Encouraging women to enroll in engineering 28

[cbiber]

Another spin-off from the "Boot camp" thread in this forum --

It's pretty clear that by and large, most engineering fields have a low percentage of females. In my experience, the percentage gets lower as the people get older. In fact, many of my female engineering school colleagues aren't engineers anymore.

Some specific topics to discuss:
-- why aren't girls interested in enrolling in engineering?
-- why do they drop out of engineering programs (do they do so at a disproportionate rate?)
-- how can girls be encouraged to pursue engineering?

In my area, there's a "Saturday Academy" with specific classes to address some of this; there's also an organization called AWSEM for middle school girls (I'll have to post the links later). Other ideas?

Cathy Biber

Biber Thermal Design

http://www.biberthermal.com

 

[samv]

Vivk said:
"What I found though, was that most of the guys were already quite familiar with mechanical things, from working with their cars, workshop subject at high school etc. I felt that I had much to catch up on in that area."

-- I totally agree, and it's very unfortunate. I think this is the major downside of our culture where girls get pink dolls and boys get "construction" toys. On the flipside - how many of you men have felt uncomfortable "babying" your little ones(comforting, bathing etc)? Are men less capable of doing this? Absolutely not - they just have never done it before.


many said:
boys score better at math (and sciences) than girls

-- I think the opposite is often true, and pure science programs in many schools now have MORE women than men. Applied Sciences is lagging behind (majorly) and I think this hands on thing is the major reason. Young girls and women are not encouraged to become comfortable with hammers and drills etc. and thus feel more comfortable taking their skills to the pure sciences than to the applied sciences.


Lainey said:
"Im actually kinda glad there's not a lot of females in my class, because then it would take away from our uniqueness. But i feel that having some females in engineering is important to add diversity in opinions and ideas.

I think someone compared this situation to males in nursing, but i think it is a bit different than that. Females in engineering are commended for being with the best(aka male engineers), where males in nursing get a different reaction.
It's similar to a female playing on the pga tour versus a male playing on the lpga. "


Although I completely disagree with a great deal of Lainey's post I'm glad she brought this to the table. I think a lot of women in engineering have felt a tinge of what she is saying - about liking all the attention etc. I think this is a VERY short sighted view because in the end it will come back and bite you probably in more ways than one.

To become a respected engineer you have to work hard and be dedicated. You have to play on the same field as the boys - if you don't they will surpass you. Although I'm not totally against this "biased scale" to help balance things out, it needs to be done very carefully and in ways that do not unfairly treat the "majority" (white male).

Now onto the nursing thing - as I said in a previous post I think the world needs to change in both ways with women having the chance to enter male dominated fields AND vice versa. I do not at all agree with comparing this with the LPGA because nursing is a very important career - not a less competitive league. Our society seems to demean everything that is traditionally female territory - from secretaries to nurses. It seems that being a forklift driver is more highly regarded than these traditionally female careers are.

In answer to Leanne's question that asked "Why should it cause a career interruption having kids? Other than the obvious time off for recovery" Because children are of the utmost importance, they deserve quality, and in the beginning lenghty, time with their parents (BOTH parents). Here in Canada we can take up to a full year of combined maternity and parental leave. Child rearing is another "female career" that gets a lot less recognition than it should.

... sorry to come down on you so hard Lainey! I do hope you understand that this tidal wave of "specialness" will not carry you very far in life.

Best regards,
samv

 

[GregLocock]

"this tidal wave of "specialness" will not carry you very far in life."

Hmm, /cynical mode on/ it'll splash her up against the glass ceiling round here /cynical mode off/.

So far as the recruitment of women into engineering goes - in another thread many of us have said we would not recommend it as a career, given reasonable, equally liked alternatives, given the current and likely future state of play in the USA in particular, and the West in general. But we are more than happy to have female company on the sinking ship!



Cheers

Greg Locock

 

[FrenchCAD]

"But we are more than happy to have female company on the sinking ship!"

Amen to that!

Cyril Guichard
Mechanical Engineer

 

[cbiber]

Just sad that the "sinking ship" is taking our jobs with it -- jobs that we obviously all like, and that some of us (male and female both) think we're suited for!

