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Women Engineers.... 44

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jmw

jmw

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Jun 27, 2001
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This topic has come up a couple of times, how to encourage more women to take up engineering and how to make the environment for women more acceptable.
This is an article about a female chief engineer on board a ship....
Juliana,28, works as a chief engineer on an oil tanker. Mother to a 13 year old girl, Juliana lives with her family in Vitoria, Brazil. She is one of the very few women chief engineer and enjoys every moment of her professional life. Juliana wants to motivate girls around the world to come forward and explore the numerous opportunities that Marine Industry provides.
Click to expand...


JMW
 
The first thing that needs to happen is that men in engineering need to stop acting like jerks.

I went into engineering believing that women were fewer in number but on an otherwise equal footing. It was late-20th Century America, after all. Any women who complained were just playing the "Gender Card".

20 years later, I'm convinced most women engineers leave engineering because they are treated like crap. Seen it with my own eyes.
 
I'm convinced most women engineers leave engineering because they are treated like crap.

I actually think that most women engineers who leave engineering do so because they are smart enough to realize that they don't have to put up with this crap.
 
I worked somewhere, just a pathetic place in so many ways, and it was common thought that every project manager had to make one of the women cry before they were promoted. If I hadn't seen this myself I wouldn't believe it. I think I saw all but 2 women cry at this work place.

On a positive note, all the women I went to school with are still doing very well in their work places, I am 32 and graduated in 2002.

And I think DVD's sounds right on the dot for both genders.

B+W Engineering and Design
Los Angeles Civil and Structural Engineering
 
There is currently a fantastic four part series on the BBC called the British at work. It tracks the workplace from post WW2 to the current day.

It shows the whole sorry mess from virtually total employment but with many mind numbing jobs, virtually zero health and safety, sexism and racism common place, weak management, outdated work practices, militant unions, lazy workforces, etc.

The sexism side is very interesting from advertising secretarial roles where vital statistics and looks are a requirement and the only female engineer on the Concord project and how she was paid less, missed out on promotion and male colleagues were asked why have you brought your wife to this meeting?

Much of this is so cringe worthy it almost seems impossible it happened, however it does make me wonder how we have now reached the stage where it is nearly impossible to employ a female in a crucial role at a small company who is likely to have children, when you look at the current employment law regarding maternity leave it is plain stupid and actually creates the very thing it started out trying to prevent.

Pretty much the same applies to health and safety you look on in horror at people working in a foundry with little or no protective clothing but I do wonder at what point we became so stupid that it is now common place for companies not to allow a kettle in the work place on the grounds of health and safety.

A couple of weeks ago there was a European ruling that insurance companies could not offer cheaper insurance to women drivers who were a lower risk than their male counterparts as it was sexist, that to me is plain stupid. How long before some Eurocrat decides that to charge a 96 year old more money for life insurance than a 16 year old is ageist?

We do seem to have gone from the sublime to the ridiculous and I would guess at some point we must have had the balance about right, I just have no idea when it was.

 
Did no one think the tone of the article rather patronising?
The intent may have been good but somehow this didn't seem to quite hit the target.

I know I did, but I wasn't sure if it was just poor journalism or "Hey, look guys,here's the little woman who is happy to get her hands covered in grease and who can change a filter...."
Or, as they actually said:
Juliana loves to put her hands in grease. She changes oil, filters of marine engines and attends all routine performance and maintenance needs.
Click to expand...

It read like someone down the pub bragging that his wife or girlfriend could actually do something like check the oil and water in her car and put air in the tyres and maybe, just maybe, change a wheel on her own.

As chief engineer she should be capable of a great deal more which isn't mentioned. Emergency repairs to the water treatment plant, cylinder head replacements and everything else that goes with the job.
It might have been nice to describe her job as chief engineer, as that of any engineer, and treat the fact that she is a "female" as incidental and let us get the point that this is a mum with a beautiful young daughter.

