Caroline Baillie draws on her multi-disciplined career to orchestrate changes in a traditionally male-dominated industry.
FOR Caroline Baillie, engineering is not about building physical bridges but bridging the gap between engineering and social justice.
Last year, Dr Baillie’s work in engineering education brought her to Western Australia, where she is knocking down the barriers to engineering’s global application and giving it social meaning for students.
But defining her by discipline is difficult – she is a self-proclaimed ‘mixed personality’ and the lines between her multiple job titles are blurred.
She founded a theatre company in London in the 1990s, started international not-for-profit organisation Waste For Life – funded in part by the United Nations – continues her research into materials engineering, and worked in her specialised role as ‘chief of engineering education’ in Canada before moving to Perth to take up that position at the University of Western Australia.
“My thesis is that problems in the world don’t know disciplinary boundaries so I can’t be framed in one if I am really going to have an impact,” Dr Baillie says of her broad repertoire.
It was her experience as an engineering graduate working in public relations in London that pushed her into following a career that upheld her values.
“I went in to public relations because I thought it had something to do with people; then I found myself being asked to represent a company that had been sued for covering up the results for testing on asbestos dust,” Dr Baillie says.
“It was the first time I thought, ‘no, I am not going to use my engineering knowledge to do something unethical’, so I resigned. It was the first moment I thought, I have control over my life and I can live by my values.”
Since then, her social conscience has become one of the driving forces in Dr Baillie’s career.
While undertaking research on materials engineering in a shantytown suburb built on a rubbish tip in Cairo, Dr Baillie was intrigued by the entrepreneurial nature she had seen in its 25,000 residents, many who processed waste to make money.
Building on that interest, several years later she started Waste For Life with the help of a colleague and the pro-bono support of universities in Italy, Canada, Australia and the US.
“I thought maybe with the potential those people have for collecting this rubbish they could start a business, adding to that my experience with composite materials,” Dr Baillie says.
The organisation now operates in Lesotho in Africa, where cooperatives of women are using the waste materials from their production of aloe gel to make ceiling tiles – extending their profitability and skills.
“We are turning these women who are used to making slippers and face cream into engineers to make building products,” Dr Baillie told WA Business News.
Attracting females to engineering has become another of Dr Baillie’s focuses and is a passion she identified in the early days of her teaching career.
“I began lecturing in engineering, despairing that my students weren’t learning anything. In Sydney I was the first female lecturer in mechanical engineering and I looked at my class of 180 students and I couldn’t see a single female,” she says.
That was the catalyst for Dr Baillie’s thesis, in which she focused on gender inclusivity in engineering.
“I was asking the question, ‘why are there not any women in my class’, but my real concern was ‘why should there be?’” she says of her worries for a course she saw as disengaged from society.
“There are still quite large pockets of mind-numbingly boring things happening in the classroom, completely disassociated from anyone’s life.”
Dr Baillie says engineering’s lack of social and environmental links, coupled with the propensity for young women to seek careers that involve a ‘people connection’ has led to a disproportionate gender representation in engineering.
“With engineering, females don’t see the link to society, of course it is there, but they don’t see the link,” Dr Baillie says.
To thwart engineering’s male-dominated classes, Dr Baillie has introduced subjects such as social justice and engineering to attract the more socially attuned young women.
“The evidence is women in engineering tend to go towards the subjects that involve social or environmental impact,” she says.
And Dr Baillie has distinct outcomes set for gender balanced classes.
“If you have a balanced class one imagines you will have a class that will solve the problems, critique them, understand the impact on society and put them in to practice; but we don’t have a balanced world at the moment and I want to see that.”