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Women in Engineering II 54

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lacajun

lacajun

Electrical
Apr 2, 2007
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Since the first post on this is closed, I decided to begin a new post.

This is a dated but interesting report that I'm working my way through. As I read through it, I see improvements that can be made to benefit women as well as men.

Women in Engineering: An Untapped Resource

Pamela K. Quillin, P.E.
Quillin Engineering, LLC
NSPE-CO, Central Chapter
Dinner program:
 
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While the best sellers list is one thing, further down in that link are genre by gender, which shows that while the best seller list might be balanced in gender, the genres are almost completely non-overlapping; romance novels appear to be carrying the bulk for female authors, and the 2010 listing only shows 3 women in the top 10, and only 1 is non-romance.

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Are you seriously trying to defend the position that there is no difference in the way men and women think, on average?



Cheers

Greg Locock


New here? Try reading these, they might help FAQ731-376
 
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thread731-451501 may explain a lot about why women are under-represented in engineering.
 
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No.
To pick on one profession which is traditionally seen as female, you could take nursing, where overtime in some workplaces is mandatory.
The practice continues today, even though the risks have been well understood for a long time.

Ridiculously long working hours is not, in practice, a gender issue, when all professions do this to some of their workers somewhere, be they male, female, or a mix.
Want other examples?
Paramedics
Plant maintenance
Linesmen
Farmers
Firemen
Taxi driver
Restaurant manager

Pick a male/female ratio and fit that to a career choice, whichever one you need to suit your argument, and you can find a work/life balance that's out of whack.

No one believes the theory except the one who developed it. Everyone believes the experiment except the one who ran it.
STF
 
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As I understand it, in the US, firemen and paramedics typically works 3 days on/4 days off, and paid as such. They, and police, often use overtime to boost earnings for pension calculations.

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GregLocock said:
Back to the old numbers game. Off the top of your head how many male composers of classical music can you name? (I'm guessing sixty) Female? (Four) What is the structural reason why there is this imbalance, it can scarcely be due to physical requirements? Or is it innate? If I do the same with novelists there is a much smaller mismatch.
Click to expand...

Classical music is a wretchedly terrible metric to enter into this conversation, because most of it was composed in prior centuries. We know for a fact that the socioeconomics in prior centuries were very heavily weighted against women doing things like composing classical music. We could call that 'sexism' or we could call that 'the reality of the 18th century,' but whatever we do call it, it's obvious that it's not currently applicable, which makes the discussion moot. If you're going to use this metric at all, you need to limit yourself to classical music composers within the last 20 or 30 years, and that nukes your data pool. The discussion is basically not worth having.

Now, if we expand the discussion to all current music, we may still see some gender gap. Some of that gender gap might be due to sexism, and some of it might be due to "male variability hypothesis," although I won't take a position on either. I'm not sure MVH applies to creativity. I'm not even sure how creativity would be objectively measured to make the case. MVH is most solid when you look at things like ASVAB scores, which are specifically tailored to more workplace specific traits.

Which brings up another weird thought I've been tooling on for about a year. Is there a gender gap in things like personality or charisma? If so, does it skew towards women? I think it might be possible. (I think a lot of women would emphatically support that idea, quite honestly) If that's the case, and the slow march of AI and automation continues to consume all the professional jobs for which ASVAB style Male Variability Hypothesis applies, then we could see ourselves shift in the next 50 years away from a technocratic, intelligence based economy and more towards a creative one, where the robots do basically all the math. What sort of gender gaps are going to be in that new world? Probably not a popular thing to ponder on an engineering forum.



Hydrology, Drainage Analysis, Flood Studies, and Complex Stormwater Litigation for Atlanta and the South East -
 
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One thing that hasn't been fully covered here is the actual environment, i.e., is the discipline's environment conducive to encouraging women to stay the course. One study would suggest that it's not the case, at least, for physics:
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I'd wager that if that survey was given to a group of females in any undergrad program 3/4 of them would also claim to have been harassed.

Its called being young, and not something I see as reflective of the workplace or industry.
 
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In a survey of women pursuing US undergraduate degrees in physics...
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It appears they're talking about undergrad students, who typically range from 18-22'ish.
 
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But, the harassment isn't solely from fellow students; their professors are not in the 18-22 age group. Moreover, the professors carry a tremendous level of influence on future endeavors; a nasty professor or faculty advisor could easily dissuade someone from pursuing an otherwise plausible career.

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We also specified that these actions may have come from other students, high school teachers, instructors, or professors. We did not, however, ask students to explicitly report who perpetrated these actions.
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Ultimately this seems more a shock and outrage piece than an overly scientific study.
 
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So, that it's OK and should be the norm that our daughters and wives get harassed because, what, "boys will be boys?"
d41586-018-05404-6_15853338.png


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Of the 455 people who responded, 338 reported experiencing some form of sexual harassment, including gender harassment — such as being ignored because of their sex or gender, or being told inappropriate jokes — unwanted sexual attention or a combination thereof during the previous two years.
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By those definitions I've been harassed countless times since childhood by both men and women.

No, its not ok for anyone to be harassed in any significantly harmful sense nor is it the norm.
 
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I'd like to read that study (but probably won't pay $50 for it). Actual study:


In particular, I'd like to know what their definitions of "sexist hostility" and "crude behavior" and such are, to suss out sampling bias. I imagine there may be many activities that would be flagged by this study that women would report as sexist, and men wouldn't report as sexist, even if the activity itself was identical. If so, the graphs may simply reflect differing definitions of what counts as harassment among the sexes themselves. Or they could reflect a cultural norm among men to not report such activities.

It also bears mentioning that the graphs are meaningless unless they give a baseline - meaning we need to see the data for both men and women. Only showing it for women is a data visualization trick that makes the reader presume that for men the bars are all at zero.

I'm not saying this isn't a problem, but I'm definitely saying that these links don't do a good job of presenting that problem fairly. The Nature article is semi-scientific clickbait, which is an unfortunate recent trend with that publication.

Hydrology, Drainage Analysis, Flood Studies, and Complex Stormwater Litigation for Atlanta and the South East -
 
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SparWeb said:
Working it out rhetorically rather than just figuring it out clearly before I start typing.
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That's perfectly normal. Many of us do that. :) How else can we work out ideas sometimes? Dialogue is good, don't ya' think?

CWB1 said:
By those definitions I've been harassed countless times since childhood by both men and women.
Click to expand...

Who knew you were such a stud muffin? :)

Compositepro, I experienced that often working in plants. Some managers understand and give comp time whereas others don't. It's a mixed bad.

There are differences between men and women that are indisputable. However, there are a lot of aspects in common and I believe those are the points of discussion that many women would like to work out.

Pamela K. Quillin, P.E.
Quillin Engineering, LLC
NSPE-CO, Central Chapter
Dinner program:
 
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lacajun said:
CWB1 said:
By those definitions I've been harassed countless times since childhood by both men and women.
Click to expand...
Who knew you were such a stud muffin? smile
Click to expand...

How do you think people would react if a guy made a similar comment to a woman who talked about being sexually harassed in the workplace?
 
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