Women in Engineering II 54

[lacajun]

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:

http://nspe-co.org/events.php

 

[IRstuff]

"if a "system" is made of nonracist people then the system won't be racist itself. "

You clearly argue the exact opposite 3 paragraphs later. If we all started perfectly non-racist and non-sexist as babies, we, like your neural nets, learn by example. We learn and assimilate the fact that 99% of the people currently in power are old, white men, and that taller Nordic types are the power players below them. We learn and assimilate that black and gay people are token participants in everyday life.

It's no different than watching one's weight; it's an ongoing and continual exercise to exercise and maintain the desired calorie counts. People mistake being vigilant as "trumpeting" but we don't claim that our continuing and constant battle against bad actors in our cyber lives as "trumpeting" some sort of PC behavior. Does anyone seriously doubt that Russia, China, etal, aren't engaged in cyber activities against American interests?

TTFN (ta ta for now)
I can do absolutely anything. I'm an expert!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg

faq731-376 forum1529 Entire Forum list

http://www.eng-tips.com/forumlist.cfm

 

[beej67]

You clearly argue the exact opposite 3 paragraphs later.

Yep. Now that these non-human actors are in play, we can build a system out of non-human actors that exhibits systemic racism without realizing it. Prior, all the nodes in our systems were ultimately people.

That's my view, anyway.

Hydrology, Drainage Analysis, Flood Studies, and Complex Stormwater Litigation for Atlanta and the South East -

http://www.campbellcivil.com

 

[IRstuff]

You miss my point, which is that even if you dropped a bunch of non-racist people into the current world, they would learn, just like the neural nets, by example, and become racist. So that "system" of non-racists would become racist and sexist. You would have to actively force this system to constantly reset itself to maintain any level of unbias.

TTFN (ta ta for now)
I can do absolutely anything. I'm an expert!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg

faq731-376 forum1529 Entire Forum list

http://www.eng-tips.com/forumlist.cfm

 

[vthomidis]

....in 2 words it is called "victimhood obsession"...

 

[HamburgerHelper]

If you want to take that angle, anyone who is religious has a "don't sin obsession". Anyone who exercises has a "be healthy obsession".

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
If you can't explain it to a six year old, you don't understand it yourself.

 

[IRstuff]

This has been the traditional tactic since time immemorial; attack, denigrate, and ridicule the victim, because men are obviously not responsible for their actions or are constantly being accused of rape by radical feminists, and demonstrate why women don't even tell their own families about such things.

This is precisely why only 35% of sexual assaults are even reported and why 1 in 6 women will get sexually assaulted in their lifetimes. These statistics are simply unacceptable in a civilized society.

Certainly, if my wife or daughter got attacked, I wouldn't be blaming them; I'd go find the SOB(s) responsible and beat the crap out of them and make sure they'll never even think about doing anything with their 5th appendage besides peeing ever again.


TTFN (ta ta for now)
I can do absolutely anything. I'm an expert!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg

faq731-376 forum1529 Entire Forum list

http://www.eng-tips.com/forumlist.cfm

 

[vthomidis]

Hamburgerhelper,since you mention religion - my thoughts exactly, political correctness is the "middle ages" of today ( inquisition included as I can see...)

 

[IRstuff]

( inquisition included as I can see...)

only if men never lie and never sexually assault women, which has been positively demonstrated with Weinstein, Lauer, etal, to be patently false.

Which is more likely, that a guilty man will lie about their crime, or that a woman would go through abuse, innuendo, etc., to lie about a fake attack?

TTFN (ta ta for now)
I can do absolutely anything. I'm an expert!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg

faq731-376 forum1529 Entire Forum list

http://www.eng-tips.com/forumlist.cfm

 

[CWB1]

Which is more likely, that a guilty man will lie about their crime, or that a woman would go through abuse, innuendo, etc., to lie about a fake attack?

I believe you mean the relief and sympathy.

Ask a group of men who are <40 and have "been around" quite a bit. A very common female excuse in recent decades for having been caught 1. cheating, 2. sleeping with someone others disapprove of, or 3. sleeping with someone they personally regret is "rape." THAT is why so many are unreported - bc they're simply not true. I personally experienced all three of the above btw and would recommend contacting the police before going after a "guilty" man. Even "good" girls make these ridiculous claims and from experience, involving the police quickly resolves the truth of the matter.

 

[vthomidis]

I used to believe brainwashing and fanaticism to be incompatible with engineering.Not always the case as it seems...

 

[beej67]

You miss my point, which is that even if you dropped a bunch of non-racist people into the current world, they would learn, just like the neural nets, by example, and become racist. So that "system" of non-racists would become racist and sexist.

