Breakfast at the American Physical Society: Gleiter meets with grad students.

The Global Institute for Technology and Engineering (GIFTE, www.gifte.org) is not a traditional membership organization. It’s a group of energetic, successful technical women who are willing to pay their own way to travel all over North America and beyond, inspiring girls and young women to aim for technical success.

GIFTE is officially a nonprofit, educational public service organization dedicated to elevating the status of women in the technology and engineering workforce. The organization works in a variety of ways: it arranges events like paper airplane technology demos for middle-school girls, career-day discussions for high-school students, and seminars, tutorials and heart-to-heart talks with college women and young professionals. The idea is always “to support girls and women learning about our profession, and let them know what fun it is and how great it is!” says co-founder Roberta Gleiter.

Explaining GIFTE
The organization began early in 2001. It was the idea of ChE Gleiter, now CEO of GIFTE, and co-founder Felicita Saiez who serves as president. In her salaried job, Gleiter is a program manager with the Aerospace Corp (El Segundo, CA). Saiez heads her own engineering management consulting firm, LICI, Inc. The board of directors also includes CFO Alexis Schroeder, a mathematician and an entrepreneur with her own accounting firm.

“We felt very strongly that our organization would be giving a gift to both students and professionals by reaching out and helping them. So we thought GIFTE was a very appropriate name,” says Gleiter.

The women who make up the GIFTE group had, of course, been inspiring and mentoring girls and young women right along. GIFTE would give them the opportunity to do it more formally and more intensively, and allow them to recruit other successful technical women to join the crusade.

“We do our own programs and also support other organizations,” says Gleiter. “We just opened our doors last spring, and we’ve already touched more than a thousand high school students, 500 college students and 400 professional women.”

At a science fair, GIFTE volunteer Captain LaDonna Harris of the U.S. Air Force uses paper gliders to explain aerodynamics.

Assignments but no meetings
“When I was national president of SWE in 1999,” Gleiter recalls, “I was going across the country just as I do now, visiting with the deans of engineering schools and giving speeches and meeting with students. I ran into a number of technical women who liked my work and were willing to help.”

The group action concept was very appealing to them. “Just tell me what you need and where to come and I’ll be there – but I don’t want to join another organization and feel guilty about not going to meetings,” they told her.

The result was GIFTE, an organization “with assignments but no meetings,” Gleiter explains. “We have a database of 100 to 150 volunteers who are happy to help when we’re doing something near them, and some even take the time to travel for us. Most technical women who are at all interested in this missionary area are passionate about it!”

Where GIFTE works
Up to now, GIFTE has done its work “pretty much by invitation,” Gleiter explains. “We are well respected in our professions. Many different people know our board members and are aware of our intense desire to communicate with young people as well as professionals about being successful technical women. In some cases the group that invites us makes the arrangements and we create our presentations, come in and provide volunteers.”

In the group’s inaugural year, GIFTE volunteers have:

• talked to middle-school girls and boys about careers in science, math and technology at the request of the San Fernando Valley, CA chapter of the American Association of University Women (AAUW).

• provided judges for the FIRST Robotics Competition for high school students held in Orlando, FL.

• fielded a panel of six distinguished women for the fifty-country International Conference of Women Engineers & Scientists (ICWES 12), held in Ottawa, Canada. In a packed conference room, the GIFTE panel discussed breaking barriers and opening doors to opportunities. Enthralled delegates from South Africa asked GIFTE to be part of their civil engineering conference in 2003.

• given the keynote speech at the March 2002 annual conference of the American Physical Society in Indianapolis, IN. GIFTE addressed grad students and professionals, talking about “who will do the science of tomorrow?”

• helped present a course for high-potential young women at the Ecole Polytechnic Feminique, an international institute of women in engineering based in France.

• joined a Women’s Leadership Institute conference sponsored by the Department of Labor Women’s Bureau, and held at Mills College (Oakland, CA.)

• signed a memo of understanding with the Junior Engineering Technical Society (JETS). A GIFTE board member will join JETS to spearhead a national engineering design challenge for high school kids next year, and the group is already gathering volunteers in different parts of the country to support the contest.

Grant writing
“So far our volunteers have usually paid their own way,” says Gleiter. “But it’s my belief that they do enough by giving their time, without having to pay for it as well.” That’s why Gleiter and several other GIFTE regulars are studying grant writing. A few companies have already contributed to the cause; Chevron is prime among them.

“In the future we would like to offer a broader perspective and broader base, and with the proper kinds of grants we can do that,” says Gleiter.

Gleiter mixing with contestants and other judges at the FIRST Robotics Competition.

Out of the Dark Ages?
Roberta Gleiter, the quintessential woman in technology, graduated from Purdue University at a time when perhaps one-tenth of 1 percent of U.S. engineers were women. “God bless Purdue!” says Gleiter. “It’s a land-grant university and they cannot refuse you if you have the qualifications.”

One of Gleiter’s first professors welcomed her by saying, “I’m going to fail you. You’re taking up the place where a man should be sitting.”

“I’m not a confrontational person, but you better believe I passed that class!” says Gleiter.

“The awful thing is, while it’s not so overt, that kind of thing still takes place! People still tell us the same story of professors resenting and rejecting women in their classes.”

And after they graduate? “Of course I see progress from when I started, but it can still be difficult for technical women.”

And this is where GIFTE comes in. “It’s our mission to help girls understand how wonderful it is, and to help technical women realize that ‘Yes, you can do it, and don’t worry about issues that come up because we all face them.’”

GIFTE, Gleiter concludes, “envisions a future where the global crisis caused by a lack of technologists is solved, because many of the jobs are filled by women.”

D/C

– Pru Peterson is a freelance industrial writer and D/C’s copy editor. She’s based in Millington, NJ.