CULTURE
REDEFINING A LOOK AT WOMEN CLAIMING THEIR ROLES AS LEADERS
BY ROSEMARY JONES
A
ll eyes are on Kamala Harris as she begins her first term as Vice President— the first woman to ever do so. Female students at Messiah have been both inspired and empowered to see Harris— and other women—step into new positions of leadership this year. They, too, are making great strides with hopes to bring about change in the world that lays before them. According to BestColleges, women made up only 21% of bachelor engineering graduates. Even so, the past many years have shown a notable increase in women joining the classically male-dominated field. Amongst these women is sophomore Ruth Galyen who is looking to enter the civil engineering field after she graduates. Galyen shares that even in this last year, she has seen the number of women in her field increasing; however, the engineering field still has a lot of room to grow. “I think I want to see more feminine language be common in engineering… since the default is ‘oh, this is a masculine thing’ and a woman is an exception,” Galyen said. “You know,
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engineers are seen as very messy and kind of the stereotypical masculine traits so to kind of redefine what an engineer can be and to highlight some of the stereotypical feminine qualities that engineers have like their creativity, their attention to detail, all of these things— redefining that would be really cool.” As the daughter of missionaries, Galyen lived in multiple places growing up and saw how infrastructure drastically impacts a community both positively and negatively. This instilled in her a desire to act. “I lived in the States my junior year of high school and I was so frustrated because there’s no public transportation, and the city isn’t made for pedestrians so if you don’t have a car—if you can’t afford a car— then you can’t really get a job or do anything and it looked very unfair to me,” Galyen said. “So I think in terms of my faith and my calling, it’s kind of putting together the things that I’m naturally good at and the need that I see in the world that I think God wants me to help with.”
Jenna Walter is a junior biology major with a biomedical concentration. She then plans on entering medical school and working abroad, focusing on women’s health in a missions capacity. “I think that God’s heart is very clear that He uses women, He empowers women, His kingdom is advanced through women just as much as it is through men,” Walter said. “I just think that sometimes it takes a woman’s perspective to understand how to help women better in healthcare.”
“I think that God’s heart is very clear that He uses women, He empowers women..."