The future of women in Engineering... 17

[LSpark]

I'm not sure it will be much more palatable coming from a female engineer, at least that hasn't been my experience. I've been working in engineering for the last 18 years and have mainly kept clear of women only events as I don't agree with them. I've been asked why by some fairly senior managers and have been told that my view is selfish, not everyone is as confident as me and lots of women do need additional encouragement and guidance.

I was very pleased to hear that a few men had slipped into a recent presentation at one of the womens lunchtime sessions - it was on a topic that would be of interest to any engineer regardless of gender.

If I could go back in time I would chose the same career path. I don't feel I've been discriminated against for being female, if anything there was a small element of positive discrimination at the start.

 

[cranky108]

The statment "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.", while it is a trueism, has a few problems for our profession (engineering) as a whole.
One is that none of us want the image of being a boys club, and all the societal attention it brings. There is no intent by most engineers to be a so called boys club. A professional club maybe, as most of us perfer the techicnal side of the profession.
Another is if too few women attempt to become engineers, then the education, and managments will tend to fill up with men who feel woment don't beling in engineering.

Now I may be wrong about this, but this is my perspective until I am convenced otherwise.

What I see with men who fail at engineering, is they attempt to remain in the techinical areas (many of them), and end up as technications. I don't see that with women, and I can't explain why. This is in general terms, and not true in every case.

 

[KENAT]

LSpark "have been told that my view is selfish, not everyone is as confident as me and lots of women do need additional encouragement and guidance" sounds a little bit condescending and sexist in itself. Is the need for additional encouragement and guidance


Cranky, if "There is no intent by most engineers to be a so called boys club" then why does it follow that "if too few women attempt to become engineers, then the education, and managments will tend to fill up with men who feel woment don't beling in engineering"?

That seems somewhat self contradictory, unless you're intentionally implying that the kind of male engineers that migrate to management are also a bunch of sexist pigs?

Despite what KM & LSpark have said there have been some female members that have posted about being on the receiving end of discrimination, so I'm not going to claim it doesn't exist or that we shouldn't care about it.

However, I'm still not sold on large scale efforts with specific targeted stated goal of 'get more women into engineering', I still can't seem to get my head around a really good reason why engineering or any other profession should have the same gender distribution as the population at large.

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[TenPenny]

I think the goal should be to make sure ALL WOMEN understand that, if Engineering appeals to them, the door is open. Same goes for every field. The goal shouldn't be to encourage 'women' to become engineers, it should be to ensure that women know that it's a viable career option. Some times, that means that women already in the field have to make sure others can see them as a successful example.

 

[KENAT]

Oops, first line of my 14 Aug 13 11:23 post should have been "Is the need for additional encouragement and guidance really unique to females?".

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[rconnor]

I’d like to comment on the idea “if few females want to go into engineering, then so be it”. Although I don’t have any issue with it in principle, it misses the larger issue. Few females want to go into engineering because it is dissuaded by our culture. Gender roles, which are entirely artificial constructs of our society, are beat into us early and then continually through our development. Subliminally (and sometime explicitly) we are told that engineering is a male profession. Parents by their daughters Barbie’s and their sons Lego. Daughters help their Moms with the baking, sons help their Dads in the garage. It’s also no surprise that woman who grew up around and worked with technology at a young age tend to be the ones that go on to become engineers. We don't really choose the field we go into, it's a by-product of our upbringing, culture, parents, friends, etc.

This brings up the next question, is there anything intrinsically wrong with lower numbers of female engineers? Why should we actively try to increase the number of females that enter the field? A discipline based around creativity and innovation, such as engineering, benefits greatly from diversity. Different minds, different backgrounds and different perspectives allows for a greater spectrum of ideas and solutions. Furthermore, and more importantly, technical fields are the highest paying (undergrad) disciplines on average and are also those that females are steered away from by cultural norms. The societal cycle of undervaluing females is reinforced by deterring females from entering highly valued (in terms of both remuneration and respect) fields of employment. Don’t think that’s the case? Watch this great/simple experiment which highlights our gender bias when it comes to career vs family.