I've had this discussion before, and in the end, it all comes down to the interlocutors opinions on free will. If you believe that all people are neural net based robots who react to stimuli the same way the Amazon bot does, then your case is iron clad. I grant you this up front. I have a differing opinion of the nature of humanity.

Hydrology, Drainage Analysis, Flood Studies, and Complex Stormwater Litigation for Atlanta and the South East -

http://www.campbellcivil.com

 

[lacajun]

the better use of effort in the short-term is turning an inequality of perception to an advantage.

My last director of engineering told me that I needed to "learn how to make being a woman work for me." My work was not speaking for itself and had not been for many years.

There are many forms of aggression and some do not belong in a professional setting, from what I consider to be highly educated people working in a professional setting. Evidently others agree because HR usually produces an employee handbook stating such behaviors are unacceptable. I thought as a small business owner I wouldn't have the need for an employee handbook. I was wrong and had to do it. People endlessly surprise me with crazy thoughts.

beej67, much of it, though dated, still applies. That was what struck me, as I read it. When I, as an older woman, have men 20 years my junior tell me that I have no business being an engineer or running my own company because I've taken "the" spot a man should have, that really sums it up. Just by getting the engineering degree I had taken "a" spot a man should have. As if that's the way life really works... Is there a lottery system to attend public institutions of higher learning? And what if no man fills that spot? Should I still go elsewhere? Men and women are doing things all the time in all aspects of life. Life is very dynamic not some rigid system of whatever their biases are. There are plenty of white, male owned companies that will not take on risky projects.

There are a lot of changes employers could make that would ease the burdens of life for their employees rather than make them continue in hardships. They don't, I suppose, because of greed. They're in the business to make as much money as possible and that means full-time employees making the money for them because they cannot do it alone, which is obvious to all. Some of the pieces that would make things better for women would also make things better for men, too. Families are units so when one has a hardship due to work the unit has hardship. I cannot see it any other way.

And I am very sorry your wife has cancer and hope she makes a full recovery. I hope your family supports you, too.

A friend attacked me recently blaming me for all of my career problems. He accused me, wrongly, of being arrogant and thinking less of him because he didn't get an engineering degree. I was floored by every accusation. I apologized but even that wasn't enough and wasn't deemed genuine. I was floored by that, too. I could do nothing right. Yet, the first time he broached the career problems years earlier, the example he used was a "sweet, young thing" doing great in sales. In my 50's, I'm not exactly young and some think I'm not sweet. He didn't even understand the adjectives he used in his example. Sex, with men, is a powerful motivator, whether they think they'll get sex from a sex kitten in sales or not. Some women, I know, use that to their advantage and they are fully aware that time is limited so they need to make the most of their time regardless of who they step on, too.

For the record, I will glove up and clean just about any toilet. I don't think arrogant people will do that or even come close to thinking it. I also don't discriminate against others for the education they get and I'm very tired of people doing it to me. It doesn't happen often but it does happen. We all make our choices and I am glad that others make theirs and invest in themselves through education.

So, in principle, and in practice, one could advertise jobs, but tailor the ads to exclude all sorts of undesirable segments, like women, or minorities.

And that does happen.

As I've posted before, a man young enough to be my son refused to do business with me because he didn't think I could do the work. He "knew" how things worked. I was a front for a male owned engineering firm, which I would hire to "really" do the work because they could and I couldn't. It's just like the black owned engineering firms, which were his words. I was floored that he would say those things and surprised at his ignorance of how business does work. I don't care to do business with people like that.

I'm not a big fan of trumpeting "systemic sexism/racism!" all day every day like many other people seem to do.

I don't either but sadly it is systemic and much of it hasn't been dealt with adequately because there are no adults in the room. I use "room" in a very broad sense.

....in 2 words it is called "victimhood obsession"...

And while males are taking that exact tack now even though while males still have the bulk of the power, position, etc. A white male (ChemE) told me at work many years ago that they have the power, position, money, etc. and they're not about to give it up. They'll fight to keep it. So, as laws are made to level the playing field, they devise new, more subtle ways to discriminate against people. I thought that was quite the bold admission especially at work.

I believe you mean the relief and sympathy.

Many women, who come forward, receive death threats, costly relocation and security expenses, loss of employment, etc. Those far outweigh any relief and sympathy they may get. The last discussion, which was recent, I had with one of my childhood abusers was quite negative, threatening, and intimidating just like in childhood begging to be left alone. You learn not to speak because it will bring a heap of trouble on you! That was what they told me as a child. It would be my fault, not theirs. The culture then told me they were right and, sadly, it still does. Those men have voices and power I do not and I am not going to come forward to authorities and endure all of the problems that come with it. I avoid those men at all costs. And I don't need or want sympathy. I want change. I want better behavior from men.

