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

 

[nonplussed]

One thing that is never mentioned in any media is that women are in fact the MAJORITY of science students in university. The 'S' and 'T' in STEM are female majority. This is true throughout the western world in the US, Canada, Europe and Australia. Women are the majority in science and have been for some time. Why is it that this is never mentioned? Focus is only ever on a handful of specific courses where men are the majority. There are very few courses left where women are not majority, and that includes within the scientific fields.

Anyone espousing a claim that women are somehow disadvantaged or downtrodden in science is just living in the past.

 

[IRstuff]

One thing that is never mentioned in any media is that women are in fact the MAJORITY of science students in university

That's Great! But, if they can't convert to T, E, and M, jobs, which are the higher paying jobs? Even so, most people don't seem to be employed in the discipline that they trained for.

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[CWB1]

My school had a reputation for having minimal entrance requirements...

Mine has a similar reputation that I attribute to being part of a statewide chain with many small campuses. In reality however their entry and course requirements are rather strict compared to other "better" and even many "top" schools, likely driven by their small size and limited resources. Not sure if I fell into somebody's quota for enrolling veterans or not, but going back at 24 fresh off active duty several big name engineering schools were willing to admit me simply based on my discharge and seven year old high school transcripts with no interviews, placement testing, or other formalities necessary. Mine OTOH pulled me in for pre-admission interviews, testing, and made it abundantly clear that there were no remedial math or other courses for engineers, either pass Calc I or leave.

I concur with Ron's sentiment above regarding the importance of what a student must do to graduate. Not sure how typical it was in the past but my alma mater put us through the proverbial wringer, which seems rather rare today when many schools graduate quite a few cum-laudes within 0.1 GPA of perfect. We were told to expect to earn a few Cs or Ds as several professors graded along a cubic curve (most were scored B-/C+'ish, very few above, very few below. If you were in a few large classes it was dam near impossible to have an overly high GPA.

 

[IRstuff]

which seems rather rare today when many schools graduate quite a few cum-laudes within 0.1 GPA of perfect.

Not sure which schools those are, because even in the "state" schools in California, the UC system, the required freshman CS classes are no walks in the park; I looked at my sons' homework assignments and couldn't even decipher some of the notation, which looked to be stuff I might have taken in sophomore year math, and I went to a tougher school. But, this might just be the usual generational thing, "You young whippersnappers have got it so easy!" But, they don't have it easy; there were 111,266 freshman applications to UCLA, with 13,747 accepted, a 12.4% acceptance rate. UC Berkley, interestingly, had a 16.8% acceptance rate, and UCI, 26.6%. But, latter two are extremely hard to get into, so I think there are those that don't bother applying.

Even the Cal Polys are hard to get into, for certain majors. Applying for college is a major stressor these days; there was a student who got rejected by Stanford, but told no one, and pretended to be a legitimate matriculated student, attending classes, etc., for a year before they were found out. Not clear why the parents didn't notice that they weren't getting tuition bills...

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[CWB1]

it's been stated that teachers have had a tendency to call on boys to answer math and science questions more often than girls

Maybe I led a sheltered hillbilly upbringing, but growing up in the 80s&90s teachers just about beat women's equality to death, quite possibly bc the overwhelming majority of them were women. The various STEM focused and advanced-placement classes were also overwhelmingly girls which I thoroughly enjoyed. I could see your claim being true in past generations, but I struggle to see it happening on any large scale in recent decades. My mother was a very successful chemist at a Fortune 100 for 20+ years (1960s-mid80s) prior to having a family later (than "normal" it seems) in life. She's a sweet old-fashioned/very "reserved" lady that won't comment or even show emotion toward many topics publicly, but she's asserted several times that she thought the oppression of women predated her generation significantly and that neither her generation nor modern women were oppressed in any significant sense. I've heard similar from her more-successful friends, the consensus being that some men are pigs but most in general good to work with, and the quest for equality is neverending for some.

 

[nonplussed]

That's Great! But, if they can't convert to T, E, and M, jobs, which are the higher paying jobs?

So dentistry is not high paying? Medicine is not high paying? Law is not high paying? Accounting is not? Business is not? Every other subject except for Engineering and Math is not high paying?

I have a close female friend who studied Chemistry. Most off her colleagues during her PhD were female. Once she graduated she became a sales rep for a scientific company and one year in she is making more than I do as an engineer with many years experience.

