It may be impossible for such opposing voices of conscience to remain in fellowship.
Solving the riddle will take something like the Pentecost inbreaking of the Spirit that enabled understanding across a babble of languages. Yet I pray that instead of emulating our culture’s fragmentation into an individualistic affiliation only with our own kind, we contribute our individual voices to a divine project larger than any of us alone can build.
How to Attract Female Engineers
In the fall of 2014, U.C. Berkeley began offering a new Ph.D. minor in development engineering for students doing thesis work on solutions for low-income communities. Half of the students enrolled in the inaugural class are women. They are designing affordable solutions for clean drinking water, inventing medical diagnostic equipment for neglected tropical diseases and enabling local manufacturing in poor and remote regions.
Women seem to be drawn to engineering projects that attempt to achieve societal good.
.. At the interdisciplinary D-Lab at M.I.T., which focuses on developing “technologies that improve the lives of people living in poverty,” 74 percent of over 230 enrolled students this past year were women. This makes the D-Lab one of the few engineering initiatives in the country that has a severalfold higher enrollment of women than men.
.. At Princeton, the student chapter of Engineers Without Borders has an executive board that is nearly 70 percent female, reflecting the overall club composition. Seventy percent of the university’s student-run Sustainable Engineering and Development Scholars program is also female.
.. What does all this show? It shows that the key to increasing the number of female engineers may not just be mentorship programs or child care centers, although those are important. It may be about reframing the goals of engineering research and curriculums to be more relevant to societal needs.
Google: Sergey’s Affair & Eric’s High Living
A year later, Wojcicki gave birth to their first child just as Google executives started enjoying life as some of the richest people in the world. Schmidt was a pilot, and, according to the friend, he encouraged other Google executives to indulge their desires for yachts and planes.
.. Schmidt’s wife, Wendy, however, retreated to their compound on Nantucket and didn’t often make the Google social scene. Schmidt, now 58, was sometimes accompanied by younger women, one of whom briefly worked at Google.
Smart Girls vs. Bombs
As I see it, after 9/11, we systematically overused military tools and underemployed two other kinds of tools — education and women’s empowerment. These work agonizingly slowly, but over time they help change societies.
.. Education is also a bargain. For the cost of deploying a single American soldier abroad for a year, we can start more than 20 schools.
.. So instead of pummeling each other on foreign policy, let’s look for lessons learned. Surely one of them is that to counter terrorists, sometimes a girl with a book is more powerful than a drone in the sky.