Music What I would tell other girls and young women about my experience with engineering is that it's so rewarding and it's just so interesting. What I would tell other girls is engineering is so much more than what you think it is. It's such a broad field and a lot of girls just don't know that you can make a change in the world one day with what you've learned.

Would you like to travel to Mars? Be the next big internet success? Do you dream of discovering a cure for cancer or protecting our rivers and oceans from pollution? All of these things require engineering. In very real and concrete ways, women who become engineers save lives, prevent disease, reduce poverty and protect our planet.

My name is Elaine Kunda and I'm a proud member of the McMaster Alumni Board of Directors and lead advisor of the Girls 20 Summit. The Girls 20 is an organization which promotes the economic empowerment, education and entrepreneurial training of girls and women globally. I'm here today on the beautiful McMaster University campus to explore the pressing need for more women in the field of engineering worldwide.

Women like to be relevant societally. We like to solve problems and stereotypically people don't see engineering as doing that. They see engineers as building bridges and making better engines for cars and maybe not solving problems like how do we make a better heart valve or how do we clean up our water. Why the ratio is lower is gender stereotypes are all over and also social beliefs in terms of what is the most suitable job for women.

Move forward a little bit. What you're looking for is the Xbox Connect to pick up your face and you know it's done that when you get kind of a yellow mesh over it. With encouragement and McMaster's supportive environment, Trinette has succeeded in taking a difficult personal event and turning it into a remarkable innovation.

My mother had a bad accident and has been in a wheelchair for the last six months and just watching her go about her daily life and just trying to complete tasks that we would take for granted, I can see that the support for people with these kind of limitations isn't there and I feel that anything that I can do in terms of engineering to help make lives better, I should really do that. So what we've done is we've taken the Xbox Connect and written an application that will track a person's face and we will translate the movement from that tracking into the movement of a cursor across a screen and then what we've done is we've built a specific headset that will pick up EEG signals and by closing your eyes you can actually change the ratio of these signals so in essence your face becomes the mouse for a computer and closing your eyes is the click. I did it!

If we were to get the word out there that engineers actually solve today's problems, I think that we would get a larger number of young women interested in the field. Although women represent half the world's population, they're greatly underrepresented in the field of engineering. There was a recent statistic that women in STEM careers earned 33% more money than their equivalents in non-STEM careers.

STEM is an acronym used to describe education and careers in science, technology, engineering and math. The undeniable truth is that more girls choosing STEM related professions can have a profound impact on society both socially and economically. McMaster Engineering is actually doing quite a bit in terms of supporting and promoting women in engineering and it's one of the main components of the current strategic plan.

One of the targets in that plan was to double the number of female faculty which is very important because they serve as role models for our undergraduate students. When there's more women in it, then the women who are there also feel more comfortable. Although girls represent only 15 to 25% of the student population in engineering courses in the G20 countries, they are excelling in making their voices heard.

The girls in our programs are extremely involved in all kinds of different things. So our student presidents have been women over the past number of years. They become very involved in things like our summer camps and various programs within engineering. They're very involved with initiatives like Engineers Without Borders and that type of thing that has an impact on society.

So not only are they successful academically, but they're making their mark on other aspects of the world. Whether it's, you know, building a small piece of code and having it run properly with the correct answer or, you know, going through a full year design project. There's always something that you can look back on and say, I did that and it works and it's great.

Engineering is a field that you could actually get into and make a difference. With engineering, you're limited only by your imagination. Develop a new technology, design a community, explore a new planet, save a life. It's up to you.