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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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IRStuff, interesting take on it. I may email you separately about that one.

CWB1, I got the engineering degree to do engineering and I love engineering. I really enjoyed engineering education, too. I love to learn.

I worked with a number of male and female engineers that got an engineering degree because it is a great stepping stone to other careers, such as project management, purchasing, law, medicine, etc. Many of them were very open about their plans, which I didn't and still don't have a problem with. They had the mental horsepower and funds to get an engineering degree and they should be able to do so. Higher education is not a lottery system.

I still do engineering and I still love engineering. But, I also, running my own company, have found I enjoy negotiating contracts, planning business, etc. I enjoy meeting others in the business world. Running my own business has opened my eyes a lot to how dynamic the world really is. I wouldn't have seen it any other way; I'm not smart enough and was too focused on plant work, as a direct employee.

I've had to pull holiday/weekend duty because I am single. I get that and don't mind pulling my fair share. I don't mind giving someone else a break. That's being thoughtful and kind, which I think should be a requirement for the human species. Tying my gender and marital status to career and pay are not that, in my mind.

I no longer consider myself a Christian so Bible people can say what they want; I don't buy it. I've learned way too much to ever believe it. And, all of my Christian friends walked away from me due to Lyme disease. I've been through it all completely alone. It was brutal. I've had a hard life but the rest of it has been a cakewalk compared to Lyme disease. When I survey my life and what I've been through, I find it amusing for people to call me weak and other things. If they only knew...

SparWeb, IMHO, you missed the point of the middle stuff and it wasn't CYA but an expression of thoughts based upon a previous post. :)

Pamela K. Quillin, P.E.
Quillin Engineering, LLC
NSPE-CO, Central Chapter
Dinner program:
 
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It did sound like an attempt to create a link between gender and the too-common desire to study engineering with only management interests. I've seen my share of PM's who didn't become good engineers before attempting to manage projects, so maybe CWB's comments touched that nerve.


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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I am not trying to create stereotypes but I would rather a female document things than a male. Not that there aren't good guys but there are a few that just freewheel and I am left wondering if they know someone is going to inherent their mess after them. I really believe there are some male engineers that hardly ever double check or run through something with a highlighter and are hardly bothered by mistakes and typos. I haven't run into a female engineer like that.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
If you can't explain it to a six year old, you don't understand it yourself.
 
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That would be an interesting question; how much of stereotyping is due to cultural influences and familial environments? Certainly, it's been noted that Asians, who had been stereotyped as eating healthy and being thin, are showing more and more signs of obesity:
It used to be that because women were "taught" to be housewives, they had a certain skill set and mentality for detail work. However, that's gone by the wayside in most demographics, so it certainly bears re-visiting to see if the stereotype still holds up.

TTFN (ta ta for now)
I can do absolutely anything. I'm an expert! faq731-376 forum1529 Entire Forum list
 
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One thing that tends to crop up in this discussion space, is the idea that male humans have personality predilections which cause them to gravitate toward "things" and female humans have personality predilections which cause them to gravitate towards "people." And that some of the employment gap in STEM fields may be due to this predilection of interests. In other words, yes there are women who are interested in "things," but there are more men interested in "things," so this skews the representation. This was one of the things Damore brought up in the memo that got him trashed.

This is a pretty comprehensive academic paper on the topic:


This doesn't mean there isn't sexism in the workplace. But it does indicate that the gender gap in STEM is multivariate, with many factors in play, and you can't simply point at the gap as proof of sexism.

FOiyQox.jpg


Hydrology, Drainage Analysis, Flood Studies, and Complex Stormwater Litigation for Atlanta and the South East -
 
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Going way back to this...

Do you think single parent families could be in fact propagated by disproportionate incarceration of minorities for crimes committed at similar rates among the majority? - Could those affects be multi-generational?
Click to expand...

...I personally think so. I don't beat on the "systemic racism" or the "white privilege" drum very much, as I think both concepts are very overplayed and often media contrived to stoke outrage. But looking at the numbers I've seen in terms of disproportionate sentencing, I definitely think something is going on in this space that we might call "systemic racism" or "white privilege" depending on how we define those terms. Most (but probably not all) of what gets assigned "white privilege" by the media is actually wealth privilege. Because wealth is just as heritable as genes are, that's why they call it "inheritance." Plus there's issues of wealthy folks having better child rearing environments, which lead to better outcomes, which are another kind of wealth heritability. And since single parents don't have the time to pursue professional careers that two parent households have, they don't have as much money, don't have the ability to regulate their kids behaviors, etc. And if the kids do get into trouble, they're less likely to have independent legal representation, which is probably partly at fault for the disproportionate trends in sentencing. There also could be racism in play here as well, outside of the wealth issue.

