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EDN Europe's Editor Graham Prophet posts a selection of comments and insights prompted by the many items of industry news and rumour that cross the editorial desk or are gathered on his frequent travels to interviews, press conferences and events around Europe - and further afield - and somehow never find their way to the magazine or the web site, recovering some of the information otherwise lost in the noise level...

Wednesday, May 26, 2010

"The pleasure of finding things out"**

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Why are there not more women in engineering? The question comes up time and time again, and so do many of the same answers. But I witnessed a little scenario the other day that, I think, may illustrate one small part of the reason.
The scene; a country park on a sunny weekend day. There are many families out for the day; overflow car parking is in operation using a field that that other times contains farm livestock.
As part of its farming role, the field has in it a large open tank to provide the livestock with drinking water. It has a water feed pipe, and a float valve to maintain a constant level.
A small boy is investigating this arrangement, engrossed in experimenting with the float valve and observing the results. Not misbehaving, not being destructive, just exercising the age-old curiosity of small boys everywhere to find out how things are put together, and how they work. Apply this much pressure to the valve; water is released, level stays constant all by itself...
For a few moments, all is calm. Into this tableau, a small girl enters: presumably, though we don’t know, the sister of the small boy. She joins her brother in his mission of discovery.
Instantly, there is an anguished parental shriek, “Come away from there, take your hands out of that!”
The family day out continues; with the matter of whose role it is to be curious about how things work, having been re-asserted.

**This quotation is of course the title of an inspirational book by the late Richard Feynman

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