Women in Engineering. 61

[Compositepro]

I'm not a woman, and this topic is not of great interest to me, but this blog was quite interesting:

http://www.ecnmag.com/blogs/2015/06...asses?et_cid=4617690&et_rid=45570172&type=cta

 

[TenPenny]

I took paternal leave when we adopted, because my wife, being self-employed, didn't get such a thing (in Canada, it's part of Employment Insurance).

When I came back to work, I worked half days for a while, then came back full time on the understanding that I would have to be flexible so that I could get the kids to and from preschool, school, and events. Luckily, I have a flexible boss, and we worked it out. Sure, I've paid the price career-wise, I know that, but I have two great daughters, one just finished high school with high honours and a 94% average, the other is in high school with a 97% average. It's a fair trade. Oddly enough, one of my university classmates is at one of the major consultants round here, and he was 'Mr Mom' to his kids, and worked part time, too.

 

[JNieman]

I do have to say that this thread is a fine example of the working world still seeing women as baby factories first and foremost.

I guess that pretty much answers the OP as to why some of the old "boys club" professions (even if they've slowly lost that status, partially) don't attract more females.

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[SLTA]

Hey KENAT - cheers, my friend. I can't even say how much your comment means to me.

Please remember: we're not all guys!

 

[SNORGY]

I (we) the engineers in this forum did not create the prejudice.

But right or wrong, it does exist.

I have seen abuse on both sides of it. I remain neutral.

It sucks, because it is an affront against the very good women (engineers) I have worked with, better than men.

Over the years, I think I have personally hired 80% women and 20% men, and not a single hiring decision I have ever made has ever been wrong. I just hire the person who demonstrates to me that they can take problems and make them go away so I won't have to.

 

[rconnor]

From my perspective, there are three main areas where women face deterrents to joining and staying in the engineering profession – the work place, the hiring stage and the decision to pursue engineering.

The Work Place
It is very difficult to enjoy working in an environment where everyone is significantly different than you. Directly or indirectly, women can feel alienated from and by male colleges. This, of course, is not universally true but is broad enough to be a serious deterrent.

It’s not just being “different” than the average college that is difficult but that the culture around common “shop-talk” in many engineering environments is degrading to women. The reality of working in a male dominated work environment is the coffee-break conversations are male dominated. This involves the “nagging wife” stories, tales of last weekend’s sexual exploitations or, at best, the problems with the local sports team. This is an uncomfortable and offensive environment to work in for women. What’s worse, is that when someone finally decides to complain about the offensive nature of these conversations, the reaction of the guilty party is almost always “You can’t say anything this day and age! This new-age political correctness BS is an infringement on my right to free speech!” (as if they are the ones being discriminated against…).

While I understand it’s not a perfect system, establishing quotas for female employees does help with this issue of alienation. Furthermore, the more people like me in a work place, the more I can “see myself” working there. Of course, more importantly, we need to stop sexist “shop-talk” from occurring. This requires changes in our culture – which are difficult but I think slowly improving. While there certainly is a fair share of cads (no, not CAD) in all generations , more often the younger generations have more progressive views on gender.

The Hiring Stage
This has been discussed above. I fail to see how it’s not relevant to the topic but I feel enough has been said on this already.

Decision to Pursue Engineering
This is by far the most difficult issue. While exposure to female engineer role models and other initiatives such as in the OP’s article are great steps forward, the underlying theme of cultural impediments still lurks below the surface. As a society, gender roles are so ingrained in us. This starts even with the way we treat babies. A study dressed the same new born baby in blue and pink and viewed how adults interacted with it. When the baby was wearing pink, adults were more likely to say how beautiful the baby was and cuddle it more. When the baby was wearing blue, adults would comment on how big the baby was and would be more playful with it. Given a doll, a truck and a ring, adults were much more likely to give the baby a doll when it was wearing pink and a truck when it was wearing blue. Furthermore, results show that on a visit to a science museum, parents are 3x more likely to explain the exhibit to boys than girls (source).