Yes, it's a dangerous time for men. It's alwaysa been a dangerous time for women and will continue to be. We have always had to think of ways to avoid, work around, outsmart, etc. men because men don't respect women's boundaries or personhood. I've spent an inordinate amount of time trying to understand what happened to me for years during my childhood and why. More than one person called me crazy, as a young adult. The message was received and I got to work overcoming the problems of my family, culture, religious culture, etc. And do not misunderstand, I love men! I think men are great! But there are some men that I dislike a great deal and should.

I used to believe brainwashing and fanaticism to be incompatible with engineering.

I saw the fallacies of that in engineering school.

*****************************************************************************************************

Dad told me once that he admired my ability to get knocked down and get back up, brush the dirt off, and get back on that horse. His delivery said more, really, than his words. His delivery implied that people had a right to knock me down. They do not. They do not even have the right to try and that is the genesis of laws.



Pamela K. Quillin, P.E.
Quillin Engineering, LLC
NSPE-CO, Central Chapter
Dinner program:

http://nspe-co.org/events.php

 

[beej67]

Thanks for taking the time to respond, Pamela. I really appreciate it.

beej67, much of it, though dated, still applies. That was what struck me, as I read it. When I, as an older woman, have men 20 years my junior tell me that I have no business being an engineer or running my own company because I've taken "the" spot a man should have, that really sums it up.

Holy smokes. Wow.

That is completely outrageous, and I have never, ever run into anything like that in any workplace environment. While my environments are definitely male dominated, they've typically been about 20% to 25% women, and I've never even heard of anything like this. My wife was in construction for almost two decades and I've never heard of anything like that from her either. I've definitely heard stories, and there were occasions where we had some tough dinner table conversations about things that went on in her workplace, but never anything like that. That's astounding.

I googled you, and see you're in Denver. Did this happen there? Would you consider that sort of garbage to be common in places you've worked in/around/consulted for/etc?

There are a lot of changes employers could make that would ease the burdens of life for their employees rather than make them continue in hardships. They don't, I suppose, because of greed. They're in the business to make as much money as possible and that means full-time employees making the money for them because they cannot do it alone, which is obvious to all. Some of the pieces that would make things better for women would also make things better for men, too. Families are units so when one has a hardship due to work the unit has hardship. I cannot see it any other way.

I really think big companies are missing the boat on this thing. I think it has to do with the salary mindset to begin with. I think if people were simply paid by how much they contribute, and the pay could easily fluctuate up or down, that people and businesses both could more easily adapt to changing circumstances, or to different employee's outside obligations. One of the boons of the "old" way of doing things - one breadwinner and one child rearer - is that it frees the employer up from having to worry about overburdening the employee. They don't have to worry about managing flexibility. I think whoever figures out a better business model to match the flexibility necessary for the next generation of employees who aren't monolithically within the (one breadwinner one child rearer) program is going to do well. But that will be a paradigm shift, and engineering businesses in particular are hesitant to shift paradigms.



Hydrology, Drainage Analysis, Flood Studies, and Complex Stormwater Litigation for Atlanta and the South East -

http://www.campbellcivil.com

 

[JohnRBaker]

Back when I was working in 'hard engineering' (before my software days) in Michigan during the late 60's and the 70's, in our engineering department (we manufactured food and chemical processing machinery) there were no female engineers and only a couple of female draftsmen (I know that's not PC, but...). However the company did hire some females who did play a role in helping us sell equipment and I don't mean as salesmen (there I go again).

One young women in particular had a very outstanding appearance. Now don't get me wrong, she was a very competent secretary and no one ever had any complaints with either her work or even her deportment around the office. However, shortly after she was hired we had one of our semi-annual trade shows where we displayed our equipment and tended to wine & dine our prospective and current customers (remember this was the 60's and 70's). Well it seemed this secretary was included in the group that staffed our booth at the trade show. Now I'm not implying that anything untoward ever happened, but she did dress in a very different manner than any of us had ever seen her around the office and she was very friendly with everyone who walked into the booth. I know that other companies probably did the same thing, even going so far as the hiring 'professional' models to work their booths so at least our company 'kept it in the family' as it were, giving the job to an employee (trade show duty, while it could become a grind after awhile, was considered a perk by many people and those of us who went regularly were often the targets of envy around the office).

I guess the point I'm making is that hopefully we've come a long way. I do have to say that once I moved out to SoCal and started to work in the software industry, that first off, I was working with a lot more women, both as my peers and as my superiors (one of my best bosses ever was a female). And when I had my turn as a manager, short-lived though that might have been (I moved from sales management to a staff position in R&D after a couple of years) I had more than one female working for me, both in administration roles and in technical positions.

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

 

[beej67]

I wonder how regional that stuff is.

