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

 

[ScottyUK]

Running slightly counter to the disadvantaged women theme of this thread, female students are displacing male students in higher education generally. The lack of female engineers is even more pronounced if there is any substance to this report.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/educatio...ender-gap-growing-warns-admissions-chief.html

 

[BUGGAR]

tstructural: my wife's mother said something similar when she found out her daughter was going to marry someone from Compton.

 

[IRstuff]

""but you can't - you are pretty and you shower and you know how to dress". "

Well, for male engineers, one out of three was doing REALLY well... ;-)

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[Roach44]

This principle should be applied professionally. As to the conclusions of the lady, MS Muriel Kolker, implying the 'issue' is 'cultural' seems to contradict her own experiment. The truth is that women can not compete with men in Engineering or the "hard sciences" and I would assert that the biggest factor is biological differences, between the sexes.

 

[JohnRBaker]

The truth is that women can not compete with men in Engineering or the "hard sciences" and I would assert that the biggest factor is biological differences, between the sexes.

And in which century are YOU living?

John R. Baker, P.E.
EX-Product 'Evangelist'
Irvine, CA
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The secret of life is not finding someone to live with
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[IRstuff]

That's just pitiful; cultural bias is EVERYWHERE. Take any two-year to a Walmart; they'll know that one particular toy aisle dominated by pink is for girls. Where's the biological there? Or watch Barney; when they did their "what you can grow up to be" episode, the girls were teachers and nurses, but the boys were firemen, chefs, and doctors. In a show that actively promotes fairness and equality, they wind up with that?

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[JNieman]

@Roach44,

This appears to be your only post. Is your only contribution to this forum just to troll us with an imbecilic incitement of blatant sexism?

What is your cultural background, I wonder?

 

[KENAT]

"The truth is that women can not compete with men in Engineering or the "hard sciences" at best a gross generalization and quite <edit> most likely just nonsense.

There are as I recall some studies that do suggest a biological element to some gender preferences, but there is also the environmental element and it's pretty hard to differentiate the two without getting unethical in your experimentation.

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[SLTA]

I call troll. Not worth it, friends.

Please remember: we're not all guys!

 

[rb1957]

all generalisations are false, including that one.

another day in paradise, or is paradise one day closer ?

 

[urgross]

If all generalizations are false, isn't the premise false?

 

[lacajun]

And this lady has endured a ton of poor treatment because of her gender and interests.

Hillary Clinton's campaign was never going to be easy. But did it have to get this hard?

Pamela K. Quillin, P.E.
Quillin Engineering, LLC

 

[hokie66]

Now Pamela, if you are going to start a political argument, maybe this is not the right thread. The Pub, maybe?

 

[rconnor]

hokie66, there's an apolitical, very relevant point that I took away from lacajun's post. Clinton is attacked for being "mechanical" or "cold" or "aggressive" (and of course many other political things that we can ignore in this context). A male showing similar traits would be called "thoughtful" or "focused" or "determined".

It goes back to the way our culture views the two sexes. When a women displays characteristics that are normally associated positively with our culturally-constructed "typical male", they get spun to be associated negatively with our culturally-constructed "typical female". What's worse is that we've built up positions of power to require the "typical male" characteristics.

So either females fall in line with the "typical female" role and aren't perceived to have the characteristics required to obtain positions of power or they develop their own set of characteristics and are attacked for not being a "typical female". Damned if they are, Damned if they aren't.

This applies directly to engineering. The characteristic "getting your hands dirty" is seen as a required trait for engineering (and to be a "typical male"). However, if a female demonstrates that characteristic, she's considered "butch" or "unfeminine".

 

[TheTick]

So hard to separate the harsh treatment Hillary deserves from what she doesn't. Plenty of both to go around.

 

[rconnor]

I don't disagree but that doesn't impact the broader, more relevant point (i.e. the treatment of women seeking employment in typically male dominated fields) brought forward by lacajun's post.

 

[IRstuff]

While I was growing up in the 60s and 70s, I sort of bought into the notion that while vestiges of sexism and racism remained, the majority of people were getting to the point of being gender and race neutral. Sadly, it seems that this is nowhere near the case, and the prejudices run VERY deep in some cases. A certain senator referred to the president as an "animal," and I can see no way that such a derogatory label would have ever been applied to a white man. Likewise, women in politics, engineering, and in general society are not compared as gender neutral beings, but are compared to society's perception of what a women is, or should be. This applies across the board, even in some thing that are not obviously related, like school start/stop times. We have school district that came up with a scheme, during the recession, to get the federal student attendance dollars, but starting the day, not 1, but 2 hours later than usual, for "staff development." Great for the students and teachers, but sucks for working families. I would contend that there is still a notion that there is a stay-at-home parent that can deal with this disruption in schedules with no financial consequences.

One thing, though, to be fair, I believe that Mit the Romney was also labeled as being mechanical early in his presidential campaign.

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[hokie66]

I don't object to being called politically incorrect, which I am, but don't know why I should not be able to express strong negative opinions about a woman without being labelled as a misogynist.

 

[JohnRBaker]

Unfortunately every time experiments are conducted where two groups of what are seen as average individuals are shown resumes of people applying for a technical or highly skilled job and are asked to rate them, the group where no names or photos are included, are much more likely to give ratings which are distributed in a fairly random pattern. However the group where names and/or photos were included, where it would be easy to recognize race and gender, the rating are almost always skewed toward high ratings for white males and lower ratings for females and minorities. In fact, when IDENTICAL resumes are shown but where some are obvious white males and the rest are females or minorities, again the predominance of high ratings go to the white males,

Now this does NOT necessarily prove that most people are racists or misogynists, just that as a society we suffer from institutional prejudices whether we'd like to admit it or not. For most people, it's an unconscious behavior and only something like awareness training can bring some relief to this situation. The good news is that over time, these prejudices will be overcome and diluted. The bad news is that it's not coming fast enough and every now and then society backslides, which is what I fear has been happening during the current political season. It's like we've ripped a scab off of an old sore that if it had been left alone for another generation or two, would have pretty much gone away.

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]

"It's like we've ripped a scab off of an old sore that if it had been left alone for another generation or two, would have pretty much gone away. "

The current climate has exacerbated and intensified the biases and prejudices. What used to be a polite disagreements about policies and philosophies have turned into pseudo-religious, internecine, conflict. It's pretty clear, now, that certain things run VERY deep, where even generations of living together has yielded little in the way of mending things like class conflict, "religious" differences, etc.

TTFN
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