The Glass Ceiling

Women in male dominated fields such as engineering have been prominently outnumbered in the past, creating a glass ceiling above them that prevents them from reaching their fullest potential. In this blog post, I will be comparing my experiences as an aspiring female engineer to Kate Chopin's short story, Story of an Hour.

This is me receiving my certificate at the end of my aerospace engineering course at the University of Toronto.

Growing up, I had always seen the field of Engineering as a man’s world. However, once I gained the courage to take a small step into the field myself, I found many inspiring women.

In Story of an Hour by Kate Chopin, the female protagonist, Mrs. Mallard, feels constrained by her husband, as well as society’s expectations of women. Then, upon hearing the news of her husband’s death, she suddenly feels a newfound sense of freedom. But she is crushed when she finds out that there was a miscommunication of said news. Her husband is surprisingly alive, and she ironically dies of heart disease upon hearing this news.

In my life, I experienced a similar epiphany to Mrs. Mallard’s. As I was raised with Barbie dolls, princesses, the colour pink, and anything you’d think a 5-year-old girl would own, I felt pressured to act a certain way or become a certain type of person according to society’s expectations of young girls. It seemed like there was a glass ceiling over my head, preventing me from becoming who I wanted to be, and forcing me to become the person I should be. After inciting my interest in science and math, I began considering my career options, which included engineering, one of the most male dominated professions. I found many inspiring women in engineering online, and found several role models, such as Lauren Howe, that I could look up to, and for the first time I had a quiet, yet powerful thought: “what if I can become an engineer…?” It was this small whisper in the back of my head that brought me closer to breaking the glass ceiling above me.

In comparison to Story of an Hour, the glass ceiling for me was Mrs. Mallard’s husband who prevented her from becoming the person she truly wants to be and kept her from reaching her full potential as a member of society. My glass ceiling and Mrs. Mallard’s husband are metaphors for society’s stereotypical expectations of women.

The time I felt the glass ceiling most prominently was when I attended DEEP at the University of Toronto during the summer of 2017. I was the only girl in my aerospace engineering class and it made me feel restrained, like I wasn’t as smart as everyone else in the room because there was something obviously different about me; I was the only girl. I frequently thought:“I don’t belong here”. I had seen many blogs and posts in the media about empowering women in STEM who have been through similar experiences. After seeing so many of these amazing women, I was brought to believe that there may be hope for the gender gap in engineering, but quickly realized that this was false. The irony was that I knew that engineering was the right career for me, and I loved it. I just didn’t love the gender gap as much. This experience is similar to the irony that Mrs. Mallard is faced with when she realizes that her husband is alive, and she won’t have the freedom that she had been dreaming about. The only difference is that instead of the realization that my husband is alive, it was the realization that the gender gap is still a prominent issue in the field of my dream career. However, unlike Mrs. Mallard, I still have time to shatter my glass ceiling: the stereotypes that limit my potential as a woman in engineering. In the present day, the gender gap is decreasing and there is hope for equality someday.

Although my epiphany wasn’t as sudden as Mrs. Mallard’s in Story of an Hour, we both had similar revelations in terms of what we had realized: the only thing restricting us, as women, from achieving whatever we want to achieve is ourselves. We think that we have to live up to a certain expectation according to what society says in the media, but in reality we can do whatever we dream of doing as long as we ignore the opinions of others.