The Jargon Gap — Why it is Important and How to See Past it
By: Mackenzie A
Tags: Women in STEM, Women In Business, Women In Tech, Jargon, Psychology

It’s more simple than it sounds.

When I was a junior in high school, I decided to join the school’s robotics team. I knew I wanted to be an engineer, and I wasn’t sure what kind of engineer or why, but I was good at math and science, and wanted to make things and solve problems. Since my high school had one of the best robotics programs in the nation, making it to the national competition almost every year, I was told it would not look great on my resume if I wasn’t on the team if I was pursuing engineering.

Since I joined late in my high school career, was one of only six females on the team (out of over a hundred boys), and I wasn’t really sure how I could contribute. It’s not that the team wouldn’t let me — there were plenty of encouraging volunteers, parents, and classmates who were so kind and welcoming towards me. I just truly didn’t know what was going on half the time, and was hesitant to slow things down to ask. I would show up to four-hour long meetings every night, hair wet and body cold and sore from swim practice, and attempted learning and executing Java code for our robot. Ultimately there were kids on the Programming team who were so good at programming, it was much more efficient for them to do the bulk of the work.

Although I didn’t realize it at the time, and I felt guilty for not doing enough work on the robot, I actually learned a lot being on that team. One of the first things I remember learning was what a pneumatic piston is. One Saturday, were broken up into groups, trying to brainstorm and prototype solutions to that years’ competition challenge. It sounds way more technical than it was — we were basically hammering and screwing wood and gluing paper together to demonstrate how we would approach the problem. The problem was lifting arms of the robot several feet into the air, quickly. Three of the girls and I, of course, stuck together and formed a group, which was not a smart idea because we were all brand new to the team and although we were different school years and didn’t know each other before, we seemed to have similar scopes of knowledge. One idea the three of us came up with was using a scissor lift — only none of us knew the word for it. One of the girls described it as “one of those zig-zag, accordion kind of things that can be used to lift people or stuff”. Sounds so smart, right? (That girl, by the way, was a genius. She was #1 in her class of about 400, and she went on to graduate from an Ivy League school.) One of the mentors, a parent volunteer, walked by to see what kind of idea our humble little group was cooking up.

“Ah, you mean a scissor lift,” he said. That sounded right, we just didn’t know the name. One of the girls pulled up a YouTube video on her laptop to confirm. “That could work, and you guys could build one out of wood pieces when we do the group presentations to show how powerful and quickly it can deploy.”

“Build one?” We were all doubtful we could do that with wood and screws. “But how would we even get it to go up?”

“For a real scissor lift and on the robot, you could use a pneumatic piston or actuator. But, for this demonstration, we can just stick a drill into the bottom screw, and it will work for the purpose of demonstration.”

Now this is the part of most situations where I used to think, Gosh, I don’t know what “pneumatic” or “piston” or “actuator” means, so I am not smart enough to understand any of this, I’m just going to tune the rest of this day out. Thankfully, one of the other girls, more brave than I, asked what those words meant. “It’s kind of like a long cylinder that uses the pressure build up from compressed air to quickly move a rod inside the cylinder up,” he said. “You can use it to quickly drive this scissor lift up,” Okay, we were getting warmer, but he could still see our puzzled faces, “Here”, he pulled up a video on Youtube, showing us what he meant.

Oh, one of those things. None of us totally understood what it was before, but now we saw it, and we knew what it did. He helped us with determining dimensions of the wood to use, and after that the three of us spent the next week drilling holes and screwing pieces of wood together. None of us had much experience with a drill, but every now and then one of the more experienced teammates would see us doing something questionable and kindly show us more efficient techniques for drilling.

At the end of the week, we presented our idea to the male-dominated room, taking turns to explain what we built, how the prototype works, and how we could use it on the real robot. “The mechanism for driving the scissor lift in this prototype is the drill, but for the actual robot we intend to use a pneumatic cylinder.” We stuck the drill in the bottom of the scissor lift, and it turned a screw that forced all of the scissors to expand simultaneously, and it quickly shot to the ceiling, proving it could work. It was quite the spectacle, and the room burst into applause.

As the other groups presented, many of them said they were also going to be using pneumatic pistons to drive some kind of mechanism in the robot. Now knowing what that meant, I understood more and more of their ideas, rather than tuning them out at the first sign of a word I didn’t understand.

You know how when you get a new car, you notice more and more of that same car on the road? Or how once you learn a new word, you hear it more and more often? That was the case with “pneumatic piston”. I would here it all of the time. I would get my car fixed, and there would be many complicated issues that seemed to complex for me to understand. The mechanic would say the word “piston,” and instead of tuning out, I listened because I knew I could eventually understand what he was saying. When I went to college and started taking engineering classes, professors would present problems to solve using jargon I had never seen before, and I knew to look past it to get to the root of the meaning.

This is not just about understanding what one word means — it is realizing that allowing one word that you do not understand to prevent you from moving froward can keep you from learning or building new things. I am grateful I learned this lesson early on, and it has helped me tremendously in my engineering degree and later in my engineering career. My hope is that more people, especially women, will not be paralyzed by jargon they do not understand, and can see past it to understand and solve problems in the world.