The future of women in Engineering... 17

[SomptingGuy]

I got my (then about 10) daughter into that on-line game where you had to build things to get a ball or balls over the line. Very good engineering/maths/physics problem solving game. Four years later and she's back into cats and Teletubbies.

- Steve

 

[cranky108]

As your daughter gets older it seems to be more difficult to get that wow factor that drives interest. The bigest thing that seems to drive my daughters interest is dad. So I keep trying to find new things that might interest her. It's good that she is interested in math.

 

[JohnRBaker]

Our 10 year old granddaughter is into Legos in a big way so that's encouraging as she has to actually build something, and the 8 year old is into games that requires thinking about your next moves, like checkers and battleships. And she's even developed a 'system' for playing Battleships, which she carefully explained to me after beating me three times. One of these days I've got to teach her how to play chess. She's also really intrigued by trains and she has a camera she carries with her whenever they are out driving around like on vacation last year when they drove from Texas to SoCal, so that she can take pictures of the locomotives (she must have 20 or 30 photos from that trip alone).

John R. Baker, P.E.
Product 'Evangelist'
Product Engineering Software
Siemens PLM Software Inc.
Industry Sector
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To an Engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.

 

[moltenmetal]

John: sounds to me like these girls' parents and grandparents are doing something right!

 

[ManifestDestiny]

Most girls I knew who were intelligent and science oriented overwhelmingly went into medicine, veterinary science, psychology. If it wasn't any of those it was law. Its a stereotype, but ive found that women naturally gravitate towards fields where they will have a face to face interaction with those they are helping. They all have a vision in their head of how one day their expertise will help people that will come to them with their health/legal/pet elephant related issues, and that they will be able to see the results on a personal level. Engineering is generally seen as making stuff, engines, buildings, measurements, numbers, robots, hard hats, overalls, holding a clip board while pointing at stuff. It probably helps people somewhere along the line, but its primarily a technical job of making material items. The fact its also a very male dominated industry probably also scares off the last remaining ones who had multiple offers after high school graduation.

 

[davefitz]

There were a few interesting studies conducted in the UK during the 1990's, trying to determine why so few women pursue engienering and math studies in college.

As reported in New Scientist magazine, they found that virtually all of the high school girls that won UK scholarships to college in the fields of math and science were from all-girl high schools. So, they had some co-ed high schools change their math and science classes to be same-sex classes, and girls were not mixed with boys for those particular classes. The result was a dramatic improvement in the girls grades and interest in math and science, and some of those girls went on to win the scholarships.

I am sure that any comment made on why this occurred would be interpreted as sexist, but the results were real.

And finally, after my own 40 yr career as an engineer winds to an end, I can say that all of the women engineers I had worked with were at least as good at engineering as the men.

"Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition! "

 

[JohnRBaker]

I have to admit that during my 14 years working as a Machine Designer (first job after finishing school) there were no women engineers but we did have a few who were draftsmen. However, when I left that field of endeavor and made the transition to a software company some 33 years ago, note that this was also a move from the Mid-West (Saginaw, MI) to SoCal (Orange Co.), things were very different. And while in 1980 we were still a pretty small organization, there were many women working side-by-side with men doing virtually the same jobs. And it was wasn't just the programmers but also the people to trained customers and did demos and benchmarks. And while I was a supervisor for the pre- and post-sales support team, two of my manufacturing people were females and while one was fairly young (she had been born into a family of only two girls but whose father owned a machine shop so since she was the oldest, she was expected to learn the 'family business') and the other was actually the oldest person in my group how had been running machine tools her whole life and later moved into the NC programming side of the business. She was more like a 'grandmother' in our group, very feminine, but still a no nonsense sort of person having spent a lifetime working in a man's world.

But if we look at the company today, where we now have over a thousand programmers in locations around the world, the percentage who are women is quite high and many of them hold team-leader, supervisor and manager positions. And until just a couple of years ago, the VP of Software development was a women, and I was on her immediately staff, which also include another female. At the moment we don't have any executive level females (my old boss retired two years ago so that she and her husband could pursue their 'hobby' of climbing mountains, volcanoes to be specific, while they were still young enough to do so) we still have a very large number of managerial and supervisor positions held by females.

Anyway, the point I was making is that, at least in my experience, location (Mid-West versus SoCal) and the type of industry (discrete manufacturing versus software development) does seem to make a difference.

John R. Baker, P.E.
Product 'Evangelist'
Product Engineering Software
Siemens PLM Software Inc.
Industry Sector
Cypress, CA
Siemens PLM:
UG/NX Museum:

To an Engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.

