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Women in Engineering II 54

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The first report was sponsored by outfits that wanted to be seen as supportive of women, or at least not hostile to them. ... aside from sex-based wage discrimination, of course.

The second report says US demographics are changing. Duh.



Why is it important to anyone that the m/f ratio in engineering, or any trade, should match the m/f ratio in the general population? ... especially given that there are behavioral and physiological differences between the sexes?


Dated example:
You are too young to remember this, but when McDonalds was new, they hired only teenage boys as staff. They guaranteed that a customer would be greeted at the window within something like ten seconds, and it mostly happened that way, because the manager was yelling at anyone who was immobile, and there was always a line of unemployed teenage boys at the back door waiting for someone to be fired so they could have a job, that typically paid twice minimum wage to start. And someone was replaced on nearly every shift, so the survivors literally ran from station to station, fetching orders and such, and sweating so much that they really didn't need to salt the french fries.

Then the world changed. When McDonalds started hiring girls, they had to rebuild the buildings, so there would be wider aisles internally, to accommodate the much larger staff moving slowly around, or standing and waiting for something to happen. When's the last time you saw a teenage girl sweat? Right; never.





Mike Halloran
Pembroke Pines, FL, USA
 
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I don't think that anyone is necessarily arguing the ratio should be exactly 50:50, but there's no obvious reason why it should be 75:25, particularly since girls have historically done better in science and math before getting into high school and ratio is 60:40 in the physical and life sciences. Even outside of STEM, certain countries have demonstrated that the gender ratio in the US for politicians is unusually weighted.

Note, also, women with math degrees actually outnumber men with math degrees in STEM workers. The biggest factor appears to be that nearly 60% of women with STEM degrees and working in STEM have degrees in physical and life sciences. So, given that physics and math are not an impediment for women, that makes the enormous disparity engineering and computer science degrees all the more peculiar.

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I can do absolutely anything. I'm an expert! faq731-376 forum1529 Entire Forum list
 
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IRstuff said:
...that the gender ratio in the US for politicians is unusually weighted.
Click to expand...

I think we are in the process of seeing this change significantly.

John R. Baker, P.E. (ret)
EX-Product 'Evangelist'
Irvine, CA
Siemens PLM:
UG/NX Museum:

The secret of life is not finding someone to live with
It's finding someone you can't live without
 
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I would be disappointed at anyone who set quotas, as having a diverse workforce has it's own reward. In the world of ideas, no one has all the good or bad ideas.
It takes only one person to come up with a new idea, but several people to vet that idea.

What I see, and not to be critical, but more and more engineers are from a non-farm background, not just female, but also male. This is somewhat concerning, in that the farm background I feel makes a better start for engineers. But from that perspective, fewer farm girls, in the past, work on farm equipment.

The reason I have given this thought is that my daughter states she wants to be an engineer, but does not seem to interested in seeing how things work. And it makes me ponder.

 
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Cranky, this goes beyond farm background to a basic interest in how things function.
By and large kids today don't play with physical toys where you build things or make simple machines.
How may electrical engineers over 50 started building Heathkits when they were young?
The same goes for other disciplines.
When I was a kid if we wanted to play we had to build it first.
Everything from simple structures to later, minibikes.
Get a group of kids and let them take stuff apart and put it back together. They will learn lots.
We don't all need to be master mechanics to be good engineers, but we do need an intuitive sense whether something is realistic or not before we do the calculations.
Every good engineer that I have ever worked with was good at estimating things.

= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =
P.E. Metallurgy, Plymouth Tube
 
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I came from a non-farm background and was really the only person in my extended family (I include in this grandparents, parents, aunts, uncles, siblings and 1st cousins) to ever attend engineering school. My father never even finished high school, however, he did run, to help make ends meet, a small engine repair business so while I was still at home I got to help him work on lawn mowers, chainsaws, outboard motors, etc. He also had a full set of metal working tools including a lathe, drill press, welders (both gas and electric), hydraulic press, etc, so he also got involved in all sorts of other more general repair type jobs. He was also a pretty decent carpenter and cabinet maker, although I never got too much into his woodworking projects as I tended to stick with the mechanical stuff. And for the record, his 'day job' was working as a diesel mechanic and heavy equipment operator for the State of Michigan.

John R. Baker, P.E. (ret)
EX-Product 'Evangelist'
Irvine, CA
Siemens PLM:
UG/NX Museum:

The secret of life is not finding someone to live with
It's finding someone you can't live without
 
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I'm 57, but Heathkits were pretty much before my time.
The way kids play is changing, but then again, engineering is, too, so maybe spending hours on computer games is actually more useful (to an engineering degree) than spending hours throwing hay bales around.
 
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Well, I'm 70 and back in the days, I built several Heathkits, including a Shortwave Radio...

gr-91.jpg


...a VTVM (which I still have and still works)...

im-11.jpg


...and finally our first Color TV...

tomorrows_heath_0.jpg


I also still have (and it still works) a Knight Kit Tube Tester that I built when I was in high school...

