Women in STEM: traffic engineer uses platform to encourage women to pursue careers in engineering

This story first appeared in Engineers Week 2025, an annual special section that showcases a variety of local engineering topics to celebrate all that engineers contribute to our world.

If you’ve ever had the experience of stopping at a red light and then getting a string of green lights after that, you’ve been affected by traffic engineering.

If you were driving in Cedar Rapids, Cari Pauli was likely involved in planning the smooth traffic flow you enjoyed. With more than 187 traffic signals throughout the city, that’s a lot of planning.

“You don’t always get those green lights because we have opposite flows of traffic to take into account as well,” Pauli said. “It’s a complicated problem.”

Those kinds of challenges are what Pauli enjoys about her job, and as the first female city traffic engineer in Cedar Rapids, Pauli is working to encourage more young women to consider traffic engineering as a profession.

Traffic engineering is all about making it safer and more efficient for people to move around the city in vehicles or on foot. Pauli and her colleagues in the traffic engineering division of the public works department conduct studies on traffic flow around the city as part of their ongoing quest for safer, better transportation.

“The studies help us determine the appropriate traffic control method,” Pauli said.

Some intersections with high flows of traffic might require a traffic light. If that’s the case, traffic engineers will determine what kind of left-turn signals would be most appropriate. Pedestrian traffic is also considered. If there are many pedestrians, a walk light will be added to each light’s red-yellow-green cycle.

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Managing traffic is a moving target. Because traffic changes depending on the time of day, Pauli and her colleagues keep an eye on traffic signals through live video footage streamed to a wall of screens in their department.

“We can make changes to the signals remotely from our office, watch how traffic flows, and see how it works,” Pauli said. “It’s fun to see.”

Although she finds her job absorbing and satisfying, it took Pauli a while to find her path. Since she was good at science and math, engineering was recommended to her. She attended Kirkwood Community College, but she wasn’t sure which type of engineering was right for her. Wartburg offered a broad-based program in engineering science, so she finished her bachelor’s there.

On a graduate school visit to Iowa State University, she had a tour of the Center for Transportation Research and Education. She discovered that the math and logic problems involved in traffic management fascinated her.

“I liked the traffic signal timing aspect of the work. Although that wouldn’t appeal to everyone, that appealed to me,” she said. “I wanted to try to optimize signal timing and make traffic flow optimal.”

While Pauli felt like she’d found the engineering specialty that suited her, she noticed that there were very few other women in her master’s degree program. In the cohort of 15-20 men, there were only three to four women.

According to the Society of Women Engineers, this is a nationwide problem. Women make up only about 16 percent of all engineering positions in the United States even though they make up 48 percent of the total workforce.

Pauli wants to change those statistics, so she joined WTS Iowa, an organization that promotes the advancement of women in the transportation industry. Currently a board member, Pauli has been busy with the group in a variety of ways, from helping girls try out STEM activities at a booth at the Iowa State Fair to planning educational events for adults.

“We’ve brought in women who’ve started businesses, and had talks about trailblazers of the past,” Pauli said. She has also participated in the Women Lead Change Elevate workshop that helps women develop leadership and professional skills.

Being part of groups that encourage and support women is especially important for those in professions like engineering, where a female engineer may be the only one in her department.

“The mid-career path is different for women and men,” Pauli said. Women often reach this stage at about the same time they are raising a family. A professional woman might feel pressure to be the caretaker of their family when she has reached mid-career.

“The tendency is to take a step back, Pauli said. “To feel guilt, and then step back professionally.”

Programs like the ones offered by WTS Iowa and Women Lead Change can provide women with encouragement and the opportunity to collaborate while in their important mid-career years.

“The programs remind them that there are others in this industry who are still active in the professional world,” Pauli said. “It helps to know that you are not the only one.” The support she received from these groups helped Pauli decide to move up in her career this past summer.

Pauli hopes that her efforts through leadership in the WTS Iowa organization will encourage more young women to consider engineering as a career path.

“Women are perfectly capable of being engineers,” she said. According to the Society for Women Engineers, more and more girls are completing higher levels of math, like calculus, before they enter college, and a strong STEM background is essential for engineers.

“If you’re always wondering why something is the way it is, that’s something that’s not as obvious [as a background in STEM], but it’s definitely a trait an engineer needs to have,” Pauli said.

Despite being just as likely to have those traits as men are, young women might feel pressure to follow roles that other women have traditionally followed, like education or nursing, when they would be equally successful in engineering.

Once women have completed their engineering education, many organizations will be eager to hire them.

“They want the diverse point of view that a woman would bring to an engineering position,” Pauli said. “Any good company will want those different viewpoints. Keep that in mind. Remember that you do belong.”