So the whole thing is a feedback loop, where poorer and potentially blacker kids get tied up more in the legal system, which exacerbates the single parenting problem. Single parenting rates doubled in the US from 1960 through the early 1990s across all racial demographics, but the AA demographic started higher, so its doubling pushed them way up. Nearing 50% last time I looked. I think at least part of this is drug war related.

These are purely my opinions based on numbers I've seen, and I don't intend to spend a huge amount of time in argument over them. I would love to not have a real job, because I could try and do some analysis on the thing, which would take quite a bit of time.

Hydrology, Drainage Analysis, Flood Studies, and Complex Stormwater Litigation for Atlanta and the South East -
 
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Men and women are indeed different. That's beside the point however. Presumably only those people who have an interest in engineering graduate from engineering schools, and employers should be let off the hook insofar as their demographics generally track those of the graduating classes over the average age of their workforce. Anything beyond that is an issue for education system, not the employers. I say this as a former hiring manager at an engineering firm constantly pushed by HR to hire more women. I eventually learned to keep track of the demographics of the resumes they provided when I needed talent to show them that my department's demographics were a reflection of what they gave me to choose from. They in turn responded that they could only give me resumes of people who submitted them. Duh. As long as the graduating class of engineers is primarily male, engineering companies will be primarily male.
 
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While RodRice has a point, it's not quite as simple as that. There is also the factors of supply & demand. What I mean is that if there was an environment where it was more attractive for female engineers to work and succeed in industry, that this could increase the interest in getting a technical education by young women graduating from high school. I know that there is a bit of the chicken & egg conundrum here, but if there is no effort to at least promote the chance of changing the status quo then nothing is ever going to be any different going forward.

Note that in my 49+ year engineering career, I've worked in situations where I've had female co-workers, female subordinates and female superiors, and at no time have I ever considered any of these individuals as not being competent or not being able to hold-up their end of the log.

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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JohnRBaker, We very aggressively put forward our female engineers as role models and worked continuously with our feeder colleges encouraging them to seek increased diversity in their graduating class. What else would you have had us do? There comes a point where you simply can't keep portraying women as victims. There's simply no way around the need for more women to take the initiative and pursue engineering as a career before the impression of engineering as a man's world is changed.
 
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I don't think the current supply is as lopsided as all that in engineering. While the women graduating as engineers today are no longer considered to be trailblazer, deciding to apply to a specific company might still be trailblazing, particularly given the aforementioned issue with resume screening, either automated, or through headhunters.

There's credible evidence that more women than ever are majoring in STEM, and more women are majoring in engineering; Berkeley and Stanford both reported that gender parity exists at the introductory programming class level. What is not clear is what happens between getting that sheepskin at the podium and mid-career, where women seemingly have disappeared from the engineering workforce. At my company, a significant number of women originally hired in as engineers wound up in program management, so while still STEM, they aren't engineers anymore.

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I can do absolutely anything. I'm an expert! faq731-376 forum1529 Entire Forum list
 
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While being "role models" is certainly one aspect, one needs to see them in action before rendering a judgement. It's been my observation that people, regardless of gender, might be good at doing something, but suck at selling that same thing to others.

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I can do absolutely anything. I'm an expert! faq731-376 forum1529 Entire Forum list
 
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I'm not saying the we have to portray women as "victims", just that we have to look to what future are we willing to accept.

As for me personally, we have three sons and despite my life-long career in engineering, including the fact that this has provided for a solid middle-to-upper-middle-class lifestyle, including the ability to retire comfortably, the two older sons chose careers as chefs (one has now moved-up to the corporate executive level). Our youngest son did go into technology but not via a formal education. Instead he started to work at IT jobs while still in high school and has just continued to learn on the job and by gaining certification from places like Apple and Microsoft. Now he's not into computer software or anything like that, but rather on the hardware/configuration/networking side of the business. That being said, we do have five granddaughters. Note that only one has graduated from high school so far and she opted to not go to college and instead got an entry-level position working on the management side of a large restaurant/hotel/entertainment company (her father is the corporate executive and she's sort of grown-up in the company). Of the other four, two are in high school, one's in junior high and the youngest has just started school. Now two of these girls, the one in junior high and one of the high schooler's are very high achievers (the 13 year old has never had a grade less than an A and the other has a near perfect record). Both of these granddaughters have expressed interest in a technical education. We have been encouraging them even to the point of exploring the possibility of then attending my alma mater under their legacy program (they would qualify for in-state tuition despite being out-of-state residents).