Here is a video of great little experiment that highlights how ingrained gender roles are in our society (I think I’ve linked it before but it’s well worth watching the first 3-4 minutes if you haven’t seen it).

We condition our children to gravitate to certain professions before we know it or without knowing it. This fact is sometimes missed when people claim to the false idea that “men are biologically more attune to mathematics and science than women”. The difference in performance in mathematics and science between women and men is due to cultural conditioning (in early childhood development and later in life), not biology (see Spelke 2005 or Halpern et al 2007 as a few such example).

So even before the many external deterrents that women face, we as a society implant self-deterrents into young women. I think this is a huge issue that extends well beyond women in engineering to women in society as a whole. We encourage boys to be successful. While we “encourage” girls to be beautiful and well-liked. The difference is troubling. Frankly, it is ignorant to believe that “women are free to do what they want, so why should we be concerned with number of female engineers?”. Legally, they might be free but culturally they are discouraged from birth onward.

 

[hokie66]

Not having participated in this thread, I read it. All I learned was that men and women read the same thing differently.

 

[moltenmetal]

SNORGY- you're a god then. I've made some wrong hiring decisions and am happy to admit it, because I learned from them. I learned a lot about human nature from the process of interviewing and selecting candidates, then seeing how they perform on the job. The consequences of a bad hire can be dire- it's a difficult business.

I make sure my interview pool contains both men and women, in proportions similar to the source pool - that's easy for co-op students as the class percentages by sex are known. I do that deliberately to the extent that I can, given the tendency of some parents to give their kids unisex names, and the fact that names in some cultures don't betray which sex they are. I don't bother to dig through the resumes for sex-related cues, though that's easy enough to do. Then I hire based on my own assessment of both merit and interest in the position as assessed by testing. Sometimes it's all women, as it was this past term. Sometimes it's all men. Then we let performance in the actual job be the indicator of who we should keep, unless demand or lack thereof forces our hand. Interviews are rubbish, even after a lot of practice and feedback- it's still a crapshoot.

We find based on on-the-job performance, our female candidates are every bit as competent as our male ones. Whereas the males used to come in with more practical, hands-on skills than the women had, which gave them the upper hand, that advantage has disappeared- there are few candidates that come in with any meaningful hands-on any more, beyond perhaps a robotic competition or the like. So we teach them that, men and women alike, to the best of our ability.

 

[IRstuff]

Great stuff, rconnor, but it runs deeper than that. I remember taking my 3-yr old son to Walmart's toy aisles and we were following along the aisles, and we turned and he refused to go down the next aisle. I asked him why and he replied, "It's pink, it's for girls." Even that awful purple beast's show had gender bias when careers were discussed:

chef-boy
firefighter-boy
teacher-girl
doctor-girl
nurse-girl

So, by age 3 to 6, just like their language skills, their notions of gender associations are already formed.

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[JohnRBaker]

...given the tendency of some parents to give their kids unisex names...

I know what you mean; we have four granddaughters by our oldest son named, Tyler, Sydney, Ryan and Lynsey (please note that the letter 'y' is the second letter in each name, and before you ask, ALL of them have the SAME middle-name, 'Spall', their mother's maiden name). And while our granddaughter by son #2 was also given an unusual name, Paloma Elise (her mother is from Mexico), it will at least never be confused with a boys name. Now it could have been worse, our second son's wife had two boys by a previous marriage and they're named Cosmo and Pirate.

But that being said, when I first started working in engineering, some 49 years ago as a summer hire doing drafting, I worked with a guy named Beverly (he preferred to be called 'Bev').

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[KENAT]

Rconner, sorry but your work place stuff sounds a bit sexist itself.

Is female employees discussing what happened on the bachelor or some stars latest hair cut... any more sexist than the sports talk? Heck, I'm less interested in most of the sports that get discussed (football (soccer) back in the UK and NBA/NFL/NHL/Golf here in the US) than many of the female employees who I hear talking about them.