JMW
 
OK, I'll bite even though last time it offended a few people.

Why should we encourage more women, or any other identifiable group, into engineering essentially at the expense of other 'over represented' groups?

Why do we assume every profession, or similar group, should be equally populated by members of every color, creed, sex & race?

Don't get me wrong, obviously there is some use in tracking demography in professions since particularly low representation of a group compared to in other similar professions may indicate there is a genuine issue of discrimination or similar.

I just am not convinced that all professions should automatically have equal representation.

I haven't noticed particularly better or worse treatment of women at work. I noticed better treatment of them in academia though.

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KENAT:

It's not so much that professions have to have equal representation. It's that many groups, such as women (collectively) want equal opportunities and no workplace discrimination, and yet there are professions such as engineering where they are almost totally nonexistent. It’s worth wondering what’s up with that.

We should encourage women into engineering under the same premise that we should encourage anyone into engineering that has the interest and the mindset to do it. Race and gender should not be an issue. If we, not as men but as a society, are doing this to a satisfactory level and women on the whole just aren’t interested, well okay. But it’s not certain that we are.

Still, I agree jmw that the article seems a little silly. I mean, good for this woman engineer, but the article is trumpeting it up so much that it sounds like some sort of major accomplishment instead of a lifestyle that is a reasonable thing to live. The quote that gets me is:
She has to play the role of a mother, a wife, a girlfriend, a boss, and finally a warrior! Something not everyone can do!
Click to expand...
But, a male in this position would not be “a father, husband, boyfriend, boss, and a warrior,” despite the fact that all of these titles would apply to him as well. This would all be expected of him as a guy. Yet, when it’s about a woman, it sounds like she’s some sort of superhero for having a real career. Not exactly advancing the cause here.
 
I think the article says far more about journalism than it does engineering.

Regards,

Mike

 
Hey, I'm fine with informing people that have an aptitude and interest about how great engineering is (not that you'd think it from the amount of whining on this site;-)), I thought that thread recently about a guy who wanted to do some simple engineering demo at a career day type event was great...

I just think whether they're female or male should be mostly irrelevant.

At least in the UK there were extra sponsorships and the like for females going into engineering. Physics teachers and math teachers etc. would go out of their way to encourage the girls to consider engineering.

Heck, my US wife was encouraged almost to the point of harassment by a math teacher (or maybe it was a lecturer at college) to enter the engineering program based solely on the fact she was reasonable at algebra.

It is probably worth spending a little time wondering why the number of women in engineering hasn't increased the same way it has in medicine and law.

However, starting out with a premise that 'we should have more women in engineering' seems a flawed starting point.

I've seen/read/heard various articles about how on average womens & mens brains are different and how they tend to do better in certain exercises etc. and how there are trends between male and female children at an early age as which subjects they prefer...

Maybe it's just that generally more men have the required inbuilt biological factors to make them good engineers or want to be engineers or how ever it works.

This certainly shouldn't be used as an excuse to limit opportunities for women though.

The other argument might be because they don't see many female role models in engineering etc, part of the whole nature V nurture argument. Then again, how many male engineer role models do boys see compared to other professions?

Perhaps we need more female engineer role models and more publicity for their achievements, and 'Mrs. Schilling's Orifice' may not be quite the standard bearer we'd want!;-)

Maybe engineers tend to be sexist bigots (you might be forgiven for thinking so given the odd comment in the pub etc.), and that's the issue, if so then some action is probably warranted.

Then again, there are careers that are dominated by women, are equal efforts being made to encourage men into them? Somewhere on 'Nurse-Tips.com' is there a thread about encouraging men to become registered nurses?

Posting guidelines faq731-376 (probably not aimed specifically at you)
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With regard to underprepresented populations, e.g. women and minorities...

Real talent is such a rare commodity that we can ill afford to exclude any segment of the population or discriminate based on arbitrary accidents of birth.
 