Anyway, I would like to think that if any of our granddaughters do decide to pursue a technical education, that they will be able to find rewarding positions commensurate with the effort that they will need to expend getting those technical degrees.

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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One of my children has a mental deficiency that puts her outside the bounds of this discussion. My other two children both attended college, a son for Mechanical Engineering and a daughter for Psychology. My son is now the lead engineer for a product at a startup where he's responsible for all disciplines including electrical, mechanical, software, and manufacturing. My daughter is now a Major in the USAF serving in the surveillance wings and both she and her wife have been identified as leadership material due to their ability to motivate teamwork and inspire loyalty (I'm confident both will attain the rank of Colonel before retiring and one may even make General).
 
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IRStuff, does your thought about seeing role models in action apply to men as well? Just curious and not in a contentious way.

In the meantime, I am awaiting a meeting with a female engineer whose career was stymied because she advocated for women up and down the ranks of a major outfit. She was directly told that her career had topped out because of her advocacy for women. She had not accomplished near what her original goals were and management made sure she wouldn't reach them. She did a career change and loves what she does now. Who knew that advocacy for your underrepresented group would be so hazardous to a career?

Pamela K. Quillin, P.E.
Quillin Engineering, LLC
NSPE-CO, Central Chapter
Dinner program:
 
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Yes, my comment applies to anyone, anywhere. I've seen people who are brilliant at what they do, but they kind of suck at presenting their results.

The other side of the advocacy coin are some women who take advantage of their protected status. One SENIOR engineer was hired after getting glowing reviews from her previous company and coworkers, but it turned out that she couldn't really engineer her way out of a wet paper shift-register; I, as a junior in college, knew more than she did. We tried to get rid of her, but she would then play the discrimination card. I ran across her again at a different company years later, and she was just the same, put on subcontractor management, because her design/systems skills were still pitiful.

Of course, some men do similar crap. My first realtor was a really nice and sweet person, and her husband worked at the same company as me. Then, one day, he got injured, filed for workmen's comp, and filed for divorce, and asked for alimony from his ex-wife, claiming unemployability. This was 35 yrs ago, so men weren't really supposed to do that sort of thing, regardless of whether they had cause.


TTFN (ta ta for now)
I can do absolutely anything. I'm an expert! faq731-376 forum1529 Entire Forum list
 
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IRStuff, yeah, it really seems best to me to take each person individually and analyze their behaviors for what they are. I'm sure we've seen all kinds of people in our long careers and lives. :)

I had a bad experience with a young professional in another field, i.e., dentistry. What a mess he is! Absolute mess! I expected more from someone so highly educated but that was futile.

Pamela K. Quillin, P.E.
Quillin Engineering, LLC
NSPE-CO, Central Chapter
Dinner program:
 
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Today is the 4th-annual International Day of Women and Girls in Science.

One thing of note is the recent announcement that the British ExoMars rover will be named "Rosalind Franklin," a much belated honor for the person whose x-ray crystallography results for helical DNA preceded Watson's and Crick's.

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I can do absolutely anything. I'm an expert! faq731-376 forum1529 Entire Forum list
 
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I stumbled into a very interesting blog post about the Damore Kerfuffle today:


It aggregates several opinions from women STEM PhDs, one in pure math and another in quantum computing, which were very critical of Google for firing Damore over his "women in STEM" memo.



Hydrology, Drainage Analysis, Flood Studies, and Complex Stormwater Litigation for Atlanta and the South East -
 
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I think only one of the two women actually disagreed with the firing from my reading. However, both were responding only to Damore's memo, without referencing what Google's actual policy is. Neither fully agreed with Damore, and the second author's opinion was that Damore's proclamations were misplaced and non-authoritative. Moreover, the author clearly disagreed with Damore, specifically for his usage of sexist language and arguments.

Until the playing field is truly level, and all biases are truly removed can we then determine whether a 50/50 ratio is plausible. Damore was playing to his audience, with statements like, "We need to stop assuming that gender gaps imply sexism." Why is that necessary, given that he never established that sexism doesn't exist, nor that all gender differences are biological purely biological. He can't even prove that his supposed biological differences aren't a product of a patriarchal society's imprinting of men and women.

TTFN (ta ta for now)
I can do absolutely anything. I'm an expert! faq731-376 forum1529 Entire Forum list
 
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