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

 

[TheTick]

I'm very fortunate. Since grade school, I was surrounded by smart girls who were going places. This was normal for girls in my world.

These girls were my peers and my friends. Many are friends to this day. Theirs are the faces I see when I think about inequitable treatment of women. I can't imagine anyone telling them, directly or otherwise, that they can't or shouldn't do anything.

 

[kacarrol]

I fell into it. It was the day when we had to choose what we were going to take for post secondary education, I knew I wanted to go to University, so I walked into my guidance counsellors office and said that I love math and I loved science but I didn't want to be a mathematician and I didn't think I wanted to be a scientist. My guidance counsellor suggested engineering, so I said sure...and that's how I ended up here (but I'm happy I did!).

I can definitely see her point. I never pictured myself as an engineer, it wasn't a goal for me. I was honestly leaning more towards surgeon, but I didn't think there was much math in being a doctor so I took a shot at what other jobs my career counsellor could think up.

On an interesting side note, and this is purely speculation, I recently volunteered a team of engineers to run a "science Olympics event". While trying to put my team together (four people including myself) I called every female engineer I could think of in the short amount of time I had to pull the team together (roughly ten). All but one were too tied up with work to be able to come out. I only had one guy reject the invite...and then I had two more volunteer for it. I'm not sure what to draw from this observation. Are women more worried about how they would be viewed if they ran a fun activity during regular work hours? Do we schedule our time more tightly so we don't have slack in our schedule? Or maybe it was just coincidence. Either way, it was like pulling teeth to make sure I had a balanced team so that the highschool students would see more than men in engineering.

 

[JNieman]

The comments on that article are quite telling.

"But women will get pregnant and will leave the workforce. It's hard to step out and come back."

What sexist bullplop.

_________________________________________
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[kacarrol]

Maybe I'm wrong but I can't see coming back to work from having kids as any more difficult than switching jobs!

 

[IRstuff]

And they're #distractinglybeautiful
This article was making the rounds last week.

The comments and commentary from the first article and this one here are sad and disappointing, since it's pretty obvious that not much has happened in this arena in twenty years. The relative proportion of women engineers doesn't seem to have changed substantially, going from 2 out of 40 in a previous job, to a high of maybe 12 out of 100 in a more recent job. There are, however, many more women in software engineering, so that's something, and, the Twitter feed shows that there are lots of women in many science-related jobs with a healthy sense of humor and irony.

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[JNieman]

@kacarrol,

Not to mention that I know several successful engineers who have taken a sabbatical and hiked around Europe or gone on Safari for longer than the average maternity leave. Not to mention that I took paternity leave when my son was born, and had no trouble coming back to work and picking up where I left off in a leadership role, even. There's nothing special about time-off being "for a birth" than it is for a lengthy vacation. If you go completely out of practice for 7-8 years, yea, that could be a challenge, but that's not very typical, I don't expect.

_________________________________________
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[kacarrol]

@JNieman - definitely agree on the 7-8 years. I just look at how much I've forgotten from University, and that hasn't been quite a decade yet either! But maternity leave in Canada is max 1 year, which is nothing (especially if you split it like you did, and I see more and more guys doing that...which makes me really happy!)

 

[SLTA]

This.

http://energy.gov/sites/prod/files/NSF_Stemming the Tide Why Women Leave Engineering.pdf

And, the fact that I still have all the pressure to be supermom - I'm supposed to be both Bill Gates and Donna Reed. Not happening. Luckily, husband agrees fully.

Not to mention the number of times I've been told I was hired for a project because I'm female - not because I'm blasted good at my job.

It gets really, really tiresome...

Please remember: we're not all guys!

 

[ScottyUK]

Do we schedule our time more tightly so we don't have slack in our schedule?

Yes, I think that's something girls are generally very good at doing. Most men I know are happy to deal with things as they emerge, while their wives and girlfriends plan ahead more. Depending on your job, both approaches can be advantageous: for example, project engineering tends to need the structured approach, where field-based workers often depend on the ability to make accurate decisions without the luxury of time to analyse them. Home life needs elements of both.

 

[moltenmetal]

We have a legal requirement to accommodate a 1 yr mat leave here, which can be taken by one parent or shared by the two. We've had men and women take it, in whole or in part. Because we're now a large enough office to handle being short a body or two, we work around it. Is it disruptive to business? Absolutely- but way less disruptive than when a key staff member quits or has an accident and needs to spend months in hospital, or any number of other things that can and do happen- because unlike those eventualities, you get plenty of notice to PLAN around the person's mat leave. I have no idea how a much smaller office could manage to handle it though- it would be very tough to lose your sole engineer or even your #3, for a whole year. Tt's a legal requirement to keep that person's job open for them, so you figure it out and work around it.

Is the risk of service interruption due to mat leave, a deterrent to hiring young women for engineering positions? I'd say it absolutely must be, especially in small offices, in ANY responsible position irrespective of profession. Call it unfair if you like, but it is impossible to imagine employers divorcing themselves completely from that kind of discrimination- ever. Hold on a minute- I just imagined a scenario! OK, so it will remain so until they start requiring a matching, mandatory (and paid) paternity leave such that all persons of reproductive age represent exactly the same risk of having to be off the job for a year with each kid they have, irrespective of sex. Is that likely to happen? I'd give it a diminishingly small probability.

As to the proportions of male and female engineers: in chemical engineering at the university we recruit co-op students from, the female to male ratio was around 30% 25 years ago when I graduated and is now over 40%. Proportions in civil and systems design engineering are similar. At proportions like that, I see no need to be concerned about the fact that some of the other subdiscipolines- electrical/computer and mechanical- having somewhat lower proportions of women. On the job, we find vastly more variation in performance between individuals than we do between the sexes.