Meanwhile, I've heard a lot lately about how there is (or will be) a "shortage" of engineers and scientists ... I'm not seeing it (see thread on jobs moving overseas, this forum).

 

[EnglishMuffin]

If its a "sinking ship", then making sure that women are encouraged to join the profession is a bit like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic isn't it?

 

[GregLocock]

Plus they'll grab all the lifeboats!

Or if you are being serious, yes.




Cheers

Greg Locock

 

[Binary]

It's worse than that. It's like giving them a ticket for passage...

 

[EnglishMuffin]

Binary : Not quite, because when women were given tickets for the Titanic, nobody knew it was going to sink !

 

[FrenchCAD]

Good point here EnglishMuffin. Are we some kind of monsters then? Offering tickets for a trip on a sinking boat? ;-)

Cyril Guichard
Mechanical Engineer

 

[GregLocock]

cbiber wrote:" I've heard a lot lately about how there is (or will be) a "shortage" of engineers and scientists ... I'm not seeing it (see thread on jobs moving overseas, this forum)."

Cyril suggested this, and certainly engineering student numbers are down in several countries, over the last decade. In Australia we are having difficulty recruiting experienced engineers, of specific types, but that is partly because we don't train enough technical stream engineers up. On the other hand people who are out of work in the USA and the UK do seem to be finding it hard to find relevant jobs, locally. Perhaps it is a global imbalance, rather than a shortage as such.

Maybe we should pursue this in the other thread?

Cheers

Greg Locock

 

[FrenchCAD]

Yeah, that would be an interesting topic

Cyril Guichard
Mechanical Engineer

 

[havesealwilltravel]

cbibber

To address your comment on the "engineering shortage". The "shortage" is invented by colleges to keep the seats filled and management to keep the supply high and salaries low.

The following is a quote from an article I've read:
"The engineering shortage crisis is a myth promoted by greedy corporations seeking relaxed rules for imported labor and universities seeking lucrative government grants."

The full article is found at:

http://www.roundtable.com/Critical_Path/volume4/critical-path-issue-4-6.html#1

Engineers are their own worst enemies when it comes to promoting the status and pay of the "profession". This is one of the reasons why I support P.E. registration. If there is no formal definition of "Engineer" anyone can claim the title. I've seen companies (and the military) give the title to people with no formal engineering education or any depth of experience. Companies will give you any title you want as long as you don't expect more pay to go along with the title.

 

[BJC]

dannym
You have it right. There was a guy named Irwin Freest with the same ideals who ran for president of the IEEE several times in the 1980s. he was nominated by petition and was never a canidate of the establishment. The IEEE at the time ran one canidate for president, a canidate selected by the insiders ( all management and academians).
The IEEE though he was terrible and urged members not to vote for him. They said he would turn the IEEE into a union.
Actually he was right. I quite the IEEE because I got tired of being charged $ 100 + per year to vote in their sham electrions.

If you read this link you can see the IEEE is still afraid of him ( even though he's dead)

http://www.ieee.org/organizations/pubs/newsletters/npss/0602/fractious.html

There may have been some Freest suporters involved in the case of the Anthropology professor at Long Beach State in California giving his lectrues in Italian. Students complained about the italian, but he said " The engineering school has professors who don't lecture in english, I have checked the rules and there is no requirement" At the time LBS had some Chineese profs or grad students who spoke english very poorly. When engineering complained nothing was done. The anthropology professor got more publicity.

 

[KM]

Now that I've had kids and thus have had a chance to observe little girls and little boys up close, I have to agree with Haf that men and women are "wired up" differently. So long as there is no discrimination, glass ceilings, prejudice etc. involved, so what if more men than women choose engineering and more women than men choose nursing? Let people do what they like doing, regardless of whether it meets someone else's "quota" or not.

 

[davefitz]

Back to the original question, I think one reason there are fewer women in engineering is related to the observable porperty that when high school age girls are in the same math and science class as boys, most of them stop competing and jsut fade out.