Now the tricky part, how do you effectively change this situation? I agree, in part, with people that say it’s silly to put in some abstract quota to fill. It doesn’t matter if you have to fill 20 out of 50 spots reserved for females if you don’t have 20 (qualified) females who want the spots. However, this tackles the issue of more overt sexism. Although the more obvious forms of sexism are lessening they are still there and still need dealing with. Female only scholarships to technical programs is a little better of a solution. It makes it more appealing to enter into technical fields but only financially, it doesn’t do anything to (directly) combat the cultural deterrents.

Having said that, both these initiatives get more females into the field, which is important. As the percentage of females in engineering increases, it will be more attractive for young females to enter the field. One of the biggest issues I’ve heard (both in articles and anecdotally) is the alienation that females feel being one of few females in classroom dominated by men. Furthermore, attempting to tackle the core issue (the issue of culture) is much more difficult. How do you shape and mold culture to have a desired output, what will the unintended side-effects be? Perhaps it is more effective to address the issue at the end of the cycle (employment) rather than the beginning (development). Maybe the core of the issue can be solved by fixing the surface issue.

 

[graybeach]

rconner - well said! I would also point out that women engineers are generally paid less than male engineers with equivalent qualifications and work duties. There are many reasons for this, but the law of supply and demand says that the supply of women engineers will be lower if the pay is lower. By the way baking is actually great training for engineering. I love to bake and was delighted to see the giant hobart mixers in the concrete lab. Sewing is excellent training as well.

 

[KENAT]

Perhaps we (and I suspect some folk have) should look at how other professions that were once male dominated became more equal. Medicine & Law spring to mind though I haven't double checked the stats. Why are they now more equal while engineering still has large disparity? Did they have programs like those mentioned/proposed above or was it an unforced change?

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[LSpark]

Kenat - I'm on the bottom rung of management now and I can say with confidence that not just female engineers need encouragement and guidance!

Graybeach - I don't think females in my company are paid less than men (apart from pro-rataing for part timers). I don't know if this is more common in the UK or if I'm just lucky. I've been part time since I had children and whilst this has slowed my progression it hasn't killed it, again perhaps I'm lucky?

Positive role models to promote engineering to women are a good thing and something that I fully support. I went on two engineering taster courses before I applied to university, one was a WISE (Women Into Science and Engineering) event in Manchester and the other open to all in Newcastle. It was the Newcastle event that sold engineering to me (and I will be forever grateful to my physics teacher who put me forward for that course), the Manchester one was uninteresting and there were quite a lot of girls there who were only there because they had been made to go. This is probably the main reason that I've disagree with women only events throughout my career.

I'm not totally convinced by the social conditioning argument. My Mum bought me dolls and pink things when I was a young child but I still gravitated towards lego and the like. I also did a lot of cooking with my Mum and helped with the childcare as a teenager. That said I was never told that I couldn't do science/engineering and my parents supported in me in my chosen subjects/career path. I can't fathom why parents would actively discourage their girls from engineering, perhaps more visible, positive role models would be a better way forward than positive discrimination?

 

[SLTA]

I want to be an engineer, I'm a woman, and I have had to fight my way into that almost every step of the way. I know of a lot of women who wanted to be engineers and went to school but got tired of the undercurrent of "you can't really do this."

I'm glad that's not been the experience for all women; don't discount the damage it does when it has.

 

[cranky108]

KENAT the comment "unless you're intentionally implying that the kind of male engineers that migrate to management are also a bunch of sexist pigs?" is not what I had in mind. But it is true that some of them are. I sort of had in mind that some engineers who enter into managment are pigs <end of line>. And with managers rising to the level of there incompendance, you have the worst set of conditions.

Saying engineers that go into managment are sexist pigs, is like saying NFL players commit crimes.

