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How To Increase the Number of Female Engineers
HughPickens.com writes: Lina Nilsson writes in an op-ed piece in the NY Times that she looks with despair at estimates that only about 14 percent of engineers in the work force are women. But there may be a solution to the disparity that is much simpler than targeted recruitment efforts. "An experience here at the University of California, Berkeley, where I teach, suggests that if the content of the work itself is made more societally meaningful, women will enroll in droves," writes Nilsson. "That applies not only to computer engineering but also to more traditional, equally male-dominated fields like mechanical and chemical engineering." Nilsson says that Blum Center for Developing Economies recently began a new program that, without any targeted outreach, achieved 50 percent female enrollment in just one academic year. In the fall of 2014, UC Berkeley began offering a new Ph.D. minor in development engineering for students doing thesis work on solutions for low-income communities. They are designing affordable solutions for clean drinking water, inventing medical diagnostic equipment for neglected tropical diseases and enabling local manufacturing in poor and remote regions.
According to Nilsson, women seem to be drawn to engineering projects that attempt to achieve societal good. She notes that MIT, the University of Minnesota, Penn State, Santa Clara University, Arizona State, and the University of Michigan have programs aimed at reducing global poverty and inequality that have achieved similar results. For example, at Princeton, the student chapter of Engineers Without Borders has an executive board that is nearly 70 percent female, reflecting the overall club composition. "It shows that the key to increasing the number of female engineers may not just be mentorship programs or child care centers, although those are important," concludes Nilsson. "It may be about reframing the goals of engineering research and curriculums to be more relevant to societal needs. It is not just about gender equity — it is about doing better engineering for us all."
According to Nilsson, women seem to be drawn to engineering projects that attempt to achieve societal good. She notes that MIT, the University of Minnesota, Penn State, Santa Clara University, Arizona State, and the University of Michigan have programs aimed at reducing global poverty and inequality that have achieved similar results. For example, at Princeton, the student chapter of Engineers Without Borders has an executive board that is nearly 70 percent female, reflecting the overall club composition. "It shows that the key to increasing the number of female engineers may not just be mentorship programs or child care centers, although those are important," concludes Nilsson. "It may be about reframing the goals of engineering research and curriculums to be more relevant to societal needs. It is not just about gender equity — it is about doing better engineering for us all."
Honestly, why do you need to forcefully increase it?
Why?
... cloning...
Long as they have an H1B, I am pretty sure those women are welcomed...
Social engineering?
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
This bias can obviously be blamed on an ingrained bias dating to the male hunter/female gatherer sexism of early hominids.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
To include things that previously didn't fall under that banner, then women will pursue it. Well, ok then. If we redefine humanity to include things that previously didn't fall under that banner, I can marry my dog too. Doesn't make my dog human.
Don't care.
If you replace the demographic with "white male" and it suddenly sounds racist or sexist, it always was.
They should find out how they are increasing the number of male teachers and do the opposite.
Fine. So long as you're happy with being paid less for your work.
Well-paid or fulfilling - pick one. It's the same deal for both genders.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
I worry that this fervor for the involvement of women will lead to governments which try to do too much "good" for society, and thereby strangle all of us their motherly love.
"The key to increasing the number of male secretaries may not just be mentorship programs or child care centers, although those are important," concludes Nilsson. "It may be about reframing the goals of secretary research and curriculums to be more relevant to societal needs. It is not just about gender equity — it is about doing better secretarying for us all."
Be "that guy", because female engineers want to work with "that guy".
Game: Player 'Donald J Trump' now has AI skill level 'experimental'.
So what we're saying might be that while men will do what is needed, women might only do what they want to do.
If you believe this article.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
"According to Nilsson, women seem to be drawn to engineering projects that attempt to achieve societal good"
ALL engineering projects are for the societal good. There's not one that isn't made for other people.
Yay! Let us lower standards and barriers of entry for women while simultaneously denying them for men. Worked out well for general college admissions right? Right??
Because electrical, mechanical, civil engineers, etc contribute nothing to society at all...
This all implies a lack of interest is responsible for the difference instead of the barriers to entry idea that has been getting pushed all along.
Designing and building a dam that provides drinking water and electricity to millions is not "societally meaningful"?
Likewise, designing a weathersat that improves predictions of hurricanes and such is not "societally meaningful"?
Interesting that the argument being used is that "most of what engineers do does nothing for society, so women don't want to do that sort of thing"....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
You won't find a male engineer that became an engineer to feel better about himself and the 'societal good' he can do, that's for sure. Instead it'll be because it either interests him from a 'I get to build neat shit' aspect, or because of monetary consideration. Any 'societal good' he can do with the engineering will be a tertiary consideration at best.
Female here. It's in our interest to attract more than half the educated U.S. population into the engineering field. Other countries have no problem doing so, and the engineering slots will go to them. That said, I work with computers because I find them interesting from a purely technological perspective. It seems as though curious people make the best engineers; perhaps if we identify those sorts of girls early on and steer them toward STEM, that would work better than overhauling the entire industry.