Like, for instance, the last time I did a project in Miami-Dade, we had to hire a permit expediter because they literally wouldn't speak English to you in the building department unless you were a smoking hot bikini model. It was wild. I've never seen anything like it, before or since. This was mid 2000s, and was apparently totally culturally accepted down there at the time. We ended up hiring a very attractive yet very professional and intelligent lady to get us past the barrier, but most of the other expediters I saw looked like strippers with a day job. There was one lady with a thigh length semi translucent sundress on, dark skin, and an obvious white thong on underneath it, pulling a wagon full of construction plans. I did not speak to her, so it would be wrong to judge how intelligent and professional an expediter she was by her appearance, but good gracious.

Never seen such a scene in my life.

Don't know if it's still like that. That was my only Miami project. From an ethical standpoint, I think we did our best as a company (this is my prior firm) to find a saddle point in the venn diagram between professionalism, cultural norms, and responsibility to our client, in who we selected as our expeditor and how we approached the project. Sometimes I think that's all you can do.


Hydrology, Drainage Analysis, Flood Studies, and Complex Stormwater Litigation for Atlanta and the South East -

http://www.campbellcivil.com

 

[IRstuff]

Welcome back, Pam. I was starting to think that you had finally given up on us ;-)

"it all comes down to the interlocutors opinions on free will"

Not necessarily; there are a number of possible ways to configure the experiment and I wasn't particularly looking at just one generation of people.
> All children are born unbiased, and even when their own parents create an environment that's unbiased, unless they live in a cave, the sheer inundation of culture, even in supposedly unbiased children's shows like Barney, can seep in and contaminate those pure angels. Barney once had a segment in the 2002 time frame, discussing careers for the kids in the show; lo and behold, girls were nurses and teachers, boys were firefighters and chefs. It's so pervasive that my 3-yo already figured out that the "pink" aisle at Walmart was not for boys.
> It's often said that evil exists so that we can appreciate good. So that raises an interesting question about these unbiased people; are they unbiased because they choose to or because they've never had to make a decision based on bias? I think that in the former case, unless they live in a cave, their children will develop biases. In the latter case, they themselves will develop biases, simply because that's partly wired into the human brain. Family before tribe. tribe before nation, etc., are basic biases. We're all different colors, so unless these unbiased people are genetically programmed for blindness, they'll see the color differences and the brain starts to accumulate characteristics that are associated with the color differences. The same mental mechanism applies to foods; as hunter/gatherers, we've evolved the need to make associations tied to color, shape, texture, taste, and smell of foods that correlate to delicious, tolerable, bad, or dangerous. Because we live in a biased world, anything pure will get contaminated.
> An argument could be made that it should go the other way around; the pure should be able to cleanse the impure. But, we've seen historically, that people don't necessarily have good behavior unless someone forces them. We can see that democracy, ostensibly good, is fragile, easily abused, and is extraordinarily difficult to get started in most countries. Sexual equality is tantalizingly close, but never close enough to take root.

TTFN (ta ta for now)
I can do absolutely anything. I'm an expert!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg

faq731-376 forum1529 Entire Forum list

http://www.eng-tips.com/forumlist.cfm

 

[McSEpllc]

The genders are not the same, they tend to have different strengths and weaknesses, expectations of life...

Meyer Briggs personality types differ by gender:

https://www.careerplanner.com/MB2/TypeInPopulation-Males-Females.cfm

INTJ is an traditional engineer.

There are many professions female are over 50%:

https://www.dol.gov/wb/stats/occ_gender_share_em_1020_txt.htm

 

[vthomidis]

Dealing with a 100 people .Getting inappropriate behavior by 10 of them .Then, ignoring the 90 and pointing out the 10 as if they were the total.
That's typical of any lot of persons who get comfortable in feeling discriminated upon and in playing the victim part.

 

[RickyTickyTavi]

I'm trying to understand your position vthomidis because I'm not sure I follow. Are you stating that because actual victims arent thinking about the "good men" that theyre subsequently playing the victim part?

 

[greenone]

JohnRBaker:

​

"...there were no female engineers and only a couple of female draftsmen (I know that's not PC, but...). However the company did hire some females who did play a role in helping us sell equipment and I don't mean as salesmen (there I go again)."

John-in the time it took you to type your callout recognizing that "men" is a problem, you could have thought for a sec and used a gender-neutral term-e.g., drafter and salesperson. Language matters-keep telling a little kid there are draftsmen and she starts to believe there are no females in drafting.

McSEpllc:
Meyer Briggs is falling into disfavor in some circles-I've take it several times, and I can tweak my results by being in a different mood. Just one of the articles I've seen on the topic:

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/give-and-take/201309/goodbye-mbti-the-fad-won-t-die

I totally disagree that life expectations are a function of gender-I'm with the nurture not nature crowd on that.

I spent a large part of my career smacking my head into a wall, in hopes that the hole I made would make it a bit easier on the next woman to get past the wall.