The Worse, the Better

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How do we make engineering school even worse for women?

More sexist professors, no women in leadership positions at the university, and in general, women should all speak up less. On top of that, female students should always be smiling, prefer working with pink tools, and automatically get the secretary role in every group project.

These ideas went up on the board during a workshop led in spring 2022 by Sandra Furnbach Clavijo of Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey. The task: come up with as many ways as possible to make studying engineering even harder for women. In under 25 minutes, the group had 48. Then came the flip: each bad idea turned into its opposite, and out of the list of absurdities, very real solutions began to emerge. So real that the university put some of them into practice that same year.

That is how reverse brainstorming works. Instead of asking “how do we fix this?”, we ask “how do we really break it?”.

Why does it work? To be disarmingly honest: breaking things is easier than fixing them (well, that is human nature). We can rack our brains for weeks over a good solution, while an idea for ruining everything pops into our heads in the blink of an eye.

So I have prepared a small warm-up exercise: The Worse, the Better. Pick a problem that bugs you, come up with a few ways to make it even worse, and flip them one by one. You will see how much good can grow out of something really bad.

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Sources
S. Furnbach Clavijo, How to Make Engineering Programs Worse for Women: A Reverse Brainstorming Session with SWE Students, 2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition. Try it here: The Worse, the Better.