What motivates men to support, promote, and advocate for women who pursue STEM careers, regardless of society’s ever-shifting views on gender roles?
The reasons are as diverse as the men’s backgrounds and personal histories, from which they develop a deeper understanding of equality, fairness, and the power of win-win solutions.
For Kevin J. Edwards, vice president and general manager of supplier quality and expediting and supplier engagement for Bechtel Corp., the driving force was his late mother, Betty Ann Edwards, who raised him and his two siblings as a single mother. Edwards says her “superpower” was to be a mother while doing the best she could to fill the missing role of a father. While raising her family, she worked as a health coordinator at a state-run mental health and psychiatric hospital. “I recognized the struggle she had building her career,” Edwards says. “She was committed to her family while also delivering excellence in everything she did.”
“I listened to women globally to understand their challenges, advocated to leadership why we needed programs and goals to advance women in leadership, provided women opportunities to demonstrate their excellence at conferences and workshops, and, at times, helped women engineers inspire younger women to become engineers.”
— Kevin J. Edwards
Edwards, a Red Bank, New Jersey, native, worked as Bechtel’s chief diversity and inclusion officer for five years (2018 to 2023) during his 25-year career at the global engineering firm. The role allowed him to have a greater impact as an ally because he became a role model for his organization and was able to build a larger community of allyship. “I could set up programs that would encourage other allies to join in with good intentions,” he says. “I listened to women globally to understand their challenges, advocated to leadership why we needed programs and goals to advance women in leadership, provided women opportunities to demonstrate their excellence at conferences and workshops, and, at times, helped women engineers inspire younger women to become engineers.”
Edwards worked for 12 years in industry before joining Bechtel, making for a 37-year career.
He observed firsthand the challenges women face in building their confidence, getting a key role or assignment, and gaining acceptance from their male peers as an engineering expert and leader. He says the key hurdle women he worked with faced was acceptance.
Edwards believes in reaching out to precollegiate and collegiate students and participates in the Society of Women Engineers’ SWENext program. He serves on the Rutgers University School of Engineering industry advisory board and on the University of Maryland’s women in engineering advisory board.
Of the Rutgers board, he says, “We want to increase the diversity of the engineering student body, including helping students who come from a two-year program who are ready for a four-year program. The mission has broad consequences not solely focused on race or gender. It’s about providing access, while building a talent pipeline and allowing future STEM talent to achieve their full potential.”
He also leans on his earlier experiences with his own mentors, showing others how to choose the best way to showcase their talents, expertise, and performance. That includes being present at meetings by participating in the conversations, raising your hand to accept assignments that will stretch you beyond your comfort zone, advocating for others in talent and performance reviews when you get that seat at the table, he says, and advocating for younger talent to speak at events so they can build their confidence and their presence in the engineering industry.
Personal journey
Lee Chambers, a business psychologist and founder of Male Allies UK, grew up as one of two Black children in his elementary school of 300 K-6 students, and as one of six Black families in Bolton, U.K., a town of 200,000 about 20 miles north of Manchester. He experienced racist bullying starting at age 7 that grew into a daily problem — until one of his white teachers, Mrs. Smith, brought together parents, teachers, and religious leaders to devise an anti-bullying strategy, including confronting the parents and children complicit in the bullying.
“I wanted to create an organization focused on bringing people together in a world that feels divided. One that moves from fearing difference to embracing how powerful difference is, while never forgetting how similar we truly are.”
— Lee Chambers
“Mrs. Smith was correct to say, ‘This is not happening in my school,’” Chambers says. “The reality is that it changed my educational experience.” Her actions inspired him to stay in school and become the first in his family to attend college. “It was because of her actions that I decided to focus on my education. It felt like a gift.
“Going through that adversity and having to explore myself made me more aware of who I was and how I was limited by my own masculinity, which is the start of an allyship journey — to see how systems negatively impact you,” he says.
Chambers met his next challenge when he struggled with his mental health during his second year studying business and psychology at the University of Manchester. “Like a lot of young men, I didn’t have the tools to explore and express myself,” he says. “I moved back home. I was telling people that I was a failure and that I had let people down. I needed grace for myself. I tried to be excellent. I was quite hard on myself when I wasn’t.”
He found online communities that helped him, and he learned to slow down, reflect, and practice journaling. “Instead of ‘doing, doing, doing,’ I did a lot more ‘thinking, thinking, thinking.’”
Chambers graduated in 2007 with a degree in international business and started his career at the Co-operative Bank. The bank laid him off when the 2008 financial crash hit. He started working as a local government development officer and started a videogame e-commerce business, PhenomGames, in his free time. By the end of its third year, the business was turning a seven-figure profit. He reinvested the profits into a software offshoot.