This was directly proven in England about 15 yrs ago, when they tried to figure out why the only girls that earned college scholarships to math and science colleges were soley from all girl high schools. When they deliberately separated girl math + science classes from boy classes in co-ed schools, they obtained the result that the girls would then score much higher than those in the co-ed classes, and would obtain an equal liklihood of obtaining a scholarship.

 

[DrillerNic]

as Davefitz says, in the UK the lack of women engineers (and women scientists) is due to the way that girls tend not to do maths & science beyond 16 in the UK. There are all sorts of explainations for this:
Girls tend to prefer course work type subjects
Girls don't like the "right or wrong" aspects of science & maths and prefer subjective subjects like English or History
Girls lack women role models and maths & science teachers are often male (this was empahsised to me at school , where teh head of Physiscs, a woman noted that if she taught the 16 year old class physics, more girls tended to choose to do physics post 16 that if one of her male collegues was timetabled to do the 16 year old class).
Girls don't pick up the idea that maths & science carrers are for them (look at the carers advice pages of Glamour or Cosmoplitan- it's all how to be a better PA type stuff)

Having said that, in the old industry where I work, women engineers are like gold dust to employers, masters course admissions officers and so on, and many employers and industry organisations are working hard to make things beter for their women engineers- the SPE has a woman's networking section, my old employer Schlumberger had WISE-"Women in Schluberger Everywhere", which despite its awful name was very useful, I'm told. There is the occasional dinosaur at the wellsite who "won't take no orders from a girly" (I had this guy particular guy NRB'd), and it takes a strong character to be the only woman amongst 90 or so roughty toughty drillers.....

 

[ScottyUK]

I'm all for equality between the sexes, but the UK is in danger of developing an unhealthy level of discrimination. For example, there are a number of awards which are exclusively for achievements by women in engineering. Why? I've worked with a number of female engineers, and most of them were capable of winning an award judged against any of their peers. So why discriminate? One colleague refused to accept an award for the most promising young female engineer in the company, protesting that by judging her solely against her female colleagues, the implication was that she was less able than her male peers and had to be judged against a different, weaker, set of criteria. Had she been judged against all the staff in the company, she would quite probably have won anyway, and she knew it.

Taking DrillerNic's observation above [blue]"women engineers are like gold dust to employers, masters course admissions officers and so on"[/blue], I have to ask 'why?' once more. In my industry - power generation - there are relatively few female engineers. We have desperate trouble recruiting good engineers of either sex; a good female engineer would have no problem landing a position over a less qualified or experienced male engineer. If the reverse situation was true, I would be bitterly opposed to the position going to the female engineer purely to meet some politically correct agenda. There are bigger problems in our profession to address than trying achieve someone's idea of a perfect 50/50 balance between the sexes.











------------------------------

If we learn from our mistakes,
I'm getting a great education!

 

[moltenmetal]

Attracting more young women to this profession, given the over-supply situation in Canada at the moment, is tantamount to abuse. Goes for young men too- it's not really a gender-specific issue- but I do feel for the young women more because they're being actively recruited. It's a hard realization when they graduate and find there's no job waiting for them, no job after six months...and student loans that need to be paid back...

These young women shouldn't be given any guilt about the need for female trail-blazers in the engineering field- they should be given honest evidence about the real prospects for employment suiting their skills and education when they graduate, at levels of compensation which justify the investment of effort. People should let them make up their own minds and STOP recruiting.

As to having more company on the sinking ship, I guess if a young woman loves engineering and shows enough intellect and drive to be good at it, there's no reason to stop her from pursuing her dream- but we have a responsibility to make sure she's realistic before she enters the program.

As to the issue of wasting talent, we're turning away kids with 90% averages from engineering schools as it is. Engineering is education as training for entry into a profession, not the "new liberal arts education". If universities believe that engineering education is the latter, they'd better 'fess up to the students in the first week of 1st year!

 

[chris9]

Well-said ScottyUK

But in the politically correct world we live in social engineering seems to take priority over real engineering!

 

[dporte17]

ScottyUK:

Isn't it ironic that in trying to achieve equality, we are building discrimination into the system? At one time equality was about judging people based on relevant criteria rather than on some other inconsequential attribute (like sex, race,...) Now it's become about having some percentage representation rather than hiring the best candidate in every situation.

It's sad.

Dave