I’ve certainly heard plenty of female employees complaining about their significant others with comparable frequency to my male colleagues.

I've been in work situations where the females in the office openly discussed the top ten most attractive male colleague list.

As to talk of sexual conquests, that type of conversation doesn't really belong in the work place no matter what sex etc. - unless maybe you work in the adult entertainment industry or something I suppose. However, I know of at least some women do discuss this kind of thing at work – perhaps a bit more subtly than men but it happens.

I will caveat the above by saying few of the female colleagues I’ve had have been engineers, most have been in other roles. There is also the possibility that some of the women only partook in some of the above because it was the culture of the place, not fundamentally because they thought it was OK. (I’m thinking of a photo from a company holiday party taken a couple of decades ago

Other formerly male dominated professions now have a much higher ratio of female employees - so fundamentally why should these types of issues impact engineering more? I can think of things like maybe not as many women around even in non engineering roles compared to say law & medicine and that may be worse in some sectors (construction?) than others - but it's at most a hypothesis. Perhaps more engineering jobs are private sector V public sector or large companies where unions have more of a role etc. but again not convinced.

Getting back to the article its points appear to be that no one specifically encouraged the female students to consider engineering and secondly that some of the female students didn’t want to be in co-ed classes on the topic.

Thing is I don’t remember anyone ever really encouraging me to go into engineering, or for that matter any of my male compatriots. I do remember some sponsorships only available to the female students that were pushed to the girls in high school. Coming from the other direction, because my wife was good at math at college her teacher hounded her to consider engineering to the point of almost harassment.

Most of the career counseling I had consisted on various ‘aptitude tests’ to work out what careers might suit you, and then the direct counseling revolved around going on college and university not careers as such.

Likewise I don’t remember that many engineers coming up in popular culture etc. though I suspect most that did, except perhaps for miss Schilling during BoB memorial shows, were male.

I may be missing a whole bunch of subconscious indoctrination, and don’t want to ignore it but having trouble correlating the article with what I saw during my education.

Hopefully SLTA this hasn’t put me back on the other side, I’m genuinely interested to know if there is some kind of discrimination that is keeping women out of engineering. However, so far most articles I’ve seen don’t strike me as having the magic bullet.

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[rconnor]

KENAT,

I think you missed the point but, on a re-read, I see I was not very clear, so my mistake. The point is not about the specific conversations had (or not had) by male (or female) employees. The point is that engineering has a perception of having a male dominated culture that surrounds it (and most of us can recall at least a few work environments/co-workers that fit that perception). This culture can be discouraging, intimidating or discomforting to perspective female engineers.

Whether it’s universally valid or not is not really the issue - it’s the perception that deters some women from even considering engineering (and the firsthand experience which can cause some to leave the field).

Other formerly male dominated professions now have a much higher ratio of female employees - so fundamentally why should these types of issues impact engineering more?

This is an important question. I feel the difference is that professions such as medicine and law had more institutional impediments than cultural ones. There’s nothing culturally “masculine”, or “feminine” for that matter, about medicine or law. There is a “masculinity” that surrounds engineering. So, as the more overt forms of institutional deterrents (old-boys club) lessen, the opportunities for females in medicine and law improve. However, for engineering, the cultural impediments remain.

We are making good strides to reduce these cultural impediments, though. Even seemingly silly things like using a female in an engineering ad or quotas for female engineers, help to erase the notion that “engineering is a male profession” by allowing young women to “see themselves” as engineers. It takes time to correct such deep-seated cultural issues but I feel it is improving.

I may be missing a whole bunch of subconscious indoctrination, and don’t want to ignore it but having trouble correlating the article with what I saw during my education.

If you haven’t done so, I highly recommend watching the first 3 minutes of the video I linked and try to follow along with the test yourself. Like the audience, I was much slower and made many more errors during the final test (career/female = left, family/male = right). Now, this experiment highlights a much more general view of the perception of gender in society but it demonstrates that these things work at a subconscious level, even when you may be acutely aware of the problems at a conscious level. Extending this to other studies, such as Crowley et al 2001 (and there’s countless other studies – such as this one of grade 6 students’ experiences with and interest in science), you should begin to appreciate how influential cultural conditioning can be, even when we aren’t aware of it. I feel it’s important to keep this in mind while discussing these topics.

