Gloves
There’s something undeniably strange about late-night car rides. The intimate air between the driver and passenger seats seems to catalyze the most philosophical of conversations within us, the silence a sort of spell that dissolves any chitchat echoing through the day.
In the evenings, my sister and I would endlessly talk as we cruised through the concrete chaos of Bangkok. It was my favorite part of the day, and probably my sister’s too because she always drove the long way home. In our conversations, we addressed the flaws of Thai traditions, questioned each other’s existence, and debated almost everything from determinism to pineapples on pizza.
In one of our favorite conversations, we discussed the role of engineers and activists in our society.
When people think of engineers and activists, they usually picture two vastly different things. One wears geeky lab goggles while fiddling with some cold machinery, and the other parades down the street with a witty protest sign held high. But as our conversation progressed, I learned that engineering and activism share a breathtaking intersectional ground: an overlooked philosophical overlap that nestles the capacity to shape a fairer and more inclusive future.
Engineers throughout time have collaboratively formulated our world, but what most don’t realize is that engineers don’t merely design products — they also design social constructs, norms, and stereotypes that accompany them.
Even as my sister and I were reflecting on these ideas together, we didn’t realize that one of us was 73% more likely to die than the other.
Women are 73% more likely to die in a car crash than men because, for over 30 years, only dummies based on the average man were used in crash tests. The male engineers who dominated the field seldom realized that people different from them would be driving the car too. In another engineering flaw, medical diagnostic algorithms are notoriously biased against black patients. Many types of gym equipment are unsafe for transgender bodies. Some security systems won’t allow hijab-wearers through.
In a world engineered for and by the privileged, such byproducts endemic in seemingly innocent inventions have spawned a blueprint of society that categorizes people into rigid molds and discards marginalized communities.
The egalitarian innovation we must aspire towards is one that doesn’t cut corners and inputs everyone as equals in the equation of engineering. If attitudes surrounding racism, heteronormativity, climate change, and disabilities were to shift, present innovators must proactively reconfigure our cultural machinery to reflect this progression. The past one-size-fits-all solutions erase the nuances of a modern, global community and perpetuate archaically detrimental norms.
The conversation I had with my sister taught me exactly why it is important that I learn to be both an engineer and an activist. If we leave innovation to a single pair of hands, we will end up with gloves that simply don’t fit all the other hands.