 

[p14175]

Not long ago I found a website,

http://jobstat.net/

Its job outlook statics are probably as accurate as any other career exploration site. They don't mention % error. I am a female manufacturing engineer. The website says only about 8% of manufacturing engineers are women. You can also look at the stat as % opportunity and say a female manufacturing engineer has only an 8% chance of finding work in her field. The stats are about the same for other engineering fields.

When I am asked for career advice I usually don't know what to say. Yes, engineering is a great career, but it can also be a constant uphill battle if you don't "look like the boss" (fit in).

 

[GregLocock]

That is one lousy misuse of stats! There's only one of me and there's ten million engineers, so I only have a 0.0001% chance of finding work?

Cheers

Greg Locock


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[ScottyUK]

You beat me to it Greg. That is precisely the kind of crap that gets spouted by people who have an agenda to push, and which turns many people off the 'equality' discussion. Anyone with half a brain - male or female - can see straight through it. Equality isn't normally what the pusher is looking for though, it's preferential treatment for their minority.

A cynic might ask why the minority needs preferential treatment. An older, wiser cynic might conclude that preferential recruitment has potential to be a destructive force within an organisation. I have no more desire to see engineers being recruited based on colour, gender, religious faith, sexuality, species, or whatever parameter is chosen by some minority whose lobbyists make a lot noise, than I have to see engineers being excluded from possible selection based on a similar set of criteria.

And no, I'm really not a prejudiced dinosaur. There are relatively few working females in my patch of industry - heavy electrical - but the handful I do see are very good at their job. I wish we had more female engineers of the same calibre. Heck, I just wish we had more engineers of their calibre, because we need them. We need them almost as much as we need equal equality.

 

[cranky108]

After seeing a recent engineer hired, and the question was asked, I know I did not interview very well, so why was I chosen? The answer that my boss replied was, you were the best candidate that made the best fit with the existing group. This led me to the conculsion that, it isen't always the best or brighest, or even gender, rase or other stuff that matters as much as if the engineer will work well with the existing cluture of the existing engineers that is important.
In this case the engineer that was hired does fit with the group and required only a short adjustment period. So the biasis issue is going away, but the stats may not show that until more of us old guys retire.

On the other hand, we now have more female engineers than we have female tech's, so what's up with that?

 

[KENAT]

"that made the best fit with the existing group"

Interesting, I have some recollection of either some class or some article or similar on discrimination, in some cases limiting recruitment like this could be considered discrimination if it resulted in excluding people that were identifiably different. I think one example was that a company only recruited by notices on internal notice boards, this meant most applicants were from similar background to existing employees and the existing employees were fairly homogenous in terms of race so it could be considered as racism.

Or something like that, not saying I necessarily feel that way but just throwing it out there that without deliberate efforts to be discriminatory there can be implicit discrimination by some definitions.

(Yeah I know this is a terribly vague post, sorry.)

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[JohnRBaker]

However, this does not mean that there is NOT an 'old boys club' mentality at work here. How do we overcome situations like that, wait for the 'old boys' to all retire or die off? But even then, if they've only been hiring other 'boys' who themselves eventually become the 'old boys', how does change come about, or do we have to just wait for the percentages to eventually have their effect, three or four generations later?

And then there is the opposite issue, one that might be even more insidious in nature since it can harm everyone long term.

About 25 years ago when I was managing a team in our Detroit sales office, I needed to hire a full-time system support person to run our training and demo systems (this was before the advent of laptops when everyone used 'workstations' networked to a local compute server, like a VAX or a mid-range IBM mainframe). Anyway, one of my demo guys used to take care of these duties on-the-side but he was really needed full time for the job he was hired for so I got approval to hire a full-time person to do the job as our office had just moved into a larger facility and we were staffing-up to support GM. The problem was that while the person who was going to be hired was going to be working in my office and technically under my daily supervision, this person was really going to be paid out of the budget of our corporate IT support organization (located in St. Louis) so the manager there had the final say as to who got hired and how much they were to be paid, however I did the interviewing and was asked to make recommendations.

Anyway, it turned out that the most qualified person who had applied was a gal who had at one time worked for one of our larger customers doing a similar job and so she would come to the job pre-trained, as it were, and so she was at the top the list I submitted to the manager in St. Louis. The next day we conducted what was a perfunctory phone interview so that the manager in St. Louis could at least ask some questions of his own before we offered anyone the job. All in all, we did three conference calls that day and in the end the guy in St. Louis agreed with me that we should hire my top choice, but before we finished the follow-up call, after which a formal offer was made by the personnel department, also in St. Louis, the manager made this comment to me which to this day I wish I had been recording the phone call (trust me, there were other reasons why I should have recorded ALL of his calls). He said to me, after all the issues were discussed and we had come to an agreement, that he "would have probably hired the gal anyway because he knew he could pay her a lot less since she was still single and the other two male candidates were both married and therefore would have demanded more money". And since the St. Louis office was the ultimate in being an 'old boys club' there was nothing that I could do since I had no budget responsibility in the matter; it was someone else's 'dime', not mine.