We do seem to have gone from the sublime to the ridiculous and I would guess at some point we must have had the balance about right, I just have no idea when it was.
Click to expand...

We seem to forget that once upon a time the UK was such an equal place we treated men, women and children exactly the same...and sent them all down coal mines or into the textile factories.

This restriction of women to 'eye candy' roles (as portrayed in Mad Men for example) seems to have been something of an early C20th anomaly, to an extent, although I accept there don't appear to have been any female Brunels or the like (that we know of). But then again it's not like every male engineer had the ability or showmanship to write his name in history.

 
The whole topic of equality reminds me of sports teams. They are not a fair in hireing, so why don't more people boycot them?

I'm sorry life isen't fair. However I work with several women engineers and they do bring a different perspective into things, which is good.



 
I don't know if any group should be encouraged to go into engineering but I do feel the work environment in many industries is heavily biased towards straight white males. I have worked places were interns and junior engineers who weren't this were basically chased off or marginalized.
 
Diversity of thought is the main goal for any well developed team or company. If you or your company does not get it now, you and your company will be left behind. The next generation of employees will be made of smart people from different places and of course made of both genders. If you hang on to this gray beard thinking, it will blind you to people on one side of the room and not realize that you actually need all the people in the whole room to find the right solutions. The world is changing if you like it or not. While more and more larger companies are realizing if they can create a non-biased environment, they can either hire twice the smart people than just main stream white males or hire other people with a different thought (and experience) process than main stream white males.

Homogenous thought (one way of thinking) will stagnate innovation. Diversity of though (many ways of thinking because the people have different backgrounds) will spur innovation.



Tobalcane
"If you avoid failure, you also avoid success."
“Luck is where preparation meets opportunity”
 
Twoballcane:

You kind of imply that ideas and viewpoints are based totally on ethnicity and gender, and that all white males think alike and loading up on them is somehow deadly to innovation. Encouraging diversity for the sheer purpose of diversity itself is a sort of anti-racism that's no better than its opposite.

The goal should be to get a group of talented, qualified people, regardless of what gender or ethnic background they come from. If this means a largely diverse group of every color in the rainbow, great. If this means a group of pale old white guys, also great. As long as can get the job done, all else shouldn't factor in.

Likewise, I feel that the article in the OP would have been far more effective if it had done less to promote the woman engineer as some sort of hero and had taken the tone that her occupation and lifestyle was reasonable, livable, and really not that much of a big deal. Making her seem like some sort of superwoman only enforces the idea that you have to be extremely strong of mind and body to be a woman in a male-dominated occupation, which should be exactly the opposite of what they were trying to accomplish.
 
You grossly underestimate the power that culture exerts on behavior. Individuals vary, but I there are some surprising consistencies across populations.
 
“You kind of imply that ideas and viewpoints are based totally on ethnicity and gender, and that all white males think alike and loading up on them is somehow deadly to innovation.”

Hmmm Silicone, are white males starting to feel discriminated based on some dum stereo typical view that somebody else has? Welcome to the world of others who are not white males.


“The goal should be to get a group of talented, qualified people, regardless of what gender or ethnic background they come from. If this means a largely diverse group of every color in the rainbow, great. If this means a group of pale old white guys, also great. As long as can get the job done, all else shouldn't factor in. “

The status quo of these teams is made up of white males. Don’t kid yourself. A white male will be hired over others even if his skill level is slightly less than the other candidates. Studies have been done on this. If there is no difference between having a diversified team than a pasty white male team, then why the push back as may here have indicated?

Also, let me clarify, Diversity of Thought includes all (white males included) and it is inclusive to all people who can contribute to the solution. Not for the purpose of nationality or gender, but for the purpose of different though process thru different cultures and family upbringing.


Tobalcane
"If you avoid failure, you also avoid success."
“Luck is where preparation meets opportunity”
 
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