 

[IRstuff]

Sure, you can point to anecdotal examples, but the reality is that only 17% of pre-meds actually become doctors. The converse is that about 40% of doctors come from non-premed majors. And while female doctors are entering the workforce at nearly equal numbers, that was not the case even 10 years ago. Nevertheless, women doctors supposedly are paid 26% less than male doctors.

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[nonplussed]

Sure, you can point to anecdotal examples, but the reality is that only 17% of pre-meds actually become doctors. The converse is that about 40% of doctors come from non-premed majors. And while female doctors are entering the workforce at nearly equal numbers, that was not the case even 10 years ago. Nevertheless, women doctors supposedly are paid 26% less than male doctors.

Let me try and understand this, please correct me if I am wrong. Your argument is that female doctors would have preferred to study engineering/mathematics if female and male doctors were paid the same?

 

[CWB1]

Not sure which schools those are...

From a quick google, several of those CA schools you mention proudly graduate at least a half dozen engineering summa/magna/cum laudes with 3.8+ GPAs each year. Even at a large school, being dam near perfect over an entire undergrad program should be statistically near-impossible, not a common occurrence of the "top" few percent. That would suggest that its possible to be better than perfect which is simply absurd.

 

[lacajun]

Ron247, I have a similar story but I was on the college track in HS, a tiny HS. My graduating class had 39 kids. We didn't have physics, calculus, etc. Our HS counselor told us to not worry about trying hard on the SAT because we couldn't compete with kids coming from the large CA, TX, IL, NY, etc. schools. They had classes we'd never see. That's why I got a technology degree first. It took me years and encouragement from a technology instructor to understand I could do engineering. I had some encouragement from HS teachers and Mother but there were other negative forces at work in my life that had too much sway. They overwhelmed the little bit of encouragement I got. My self-esteem was in the toilet and is probably still there. But, here you and I are, two PEs, with long careers. Congrats to you!

SparWeb, I understand what you write. I am not rude about my observations. I've also been told that I am nice and a natural encourager. I suppose they were telling the truth but that's up to others to decide. Early in my career I had to learn how to work with different personalities. I used some lessons learned from my childhood friends and family. Some I learned from studying people and the Bible. I pulled from whatever I could to work with others.

Running my own business has been an interesting exercise in leadership, if that's what it is called. I concluded that some people simply don't want to be led even though they need it. They're not teachable, which is a huge requirement for success. Learning on one's own is a great attribute and will carry one far but being teachable is equally important for we all have blind spots.

CWB1, I grew up in the 60's and 70's. The turmoil and tumult of those two decades were very confusing to me, as a kid in rural Louisiana. I looked for a career and ways to get out of rural Louisiana whereas most of my female peers looked to marriage. There are underlying, subtle messages that women get that make life confusing. My early exposure to Dallas, TX helped me understand there is more to life than rural Louisiana. I wanted that "more to life" life. Many human behaviors have overt aspects with underlying, subtle messages. Those underlying, subtle messages don't have to be spoken or acted upon directly. Everyone understands them. Being purely Southern, I get underlying, subtle messages. I grew up with a lot of them. I've been unlearning a lot of that stuff most of my life. It took others bluntly telling me I was crazy, in my 20's, for me to start thinking about and working on my problems. They were many, too, so I'm still working on them.

I am a patient person and can wait years to see how life develops. My ex-husband and I had a different opinion about something and it was a big difference. He said some words that I called him on. He immediately recanted and said I was wrong, misunderstood, didn't get it, jumped to conclusions, etc. It took three years for the tables to turn to enable me to utter the same words, with the same delivery. He immediately had the reaction I had three years prior. I didn't mean those words but used them to really get to the meat of his intent years earlier. That led to greater understanding for both of us. I see life as very complex, with incoming messages that all need to be interpreted. Some are in alignment, some are not. It's up to each of us to determine what's up and what's real.

In talking with young women and other minorities today, not much has changed.

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

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

 

[Ron247]

lacajun, congrats yourself. Up to 8th grade I was at a small town school that had 325 people in the entire school 1st to 12th grades. 4 years later I graduated from a school with over 325 seniors. There was a definite difference in course offerings between the 2 schools. So I know what your were up against as far as prep courses.

