2024 in Review: Lueders explains why diversity is important in engineering

MCALLEN, Texas – Kathryn Lueders, SpaceX’s general manager of Starbase at Boca Chica, was asked about the importance of women in STEM at a seminar hosted jointing by UT-Rio Grande Valley and the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas.

The question came from Dr. Ala Qubbaj, dean of engineering and computer science at UT-Rio Grande Valley.

“When I came here (UTRGV) in ’99 we had very few women in engineering. Now, I’m glad we have 1,000 out of 5,000 (engineering students),” said Qubbaj, to a round of applause.

“So, I’m proud of your background, because I know you are the first woman to lead human space flight at NASA. So, where do you see the status of women and girls’ participation in the space industry, being a woman yourself and a role model for them.”

Lueders responded:

“We still have a lot of work to do. But if you look at a lot of the engineering schools and populations… I work with a bunch of different engineering schools and programs… when you look at the populations… if you look at chemical engineering, for example, some schools are majority female right now. So, across the board, in STEM education, we actually need to start thinking about boys.”

 The UTRGV/Dallas Fed seminar was titled, “Vistas from Texas.” It was held at UTRGV’s corporate headquarters inside the Rio Bank HQ in McAllen in October.

STEM stands for science, technology, engineering, and math.

“It’s kind of interesting… when you start looking in some areas, it’s like we’ve continued to focus on girls and keeping girls in (STEM). But it’s actually, like, we’ve got to keep looking at all the populations,” Lueders said.

“How do we keep people in engineering fields? Because engineering, to me, engineering, math, science, is our future. It’s about learning how the world works. You can’t change the world if you don’t know how it works. And we know we have problems out here that we’ve got to change and fix for us to continue to live and thrive as a species, right?

“So, we need those kiddos to be wanting to do math and science.”

Lueders said it is important for companies to have mentorship programs.

“Having people even see that there’s a female in a particular job is really, really important, because I do think that aerospace companies still are very male-centric, and it’s just tougher to go into a workforce when there’s not somebody that looks like you.”

Lueders said SpaceX is agnostic because it wants the best engineers, no matter what the gender.

“But when that engineer is a female, or any other group that maybe feels like there’s not a lot of them around, we want to make sure that we don’t lose them because they don’t feel part of the crowd. I think that’s really our big issue.”

Lueders continued:

“So, I tell people, we’re not done. We’re not done yet. We’ve got to still figure out, what are the blockages. I told somebody, I think we need to make every single student actually go through a woodworking or mechanics class. Like make it mandatory in sixth grade.”

Lueders said she still feels there’s an issue with girls getting hands on experience and mechanical experience in different areas, and then being able to apply that and use that in different areas. 

“I love it when I see a female welder at the site. Super cool. The other day, I thought it was really weird, we had a female ditch digger. And I was like, this is the coolest thing ever,” Lueders said.

“I talked to her, and she’s building herself up to gain construction experience working with a construction company. I don’t see a lot of those in that area. So, I do think we’ve got to keep looking and making sure that we’ve got a diversified population.”

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