 

[TenPenny]

I'm always amazed that people still claim women can't or shouldn't be engineers, back in the 80's when I was in school, a significant chunk of the students were women, nobody ever questioned it. Highest proportions were in Chemical and Civil Engineering.

That said, the comment about having more women in engineer just as in medicine reminded me of a point: female doctors generally work fewer hours than male doctors, because for the most part, the female doctors have more of a priority on family. So, with more women in engineering, the spin off will likely be fewer engineers willing to work 60 and 80 hour weeks on a fixed salary. And this is a good thing for everyone.

 

[cranky108]

TenPenny maybe you just hit the clamed issue of men making more that women on the head. It may not be just that men make more then women, but that some men are willing to work many more hours than women (I don't know, but I'm trying to understand).
This is a different issue than the in general men make more than women issue in the general media, because this media issue does not take into account different occupations, or education levels.

However I know in myself, I generally don't take vacation, unless I am told "Use it or loose it", so I take December vacations..

 

[SomptingGuy]

Wow! Home life so bad that you make excuses for staying at work? Why would that even be a male thing?

- Steve

 

[JohnRBaker]

...I generally don't take vacation, unless I am told "Use it or loose it", so I take December vacations.

Another reason for living in California. Out here your vacation days belong to ONLY you! Granted, it's your employer's choice whether to pay you for your unused vacation days each year or whether you're allowed to accumulate them (where I work, they accumulate). Now that does not necessarily insulate your from those annual 'use em or lose em' threats coming down from corporate, just that if you live in California (and I think Illinois as well) you can simply ignore them. Of course, you may still be 'asked' to 'Please take your vacation days' since in reality these accumulated days must be carried on the books as an outstanding liability, like any other 'unpaid' invoice, which in fact those vacation days represent, at least to the 'bean-counters'.

In the case of our company it appears that until you get up to about 50 days in the bank (currently I earn 30 days per year, but often only take 15 or 20) you won't get anything more then a simple 'PLEASE take your vacation days' notice. However, I understand, from a few people who actually have managed to reach that magic number of 50 or so, that the pressure does start to rise significantly. My goal is to get at least close to the 50 number and then simply hold it at that level until I retire because at that moment they must pay you for them, which would then feel like I was getting 10 weeks of 'severance' pay and it would be paid at the rate I was making at THAT moment and not necessarily when they were actually earned (which I guess is another good reason why companies don't like the idea of allowing people to accumulate unpaid vacation days). Anyway, that's the plan and I'm about halfway there ;-)

John R. Baker, P.E.
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[cranky108]

Home life is not that bad. It's that I don't like spending hot summer days on vacation. I would rather vacation in Winter, but the childrens school schedule limits that too.

Besides, who will feed the dog, water the yard, mow the grass, tend the garden, etc. for less than some exorbinate amount?

And where would I want to go, that is better than where I live?

 

[dicksewerrat]

Where I used to work, you could donate those extra days to some who needed them. I gave about 30 days to a guy that was going through Chemo. He didn't get my pay grade but he did get a full check for 6 more weeks. Other people did this too. It is a way for the employer and employee to do something for someone else.

Richard A. Cornelius, P.E.

http://WWW.amlinereast.com

 

[KENAT]

"This is a different issue than the in general men make more than women issue in the general media, because this media issue does not take into account different occupations, or education levels."

Cranky, I used to think similar but then heard/saw some stats that at least claimed to adjust for these and similar points and still showed a disparity. I still wonder but am more open to the idea that perhaps a significant number of women are still actually paid less for doing the same job with same experience, same output... as men.

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[PhilBW]

Has anyone heard of efforts to recruit males into predominantely female professions, such as nursing?

 

[JohnRBaker]

I don't know whether he was recruited or not, but one of the guys in my Bible study group left engineering several years ago to go back to school to become a registered nurse. He said he had never felt that his job was as personally rewarding as was his wife's, who was already an RN. The last time the subject came up, he reiterated that it was the best career decision he had ever made.

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.