 

[JNieman]

In the USA I believe it is illegal to consider a woman's possibility of maternity leave during the hiring process. That's basically the definition of sexist discrimination. I've been told it's illegal to ask, during an interview, if a female candidate is pregnant or considering having children soon.

Also, you said that your country allows for maternity/paternity leave and that it can be shared by men/women and that you see them share it so. So how could you say that one gender is significantly more likely than another to leave for a kid? I know of two friends right now who quit work to be a stay-at-home dad, immediately after the birth, while the wife works. So in some situations you'd have the woman taking 100%, the man taking 100%, or a mix. In the USA, paternity leave is growing steadily, so I do not believe it's a "diminishingly small" probability.

All discrimination and sexism aside, it seems illogical to consider a woman's potential as child-bearer in her interviewing process. Add the sexism and discrimination back in and now it just seems deplorable.

_________________________________________
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[IRstuff]

There's the ideal case, and there's the reality. Biases of all sorts exist; it's unclear to me whether this is any more deplorable than the fact that WASPier(?), taller, more masculine people are more likely to get hired and get higher pay.

For the specific bias against potential pregnancies, there's a conscious rationale, however misguided, while the bias toward taller is not even a conscious bias.

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[moltenmetal]

Deplorable it may be, depending on your perspective and values- but it very obviously happens. Asking direct questions (how old are you, are you pregnant etc.) can be made illegal- and should be. But you need to acknowledge that hiring anyone is fundamentally a process of discrimination between the candidate you hire and the many others that you don't- often differentiating between candidates who are rather subtly different in terms of their apparent fit for the position. That a person is statistically (greatly) more likely to need to be away from the job for several years out of their first ten on the job is actually material to their potential job performance, and considering that is is not arbitrary discrimination on a basis such as race, religion or sexual orientation etc. which has absolutely no correlation with job performance. Yes, either sex may leave on a mat/pat leave, but statistically it is far more likely to be a woman than a man taking the lion's share of that year of leave.

As far as my own company is concerned- we can, and do, choose to completely ignore this concern because a) we have proven to ourselves, by experience, that we can work around it, and b) losing the productive years of exceptional candidates merely because we're worried about a potential mat or pat leave is clearly not in our business interests as we understand them. But in a three person office, you're kidding yourself if you think that it isn't a serious consideration in the mind of any hiring manager! The hiring managers that have personally made that observation to me are female, if that matters.

 

[KENAT]

Molten, you have made a couple of points I was going to raise in a more eloquent manner hopefully less likely to offend, thanks.

"Maybe I'm wrong but I can't see coming back to work from having kids as any more difficult than switching jobs!"

Switching jobs you're going from doing engineering for employer A to employer B.

Coming back to engineering after being out of it for potentially several years on the other hand can take a while to get back up to speed, let alone what you didn't learn while out. I was out of Engineering for about a year (and part time working remotely for a year or so before that) when first came to the US and it took me a little while to get back up to speed despite having dabbled on my own time.

SLTA - is that the same report you shared before that as I recall basically boiled down to women on average being less willing to take <insert euphemism for unpleasant job/work aspects> than their male counterparts? Or if my memory is grossly off then I apologize for any inferred sexism.

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[JohnRBaker]

Along a similar line, when I was in college back in the mid-60's, I did some freelance photography as well as some studio work (but NO WEDDINGS). By then they had made it illegal to ask for a person's race on employment applications and so for a couple of years, companies started to request that a photo be included with each job application which meant that for at least those few years I was in demand taking and developing basically what were 'Passport photos' for seniors applying for jobs (the extra money helped put food on the table for me and my family). Of course, that was soon ruled illegal as well, but it was amazing back then as to what lengths some companies would go to weed-out the 'undesirables' and here we were a world class university producing some of the best qualified engineers in the mid-west yet crap like that still happened on a regular basis. Of course, after they couldn't demand photos anymore, companies started to send more people onto campus to do pre-employment interviews where they could accomplish the same thing without running afoul of the laws.

John R. Baker, P.E.
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[JNieman]

@moltenmetal of course the hiring process is discrimination. I was speaking specifically of gender discrimination and I thought that was clear and obvious. Not all discrimination is equal. Some is terrible. You cannot equate discrimination of skills/experience and discrimination of gender. It's preposterous to equate all manner of discrimination. I hope I'm misreading your intent in the first few sentences of your recent post.

To treat all women as if they will be taking "several years of their first ten on the job" is ludicrous. That's not maternity leave. That's quitting your job to be a stay-at-home parent. Maternity leave in the USA can be less than a week for some women.

And how do you know if the woman you're interviewing will, or can, even have children at all?

It just doesn't make /logical/ sense to sweep someone away based upon so many shaky presumptions. There are so many things a human being /CAN/ do in their time that it seems maternity leave is a small issue of concern. What percentage of men become alcoholics versus women? Do you want an alcoholic engineer? How do you pick which statistics to use in your hiring decision and which to not? Why is maternity more valid than any of the countless things humans do that impact their time at work?

_________________________________________
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[PEDARRIN2]

Funny item I just saw - relates to the topic

http://www.chemicalprocessing.com/cartoon-caption/comical-processing-you-write-the-cartoon-caption/

 

[KENAT]

And how do you know if the woman you're interviewing will, or can, even have children at all?

You don't, but you can play the odds - unfair though it is to those impacted.

Why is maternity more valid than any of the countless things humans do that impact their time at work?

It's probably not, just a lot easier to estimate who may be affected by it.

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[JNieman]

It just sounds, to me, like the possibility of maternity leave is being used to justify pre-existing prejudice. That's the only conclusion I can imagine as to why one would willfully cling to illogical choices.

_________________________________________
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