Then, he met the challenge that led to his becoming a women’s advocate: In 2014, the business’s fifth year, his immune system failed. Chambers was 29 and the father of a one-month-old daughter and an 18-month-old son. Although he stayed in the hospital for more than a month, he remained upbeat. “I had the financial freedom to focus on getting well, which is a massive privilege,” he says.
After nearly a year of arduous rehabilitation, Chambers walked one mile unaided. Just a few weeks later, he watched his daughter take her first steps. “I decided that recovering my mobility would not be the end of this journey,” Chambers says. “I had a burning desire to help other people be proactive in their recovery and through life’s challenges.”
Chambers decided to appoint the woman who served as managing director of his e-commerce company as the new CEO and to step away from operations to become a stay-at-home father. That helped raise his awareness about women’s issues at work, he says. When he walked into his local baby-parent socializing group as the only man, he instantly felt “discomfort.” He soon learned from the women in the group about their daily experiences of being passed over for promotions, struggling with inadequate child care and health care, and being ignored, sidetracked, or even harassed.
Chambers remained his children’s primary caregiver for more than three years, which he says enhanced his self-awareness and helped him understand how a caregiver’s role is often overlooked and given inadequate respect.
Then in October 2023, he launched Male Allies UK, a research, training, and lobbying organization dedicated to dismantling barriers to women’s success in the workplace. The organization contracts with businesses to evaluate how they can create a more inclusive work environment and offers workshops to help companies establish and maintain allies’ networks and employee resource groups. Male Allies UK then directs a portion of its profits to programs helping boys and young men challenge gender stereotypes and support gender equality.
“I wanted to create an organization focused on bringing people together in a world that feels divided,” he says. “One that moves from fearing difference to embracing how powerful difference is, while never forgetting how similar we truly are.”
Only the onlies
Michael D. Smith, D.Eng., is the executive director of the National Association of Multicultural Engineering Program Advocates, known as NAMEPA. While in college 37 years ago at the University of Missouri-Rolla, since renamed Missouri University of Science and Technology, Dr. Smith was one of 250 Black students on a rural campus of roughly 7,000. He had one Black professor during his four years of study there. The professor, Harvest Collier, Ph.D., taught chemistry, which was Dr. Smith’s major. The professor served as a teacher and mentor, supported students’ mental health, and served as a role model for succeeding on a campus that did not always feel supportive to students of color. “He often reminded me that failure was not an option and that giving my absolute best was a necessity,” Dr. Smith says.
“Dr. Collier’s guidance contributed to my long-term mindset of ‘paying it forward’ and naturally cultivated my desire to support others,” Dr. Smith says. “This remained with me into my graduate studies and professional career. When the opportunity arose to engage with and directly support girls and women in STEM, I was prepared.”
“I was the liaison and often, unofficial mentor to young women board members who were eager to learn and impact the work of the organization in some way while they navigated engineering degree programs as students.”
— Michael D. Smith, D.Eng.
Dr. Smith completed his doctoral degree at Texas A&M University while he worked as a professional engineering intern at DuPont Specialty Chemicals. His journey toward allyship continued when he recognized that many of the labs, classrooms, and boardrooms he traversed had few to no women.
In a blog post, he writes, “As an only child, it was common to be focused on the ‘onlys’ in the room, including my personal experience as a Black man pursuing a STEM career, which often broadened my view of women in STEM-focused spaces.
“Yet, when I became involved as a member of NSBE, my engagement with women in STEM expanded, as strong and talented women were active on the board of directors and within the program spaces.” NSBE is the National Society of Black Engineers.
“Inspired by the stories of these women who persevered despite the odds, I made a conscious effort to challenge my own biases and advocate for gender equity in STEM,” Dr. Smith writes.
Dr. Smith says he found himself drawn to engineering education because of his experience serving as a student leader and on the board of directors of NSBE. The “spark” happened, Dr. Smith says, when he became part of NSBE’s headquarters staff, leading the programs team.
“I was the liaison and, often, unofficial mentor to young women board members who were eager to learn and impact the work of the organization in some way while they navigated engineering degree programs as students,” he says. “My role evolved to include serving as the lead strategic partner representative for NSBE. In that role, I more frequently engaged with other organizations that focused on the development and recruitment of women into STEM fields.”
Dr. Smith continues that work in his role with NAMEPA, in which he helps attract, retain, and graduate engineers from historically underrepresented populations.
The key to being an ally? “It’s about your willingness to get to know people,” he says. “You have to be willing to invest in relationships.”