Hey, at least this doesn't start out by deciding men aren't welcome like so many of the recent educational agendas intended to correct this "problem".
"It may be about reframing the goals of engineering research and curriculums to be more relevant to societal needs. It is not just about gender equity — it is about doing better engineering for us all." Well, Nilsson is correct, in part. It's not about gender equality. It's about reorganizing an entire field of study to cater to a targeted group. That is not gender equality, it's feminist ideology. In today's society, if you cannot compete, the rules of play are changed. There's no incentive to become better; to improve yourself and demonstrate that you are a capable person.
"women seem to be drawn to engineering projects that attempt to achieve societal good..." Whereas men have already and keenly perceived the societal good that results from their efforts.
"It is not just about gender equity — it is about doing better engineering for us all." No, it just about gender equality -- which actually seems to be about gender dissolution.
Just relabel some (formerly) male engineers as females. If possible, ALL of them. They have essentially the same relevant specs when it comes to the purpose of doing engineering, so this shouldn't be a problem. Also safes lots of money in the long run because they get paid less than men yet still remain just as unlikely to drop out due to pregnancy as before. All in all, they are superior both to male engineers AND the original female engineers. In the few cases where simple relabelling isn't enough, gender reassignment surgery is also still cheaper than creating + educating a whole new engineer with the same result.
So, where's the problem?
Most men will do a job because they like doing it, or because the job needs done.
Most women will do a job if it gets them more likes on Facebook.
Wait, are you really implying that woman will work on whatever they want to, that they don't have the willpower to work on what's needed? That is so masochistic I don't even know where to start. Woman don't want to work on engineering, so be it: as long as the ones that do want to have as equal an opportunity as a man who would want to do it, I don't see the issue here.
"Set a man a fire, he'll be warm for the rest of the night. Set a man afire, he'll be warm for the rest of his life."
We do have gender equity in math. Is that because math is more "societally meaningful" than CS or engineering?
*ducks*
My doctor's practice is 5 women. My wife's ObGyn is a practice of all women.
I think women are smart enough to know that engineering is a dead end end career.
Rename the school of fashion design to "Fashion Engineering" and include it in the stats.
How many women have been discouraged from pursuing technology related fields of study by the constant moaning in the media about how engineers are woman-hating pigs, how 20% women get raped on college campuses, and how they'll never be accepted into the "boy's club" and never make as much as men do?
Why is it, that after nearly 40 years in the workplace, I have never seen any of the things this article presupposes as reasons why women's numbers are lower in the engineering community? Call me blind if you will but I work with several engineers who are women and they seem to get along just fine.
This is just annoying, feel-good, liberal crap. Women's numbers will never increase because most want a family at some point in their lives.
That my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the content of their jeans but by the content of their character.
Do we really need another one of these?
And this is why we have sexism:
You won't find a male engineer that...
Apparently average diffrerences between genders mean you can make a generalization about every single member of a gender.
I mean FFS, it only says in the summary that the society of engineers without borders is 70% female. That's 30% male. Which means those MEN are also doing something which they consider to be a societal good.
So, please take your ill-formed opinions about me (just because I happen to be a man) and kindly shove them up your ass.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Could they not just lift the worldwide ban on female engineers? Oh wait... Also, I think more needs to be done to address the distinct lack of female garbage collectors and coal miners.
The reason there are fewer women than men in engineering is not because of some grand societal mechanism of oppression. It is because men and women are not the same. This goes back millennia. Our predisposed gender roles are baked into our DNA.
I have a much better idea. Why don't we stop obsessing over making everyone on the planet exactly the same, and let people do for a living that which they like and enjoy doing? Women who want to become engineers will become engineers.
I entirely believe you can fill one "relevant" course with 50% women, what does that prove ?
It proves there is some demand, not that there is a horde of women desperate to learn how to drill wells in the 3rd world. ...maybe there is, but there is no evidence for it.
I'm a science grad, I like this "evidence" thing.
There are a good number of people studying the Klingon language, yet I rather suspect that if every university offered such a course the places would not be filled.
This is the same logic, "I've got a course that we get people to take, therefore it can scale"
Of course I don't *know* that the demand for Klingon is relatively small, *because I require evidence* before I know anything.
The whole idea of relevance strikes me as deeply patronising, the idea that women shouldn't concern themselves with men's issues, like money and innovation, but should be some sort of carer, either wiping things up if from a poor parental background or doing a PhD in caring for 3rd worlders if she has richer parents.
Dominic Connor,Quant Headhunter
programs aimed at reducing global poverty and inequality
means they are interested in pretending to do engineering to get salaries with zero effort. The male equivalent is probably ill-conceived weapons systems for the government
According to Nilsson, women seem to be drawn to engineering projects that attempt to achieve societal good.