 

[JohnRBaker]

When I was in the 8th grade, up in Northern Michigan, we only had six kids in our class, four girls and two boys. When I moved-up to the 9th grade, we had an 18 mile (one way) bus ride to the single high school in the county where there were 30 students in my class, or at least that was all we had left by the time we graduated as there were several 'casualties' due to unexpected pregnancies (this was in the mid-60's). Our school had a minimal curriculum, as in no foreign languages, no calculus, no drafting, etc, but you could take three years of typing. When I started engineering school, my first couple of quarters included catch-up classes to meet the minimum entrance requirements. I managed to get past that, make the Dean's List and eventually graduated with my BSME. The reason I didn't go on to grad school was because by then I was married with two kids, had a firm job offer and needed to start paying off about $10,000 in school loans.

Anyway, out of my class, I'm the only one who went to engineering school. There were 13 girls who graduated and several went to college and became elementary school teachers and one did stay for her masters and was teaching at a local community college until a few years ago (she now writes editorials for the local newspaper). I can only recall two other boys, besides me, who finished a four-year college program and they both got degrees in agriculture (one of them ended-up running the local Farm Bureau). A few did go to community college and may have gotten an associate or vocational degree, but that's about it.

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

 

[Ron247]

The concept of school size and/or town size might be an interesting topic also along the lines of people who do or don't get into engineering/science. I never thought about it much but seeing some of the recent posts it makes sense that it can have a negative affect in that sense. I remember a co-worker asking me why I don't play golf. I pointed out I used to live a small town that had no golf course at all and later moved to a slightly larger town that had a private country club golf course only. Hence, I never even had a chance to play golf growing up. He, on the other hand grew up in Atlanta. I also pointed out where I grew up, a high-diver was someone who smoked to much pot before he jumped out of tree into the river. I never met an actual Olympic style high-diver from a town of 134 people.

I know small schools do not have "honors level" courses and have virtually no advanced placement courses like pre-calculus, physics or chemistry. As JohnRBaker mentioned, we had really great offerings in Typing.

 

[JohnRBaker]

My school did offer some correspondence school classes (at your own expense), but most of them were vocational courses. So with that in mind, since I was interested in radios and such (if you go back to July 2018 in this thread, you'll see some entries of mine on this topic) and so I was gravitating toward an electrical engineering education. Now this was the 60's (YES, I DO remember the 60's), and since I was interested in electronics my only opportunity was one of those 'vocational correspondence classes' but figured it would give me a start, so I took a class in "Radio - Television & Basic Electronics" (I've still got the book). Now this was when transistors were still pretty much of a novelty (remember when they advertised how many transistors was in that portable radio they were selling) but I was hooked on the state of electronics of the day (I graduated from high school in 1965). The problem was that when I got to college and stared to take my first couple of EE classes, I discovered, much to my surprise, that Electrical Engineering, at least in the mid-60's, didn't include much of what I considered 'electronics'. It was mostly power generation, calculating transmission line loses, designing delta and 'Y' circuits, phasing transformers, etc. About halfway thru my second year, I switched to Mechanical and never looked back. This was mostly the result of having worked as a mechanical draftsman the summer between my freshman and sophomore year where I had a chance to see what electrical engineering jobs were like and I decided that I liked the work that the mechanical engineers did more. Granted, I was working for a company that designed and manufactured large and complex capital machinery for the food and chemical industries, and so the machines were the focus of the company and the electrical aspect was secondary, mostly control panels, relay logic, locating and wiring conduit/junction boxes on machines that were already designed. It was more of an 'after-thought' in many respects. I know that that's not a fair assessment of the role that electrical engineers play in industry, but in my case, it just put the nail in the coffin of my original plan to get a EE degree.

Anyway, as already noted, by me and others, coming from a small school, you do what you have to do to force the opportunities to fall in your direction.

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

 

[IRstuff]

Certainly, which town, and which state you live in can have a dramatic effect on the quality and level of education you can receive.

Fullerton, CA, has a public high school (Troy) that offers not only a smorgasbord of AP classes, but also a full IB diplomate program. Troy turns out to be a meat grinder, but they graduate 40-ish IB diplomates every year; a city nearby with a "kinder, gentler" "Troy" was surprised by anyone desiring to do both AP and IB. Yet another nearby city makes no pretense about going even that far. This is all within an 8-mi radius.

