Girls tackle engineering challenge at Santa Rosa’ Keysight Technologies

Caroline Huang and her four teammates had a breakthrough moment during an all-girl engineering competition Saturday at Keysight Technologies, the world’s largest electronics measurement company.

“Our circuit board did not work for the longest time,” she said. “It just started working.”

Huang, 13, a seventh grader at Rincon Valley Middle School, was one of nearly 100 participants in the 17th edition of the Introduce a Girl to Engineering Day sponsored by Keysight at the company’s global headquarters in Fountaingrove.

The event was a competition in which teams of four to five girls in grades six through 12, strangers to start with, collaborated in building a bare-bones radio and exchanging Morse coded messages with another team and ultimately giving a judge the correct answer to a question.

Huang’s dad, Shusen, is an electrical engineer at Keysight, and it was her second year at the event.

“I find it interesting for girls to get together and learn about engineering,” she said. “It’s pretty cool.”

Keysight has sponsored the event since 2004 in an effort to channel more girls into engineering, a profession with a major gender imbalance: Only 13% of engineers are women, the Society of Women Engineers says, noting that they earn 10% less than their male colleagues.

The field is opening up, but women’s numbers are “still too low,” said Julie Silk, a Keysight engineer who volunteered at the event.

The annual events are open to young girls, she said, with middle school a crucial time for them to aim for engineering careers because that’s when algebra and advanced science courses become available.

Huang said that’s a possible path for her, but rejected the idea that she’s a nerd.

“I don’t put everything into studying,” she said.

Art, tennis and swimming are among her other interests.

Keira Sheldon, 15, is taking an introductory engineering course as a 10th grader at Sonoma Valley High School and considering a science major in college, likely in engineering or medicine.

“I think women add a lot to engineering,” she said. “Men and women think differently; they have cognitive differences. The two genders would complement each other.”

Nick Brennan, a Keysight hardware design engineer who coached Sheldon’s team, said he couldn’t agree more.

“Men and women have different ways of looking at things,” he said. “Their brain chemistry is different, and that’s good.”

Brennan, who received a master’s degree in electrical engineering from Texas A&M in 2014, said engineering has a “pipeline problem,” with too few women making it through high school and college engineering studies, becoming licensed engineers and remaining in the profession.

The Society of Women Engineers says more than 32% of women switch out of science, technology, engineering and mathematics degree programs in college, only 30% of women earning bachelor’s degrees in engineering are still in the field 20 years later and 30% of those who have left the profession cite the “organizational climate” as the reason.

“That has to change,” said Vandana Wylde, a Keysight engineer and signal integrity application specialist. “Someone has to take a chance and believe in them, help them get through engineering school, because I see such amazing potential in the girls here.”

Meanwhile, the teams of girls working at tables in Keysight’s spacious cafeteria coped with their radio-building chores.

“They’ve had some technical difficulties, which is expected,” Silk said. “Some of the troubleshooting has been pretty difficult, even for our guys.”

You can reach Staff Writer Guy Kovner at 707-521-5457 or guy.kovner@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @guykovner.