36218456690_3de6762815_b.jpg


And before you ask, I still have a need for a tube tester as one of my hobbies are radios the 'glow-in-the-dark', my best one being a 1965 Hammarlund HQ-180AC general coverage receiver (AKA shortwave radio):

HQ-180AC_r4cwva.jpg


John R. Baker, P.E. (ret)
EX-Product 'Evangelist'
Irvine, CA
Siemens PLM:
UG/NX Museum:

The secret of life is not finding someone to live with
It's finding someone you can't live without
 
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My son will be 16 this summer. He's capable with basic tools at a level probably 100x that of his peers as a result of projects that we've done together, or the times I've dragged him into things as a 2nd pair of hands, but he has no interest in building anything. And I get it- why would he bother, when the electronic world inside his computer games already provides him with a nearly limitless toolbox at no cost? He has no problems in the physical world that he would need to build something to solve. In his games there are no materials to buy, or scrounge- no safety rules to follow, no need to clean up afterward. He did spec, buy the parts for, and assemble his own gaming machine. Whenever he encountered a problem, there was a Youtube video explaining what you had to do to fix it.

That's with a parent who lives for solving problems in the physical world. Most of his peers have parents who couldn't be bothered to spend five minutes to figure out why the electric lawnmower stopped working- they throw it out and buy another one.

You'd think this would mean that the kids lucky enough to have the interest, inclination and opportunity to solve problems in the physical world combined with the ability in math and science to do an engineering degree would have the world as their oyster. Regrettably it isn't so, and hasn't been for a long, long time. I was one of very few mechanically capable kids in my chem eng class in university and that was decades ago already, before "helicopter parenting" and all that rubbish.

 
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There will be more women engineers when more women graduate from engineering colleges and enter the work force. And that is and has been happening over the decades. When I graduated in 1969, we had 6 women in an engineering school of over 1100. When the article was published in 1992 less than 1% of engineers were women with 20 years of experience. No doubt there were few women enginering managers and roll models for other potential women engineering candidates.

While in college, I met many brilliant women majoring in math, chemistry and physics in my classes. I asked more than a few of them why they weren't planning to be engineers and suggested that they would make considerably more money to start after graduation. A graduate with BS in Chem E would start at over 40% more than a grduate with BS in Chemistry at that time. But I couldn't persaude them to change. I think it was mainly a fear of entering an almost all male world.

 
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Interesting point. Nevertheless, those that entered non-engineering science careers followed trailblazers in those fields as well; it just appears that they were more amenable to change than engineering.

Let's not forget that barely 70 years ago, Crick and Watson became famous, supposedly partly on the back of unpublished work from Rosalind Franklin.

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I can do absolutely anything. I'm an expert! faq731-376 forum1529 Entire Forum list
 
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Supposedly?

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
If you can't explain it to a six year old, you don't understand it yourself.
 
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Odd that the presence of women (or lack thereof) in certain areas of the workforce generates a lot of attention, while relatively little interest is shown in men occupying roles that were traditionally held by women such as nursing.

Maui

 
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Do we really think that there's substantial discrimination that prevents men from exceeding their 14% share of the RN workforce ( particularly since foreign trained 23% of foreign-trained LPNs/LVNs are male.

What's interesting and telling, is that despite their low share of the market, male RNs make more money than female RNs. One cannot show that women engineers make more than male engineers.

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I can do absolutely anything. I'm an expert! faq731-376 forum1529 Entire Forum list
 
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IR, I never said anything about discrimination. I said that I simply find it odd. Perhaps if objective, non-biased studies were performed to determine what motivates each gender to enter a certain career field while avoiding others we would have a better understanding behind what we observe in the workplace regarding the distribution in occupations for each gender. From my own point of view I can understand why many women would not find the occupation of engineering an attractive career choice. For example, they would have to work with us. :)



 
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Here's someone who recently took a stab at the question in the Wall Street Journal:

A portion of the article:
[blue]Why do relatively few women work in science, technology, engineering and mathematics? University of Washington lecturer Stuart Reges —in a provocative essay, “Why Women Don’t Code”—suggests that women’s verbal and analytical skills lead to career choices outside STEM. Mr. Reges’s critics say he is making women feel inferior by implying they aren’t interested in tech. I’m a female engineering professor with decades of experience as well as a background in the humanities and social sciences, so perhaps I can lend some perspective to the controversy.
I’ve observed that women tend to choose disciplines other than STEM, often for the reasons Mr. Reges mentions. Yet his argument is incomplete. An important but often neglected factor is the attitudes of undergraduate professors. Not STEM professors, but professors in the humanities and social sciences.

Professors have profound influence over students’ career choices. I’m sometimes flabbergasted at the level of bias and antagonism toward STEM from professors outside scientific fields. I’ve heard it all: STEM is only for those who enjoy “rote” work. Engineering is not creative. There’s only one right answer. You’ll live your life in a cubicle. It’s dehumanizing. You’ll never talk to anyone. And, of course, it’s sexist. All this from professors whose only substantive experience with STEM is a forced march through a single statistics course in college, if that.

The article points out that there are also good and bad bosses in the workplace and that bias happens all the time, especially in fields like nursing.

Oakley's final paragraph sums it up:
I have experienced bias in my career, but I also would not be where I am today without the strong support of many wonderful men. Women are vitally important to STEM. Professors outside these disciplines should stop mischaracterizing to poach the best students, who are often women. And it’s time for everyone to step back, take a breath, and acknowledge that good and bad bosses and co-workers exist everywhere.[/blue]

And another short article by the same author:



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JAE, that is interesting. I didn't know that the humanities often bashed STEM disciplines in that way. That could certainly influence the choices a college student might make.

 
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