Given all the challenges facing our global civilization, we realized there was a growing need for engineers of all kinds to help us solve them. But, half the world’s population—namely women—were either being left out or discouraged from becoming the engineers we so desperately needed because– of all the engineers or engineering students in the world– only 19% were female, and even that percentage was dropping. Also recognizing the power and influence of media to change attitudes and culture by providing inspiring role models, in 2015 The MacGyver Foundation—in association with The USC Viterbi School of Engineering, The National Academy of Engineering and others—launched its first major project, The Next MacGyver.

This was a global script competition to create a female engineer-type character, like MacGyver, in the hope that a new TV series with such a character might encourage and inspire more women to explore the field of engineering much as the wildly successful CSI franchise had produced a dramatic increase in young people going into the forensic sciences. We ultimately received over 2000 submissions from which 12 finalists were chosen. Those finalists were then flown to Los Angeles to present their concepts to a panel of top television producers. Five winners were then selected by the producers and each winner was awarded $5000 and paired with one of the producers to help mentor their project. The project received 500,000 media hits and, in part, at least helped produce the new MacGyver reboot series, in which several of the key characters are female.

The video of the whole awards ceremony is below.