student, I don't really have a lot of balance right now and I'm definitely not quite to that stage in my life. But I think for me, a lot of it involves combining responsibilities as much as possible and sort of planning I guess in advance the sort of both career and life priorities I have and planning a timeline in advance. So that's kind of what I'm working around right now. I think maybe the other participants might have more perspective. That sounds like a very project management approach, just a comment on that. Yeah, project management. Yeah, it's a very engineering approach to the question. How about Diana? Diana, I know you're engaged to a very handsome Jordan. Could you speak a little bit about this work-like balance? I have work. It's really difficult. I just have to plan. I usually have very stringent plans. I know I must wake up at five. I have to do this in this hour. I have to do this in the next hour. I have to do this. I must do that. So as Jordan said, it's based on planning and knowing well advance what I have to do then and now and next. It's very challenging. I must admit. I'm sure. I'm sure it's not without its significant challenges. And finally, Heather, do you want to tell us about, how do you maintain that balance? I can tell you that it's not just a female problem. There are several males on our team who struggle with the same thing. We travel so often that it's hard to keep up friendships or you meet somebody and you're interested in a relationship, but you're gone all the time. And long-distance relationships only get you so far. But yes, I can definitely say that it's not just a female problem. It's a male and a female problem or anyone who's working in global development who has to travel extensively. I've definitely seen couples who have met in the field or you know what I think sometimes works or what I've seen just based on friends is, if you find somebody else who's also in global development and may be interested in being in the same part of the world as you are for a very extended period of time, which I know is such a long shot so it's kind of crappy input. But I can also say just from my own perspective, I came in, when I started Catapult or when we all started Catapult, I was already in a relationship so I didn't have that issue. Mine came later when we were interested in having a child and Yana knows that I'm like nine mixed away now for my delivery date. So we've somehow made it work but like the other panelists have mentioned, it's definitely required. I know they say there's no way you can plan for a child, but just in terms of logistics and how I'm going to go and leave from the organization and what that means for the projects that I'm on and the travel that I'd already signed up for, it was a big headache to move all of that stuff around to make way for a baby coming into my life. And I've seen some of the other women in our team go through that too. So it's definitely not easy to be in global development and to manage a family, to manage relationships and friendships. It sounds like it requires a lot of good planning. Perhaps this is where you start using your project management tools. Start making those flow charts. I suppose if anybody out there is inspired to develop an app for matchmaking global development professionals and helping them coordinate the same country to be in at the same time, I think this is a great opportunity as we've heard there's obviously a need. So with that, I want to thank you for presenting, for sharing your honest perspectives and really practical tips on what it takes for women who are professionals in engineering and global development. We truly appreciate the time. Thank you, Heather, Diana, and Jordan. And thank you to all of the participants for attending the webinar. For those of you who are just in and receiving your professional development hours, please follow the instructions on our page and use the code that is noted on the slide. I'm sorry we didn't get to tackle all of the questions that you had today, but please feel free to follow up with us and we'll try to make sure that we get all the answers to you. And don't forget to become a new First Team Member so we can tell you about our future webinars and share these amazing opportunities with you. Thank you, everyone. Have a great day, evening, afternoon, wherever you may be, and we will catch you in a month on the next webinar. Take care.