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[CWB1]

I was fortunate to grow up in a small town that was within NYC's sphere of influence, so while we had a strong agricultural influence we also had many locals that rode the train into Manhattan daily and thus brought the city influence and opportunities home. My high school had ~1100 students in 9-12 but only graduated ~110 due to dropouts, we were perpetually on lists for schools and communities with issues including the highest teen pregnancy rate in the state. We didn't have many opportunities but the county Vo-Tech program had many success stories and being in the top 30 of my class I was fortunate to be part of the advanced/accelerated classes. This allowed us to participate in an extension program through Syracuse U senior year, taking up to a half dozen courses in our HS. IIRC between Calc I & II, an English course, Psych, Bio, and whatever else I had ~18 credits at the end of the year. Unfortunately, with an enlistment between HS and college I had to retake Calc, but so is life.

 

[MDemerse]

MIT does a lot of great work both on campus and through their OpenCourseWare to encourage younger women to consider STEM careers. If you haven't ever looked at their Girls Who Build series, I really suggest it, especially if you're a parent to younger women--which I am.

Re: the overall discussion. With the younger generation putting off raising families and getting married until much later, and with there being such a demand for degreed, skilled workers in essentially every engineering field right now (and that's not going away...) I see the number of women in the field only increasing. The implied barriers that used to be there of starting families and putting marriages first just really aren't there anymore.

I read this the other day:

"Due to shifts in the industry, many manufacturers are beginning to experience a shortage of properly trained workers who have sufficient skills in installation, production, and maintenance trades. These industries are also having difficulties locating degreed workers who understand the ongoing advances in manufacturing relating to AI, VR/AR usage, robotics adoption, the use of digital twins, and other high-tech processes that are changing the industry. As over one-fourth of the manufacturing workforce is set to retire over the next decade, these challenges will only continue to expand." (the rest can be read here if you're interested.)

25% retiring in the next decade will create a spike in demand for engineers that will translate to more job security and higher salaries. Might be time for employers to start recruiting students (male and female) from the high-school level onward.

 

[JohnRBaker]

My alma mater, Michigan Technological University, has an extensive summer youth program for 6th thru 11th graders with a special emphasis on women in engineering, as seen on the webpage below showing the various scholarships available to students:

https://www.mtu.edu/syp/discover/competitive-scholarships/

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

 

[PSEng01]

Having picked up Sciences and Physics throughout my high school years and finally graduated with a BE in electrical, and working in engineering field, I personally struggle with the industry itself. Being a female working in power systems in a region where farming is still the main industry has been extremely challenging.

People around the industry - workers, technicians, clients, project managers, find it uncommon to be having knowledgeable conversation with a female engineer. The end result is your word and work are not trusted and respected.

The criticism I have heard are endless "She has not been to the work site, so the design works only on paper" (not true!), "She has no clue", "My solution is so much better and simpler" etc.. My comments are usually ignored among my non-engineer colleagues, but when a male project manager who has no engineering expertise repeats the same comments everyone nods in agreement. My specification was not read and the design is claimed to be either cannot be constructed or unclear.
I have had people procured equipment for a different solution to my design and then asking me "why don't we do it this way instead?"
In meetings, people talk over me and then say I am too softly-spoken hence no one could hear.

Been judged for being a female rather than your work is a very bitter pill to swallow; but it is harder (at least for me) when your work is been judged because it's done by a female.

In the next 5 years, sure we might have more girls doing Sciences and females in engineering schools. The wider industry however(not just engineering firms but including construction personnel etc. overall) needs to catch up also.
My point is, It takes more than just an increase in numbers of females (which seems to be what we are aiming for), it requires a complete new perception and attitude reformation from these originally male-dominating sectors.

 

[Sparweb]

Thanks for bringing this thread back to life, PSE.

Hopefully you can take some comfort - probably not much, though - that men can be jerks to other men, too. It's quite possible that some of the disrespect you've been shown has come from men who are jerks to all people, not just to women. People can find lots of ways to put others down. I'm confronted with disrespect from time to time - and I don't deal with it well, unfortunately. Disrespect and snide insults are typical strategies used, especially by people with inadequate skill, to get ahead of others. Meh, that doesn't make engineers sound like classy individuals, does it? There are places where respect is the norm. I hope you can find a respectful workplace, soon.

Your last point reaches toward the question "how to improve this?" and I agree it won't be easy.
It may have to come from many directions all at once. The encouragement of girls to stick with STEM in school has, in the experience of some women, only set up an unrealistic expectation, but it still seems to be a worthwhile thing to do, if only it can be made to stick. It sounds like you would agree that the more effective solution is to correct the attitudes of young men/boys early. How can we go about doing that? Parents and educators may do a lot to teach respect, but there's a society that still seems to send a different message.

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