"Discovery" Wins its First Award

A few years ago, my daughter came home from a school trip to a major airline manufacturing facility. She declared that she wanted to be an aerospace engineer. Understandably, my wife and I were thrilled. What kid knows what they want to do in life? Most adults haven't even figured it out yet.

I started to dig in, trying to find out what kind of opportunities this field would present to her.
I found lots of Engineering Groups. I also found Women's Engineering groups. I began to wonder why women needed their own groups. After all, in this day and age, it couldn't be that women were really still held down in STEM fields. Could it?

Stop laughing.

Of course they can. There are a variety of reasons... some even make sense, but it still adds up to a very unlevel playing field, with women on the low end by a wide margin. So, I started digging a bit deeper.

 I spoke to some engineers of many different disciplines, both males and females. What I found was that while there isn't really institutionalized bias against women, there are still many men and women in this and other fields that think that girls, (and this begins in middle school), just can't keep up with boys in math and science.

Go back and read that sentence again. I'll wait.

Right?  I was, shall we say, a bit miffed at that idea.

So, I started writing a script. That script eventually turned into "Discovery". It's a story about how the young women on a University Engineering team are viewed by those in power, even after they come up with the solution that saves the day!


"Discovery" has been completed and is now making the rounds of film festivals. Got our first award today. Very excited.

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