04/17/2026
Engineering teaches you to solve for variables. Caregiving teaches you that some variables cannot be solved, only held.
Sarah Buckius has worked inside both systems, and the tension between them runs through everything she makes. As a mechanical engineer, she was trained to identify a problem, define the variables, and design toward a solution. As a cancer survivor and mother of three — including premature twins with serious early health challenges — she learned that caregiving does not work that way.
"Caregiving is a process that feels never-ending, with no real beginning or end," she says. "It is messy, chaotic, and human." And much of it is entirely unpaid.
What strikes Sarah is how much caregiving resembles the foundational labor that makes technological progress possible and how thoroughly economic systems have managed to keep that labor off the books. The next generation of engineers, designers, and inventors is raised by someone. That work counts. It just does not get counted.
Artist and engineer Sarah Buckius reveals how women’s unseen work complicates conventional ideas of progress and what technology can solve in a patriarchy.