 

[vrusub]

Its surprising how we have set out to solve issues on race when we can't even treat our women equally. It does not matter if the job "appears " more masculine or feminine. What matters is how effectively you can use the professionals working for you ! Both genders have their strengths and make up for where the other one lacks. Its as simple as that.

 

[SNORGY]

moltenmetal,

Nope, I am not GOD, far from Him.

Just been very lucky. No more no less than that.

 

[IRstuff]

"Its surprising how we have set out to solve issues on race when we can't even treat our women equally."

ACtually, I don't think it's surprising at all. While our frontal cortexes have evolved, our hind brains have not. At our primal cores, we're pretty much the same creatures that came into being 300 millenia ago in Africa.

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[GTstartup]

Scenario:

You own a small business, it pays your mortgage, puts food on the table, puts your kids through school. You need to hire an engineer. After hiring, you will spend 100K on training, benefits and pay before your new hire is billable. 2 candidates are more or less equal during the interview process. Both are in their mid twenties, just got married (volunteered info during the interview), one is a man one is a woman. Honestly answers - who do you hire?

 

[rconnor]

Your implied answer:

You discriminate against the woman (illegally, I might add) because you think she might have a kid and might take extended parental leave. You hire the man.

Then 6 months later he leaves for another job that's offering a better salary. (or leaves for ANY reason)
-or-
The man takes 1 year parental leave.
-or-
The woman sues for discrimination and wins.
-or-
The woman was not planning on having kids.

Your assumption that women (age 18-35??) have a statistically higher chance to take extended parental leave needs to be statistically higher than ANY of the above happening. Otherwise you're worse off.

It's stupid AND it's discrimination.

 

[hokie66]

"Stupid AND it's discrimination"? The candidates are equal, except for gender. You choose one, how is that stupid and discrimination, whichever you choose? I think affirmative action has gotten in the way of common sense and freedom of choice.

 

[rconnor]

hokie66, the entire scenario is implying that you wouldn't hire the women because she might have a kid (hence the stuff about being recently married, hence the stuff about investing all that time and money into training, hence the context about parental leave earlier in the thread) not based off some other, work-related, quality. So then that is, by definition, discrimination.

The stupid part comes from the fact you have no idea what the statistical chance of the man or woman taking extended time-off or leaving is. So making the decision to hire the man because the women might have a kid and might take extended parental leave is baseless because you have no idea if that chance is greater than the male candidate taking extended leave/leaving.

Listen, losing employees is never easy, especially for small firms. I have never said otherwise. However, that doesn't justify baseless discrimination.

 

[IRstuff]

"You choose one, how is that stupid and discrimination, whichever you choose?"

It's pretty simple; if you are unwilling to accept the outcome of a coin flip, you are biased.

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[JNieman]

Hell, if you want to look at statistics, you might be more inclined -to- choose a woman, if you were truly "following statistics" and being unbiased:

Men negotiate harder and get more pay/raises

https://hbr.org/2014/06/why-women-dont-negotiate-their-job-offers/

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/29/AR2007072900827.html

http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2013/12/11/10-findings-about-women-in-the-workplace/

( #7)

Women are increasingly less likely to 'job hop' while men are increasingly more likely to.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/02/10/job-tenure-women-gender-difference_n_4759432.html

http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/236702

<-- echoes the sentiment that women are more likely to stay at a company but seems more of an op-ed

So again, when people talk about statistics, to me it seems they just want something that will substantiate their prejudice. "Lies, damned lies, and statistics," as the famous Mark Twain quote goes. I am not convinced of any reason to say gender would put a person above/below the 'average' in an engineering related field or even a wider consideration for other shop/office/field work.

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