This was one of the reasons why I left management when I got the chance to take a well paid staff position in R&D, even if it meant relocating back to California while we had 3 kids still in school.

John R. Baker, P.E.
Product 'Evangelist'
Product Engineering Software
Siemens PLM Software Inc.
Industry Sector
Cypress, CA
Siemens PLM:
UG/NX Museum:

To an Engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.

 

[GregLocock]

...and yet one often heard that getting married/having a kid/etc were supposedly valid reasons for pay rises or promotions. So that may not be sexism so much as marital-status-ism, which was certainly alive and well 20 years ago in the UK.



Cheers

Greg Locock


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[p14175]

Wow! After reading my post again I see it was as clear as mud.

I think the future of women in engineering is positive and I am hoping that the push with the STEM education project will keep it going that way. I consider anything that can help girls realize their potential in STEM subjects is a huge step in the right direction.

What I meant by the website and the statistic was this data is taken at face value and used by parents, teachers, and career counselors with best intentions to convince girls not to become engineers. Engineering is a nontraditional career for women and some people are really uncomfortable with that.

My definition of "looking like the boss" goes like this: "Having enough similarities in previous work or academic experience to be able to eat lunch with the boss and carry on a conversation." Does that make sense? It has to do with having similar life experiences before becoming an engineer. It has nothing to do with racism or discrimination, but feel free to read anything you would like into it.

Here's some very recent material on how to attract women to manufacturing. For once, it's actually a bit positive.

The July 2013 of the SME mag has an article "Help Wanted: Manufacturing Seeks its Other Half"

http://www.sme.org/MEMagazine/Article.aspx?id=74119

which discusses how to attract women to manufacturing

From the Manufacturing Institute, "Untapped resource: How manufacturers can attract, retain, and advance talented women"

http://www.themanufacturinginstitute.org/~/media/D0D064208A994D6A91B0E51CF008BF23.ashx

 

[KENAT]

p14175 were any of the women in the MEMagazine article actually engineers or other technical roles?

"...they are: Director, Industry Strategy & Events Deb Holton; Director of Training & Development Jeannine Kunz; and Industry Manager, Workforce Development Pamela Hurt."

Sounds to me like assorted marketing and HR jobs. Of course this could be seen as an example of women being underrepresenting in technical fields.

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[cranky108]

Maybe I should or should not clarify what I said. In the past we had an engineer that had a different way of thinking, and it became counter productive in the progress of many projects. After he was asked to leave the engineering group, he joined another group, and remained somewhat counter productive until he retired.

As I started after he had joined another group, and before he retired, I had a chance to see some of his work, and I was not impressed. But because of this experence our group is very careful who they hire because members who are too different in thinking can be disruptive and the goal is to produce a product.

So while we do want people with different thinking, we don't want engineers who are disruptive to the product we are tasked to produce. It's a culture thing that we want to perserve because it works.
I know it's a fine line, but it is necessary for smaller groups. Maybe in larger groups several smaller cultures can exist, but in small groups, it dosen't work.

Having said that, we do have pressure to look at new ideas because of the whole population of engineers we have here (our group is mostly electricals, with a couple of civil's), but the other groups which have different products have mechinicals, and civils (and others I don't know about). Each group has a little different culture.

 

[KM]

Female here, been working as an engineer for 24 years. I'm a naturally nerdly type who enjoys crunching numbers all day. FWIW, I've not encountered any discrimination based on my sex.

Boys and girls are different; men and women are different. Not overwhelmingly different, but different enough that few men go shopping for clothes in large groups and few women enjoy cheering themselves hoarse at football games. Not to say none, but they are few and far between.

If only a few women choose to go into engineering, then so be it. I simply do not understand the drive to get more women into engineering simply for the sake of getting more women into engineering. It should be something you like to do. If you like it, go for it. But cajoling people into a field of study that they end up hating later only because some recruiter wanted to make a quota of some sort is, frankly, unethical.

 

[ScottyUK]

I wish I could give you ten stars for that post, but one will have to do.

 

[KENAT]

Ditto to ScottyUK here KM.

If only a few women choose to go into engineering, then so be it. I simply do not understand the drive to get more women into engineering simply for the sake of getting more women into engineering. It should be something you like to do. If you like it, go for it. But cajoling people into a field of study that they end up hating later only because some recruiter wanted to make a quota of some sort is, frankly, unethical.

I've brought this point before and it wasn't well received. Perhaps it will be more palatable coming from a female engineer.

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