I read statements like this a lot. I find it interesting for a few reasons. First there is an implicit assumption that men don't care if our work benefits society or not. How do we know for example that it isn't a case of "people are drawn to ... projects that attempt to achieve societal good" and that when you focus engineering on that, you are not really just drawing higher achieving people away from other fields and when you are really get the best and brightest strata of the workforce there simply isn't better gender balance their than in the workforce as a whole?
Secondly the statement seems to assume this desire to be a "social do gooder" is some natural characteristic of women and not that they are socialized to be this way. Maybe the imbalance isn't so much to do with middle school on but much earlier. Perhaps if we stopped giving young girls little dolls to care for and a toy cookware and instead handed them a toy hammer and gun we would see different results.
Thirdly there is an assumption in this statement that one should work to "achieve societal good" rather than for ones own ends as if that is some how noble or good. Why is society seen as a ends, rather than a means by which we can enjoy higher productivity, safety and personal wealth. Sure we all have an obligation not to harm society, and to attempt put back as much as we have taken out so that its their for the next person but when is it "good enough"? When do we tell people hey you only live once meet your obligations and spend the rest of your precious little time enjoying what is yours as much as possible?
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
As an engineer i can can honestly say i studied it for two reasons. I like technical subjects and most engineers are great family men as they are handy, well paid and well educated. I wanted an excellent family life and as a side i get to play with gadgets.
For example, at Princeton, the student chapter of Engineers Without Borders has an executive board that is nearly 70 percent female
This seems like a real problem. How can we get more men into Engineers Without Borders? We need a presidential comission and a lot of news articles !?!
Or is it only a problem when women are the minority group?
... if the content of the work itself is made more societally meaningful, women will enroll in droves...
But what if the work does not need to be more "societally meaningful"?
.
Perhaps the purpose of the work is what it is because that is what is needed.
Society has to change so that woman join ordinary engineering in equal numbers than men.
This proposal sounds like a remedy which is worse than the malady.
As long as engineer is synonymous of anti-social, nerdy, badmouthed, poorly dressed guys, it won't happen.
I think many individuals in engineering fields try to improve the lives of other people. Some of those benefits are more implicit than explicit, so perhaps these fields need better marketing. However, I think the person has a duty to her- or himself to determine what the societal benefit is of the work they are doing. That way, that person is not following but actually leading. I think the article takes a shot at the issue but the paradyme used is off the true mark. Whether male or female, the individual has to make the work fit within their principles, not have others do that for them. Being a leader happens within the individual; you shouldn't need to be told that your a leader.
What's the point? If they aren't there they don't want to be.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Never said they wouldn't then USE their engineering skills for societal good. Just that they didn't go into the field for that purpose. There is a rather fundamental difference. Not to mention, and this is kind of important, EWB does not require any sort of engineering degree. As well, that percentage was the school club, not the percentage of ASCE members in EWB. Thus, using it as any sort of metric is rather... shortsighted.
female_engineers++;
A woman in every seat, regardless of competence or skill set.
This is the roar I hear from some of the more rabid members of the Neo-feminist movement, which is what I'm calling militant idiocy these days, as it resembles in no way true feminism.
If you want "gender equality" (an absurd term if you consider it carefully) you have to start at birth, it's amusing to me so many woman do the child raising and so many of those women raise their daughters with the same mythology they were handed.
Boys wear blue, Girls wear pink.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
"...the student chapter of Engineers Without Borders has an executive board that is nearly 70 percent female...."
Oh, well, as long as women outnumber men, that's OK.
Some of the comments posted here provide ample reason to aim for better gender balance in any and every field.
Like I said:
You can take whatever opinions you've formed of me simply because I'm a man and shove them up your ass.
It is reasoning like yours that sexism exists. You assume you can make glib assumptions that cover the mental state of 3.5 billion people.
A clue: you can't.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
The thing is, what they are describing isn't what has been proven to convince women (or people) to be engineers, but rather what has been shown to motivate women who already want to be engineers. So your argument doesn't really apply to this, but then neither does theirs.
I'd argue that once a person is already an engineer, the kind of work being done most certainly does factor into job choices for both men and women. I've turned down job offers to work on software for smart bombs, and once refused an assignment for a foreign military customer who had just carried out a massacre against its own people (luckily we didn't "win" the contract). I know plenty other (male) engineers who go further than me and refuse to work on military jobs at all. And I don't doubt that there are other engineers working those kinds of jobs who consider it a high moral calling. My current company (which does mostly commercial aviation) just a couple of weeks ago had one male student at a trade show blow us off because he was much more interested in working to provide secure communications for international democracy activists.
Now its possible this effect tends to be more pronounced in women. It appears the subjects of TFA have noticed this anecdotally. Personally, I'd rather see this scientifically studied. Getting to the bottom of the gender-stilting of our industry ought to be worth devoting some actual resources to, rather than just flailing about randomly at every anecdote that comes down the pike.
You won't find a male engineer that became an engineer to feel better about himself and the 'societal good' he can do, that's for sure.
Speak for yourself. Some people have interests that go beyond the amount of money they can make.
I don't respond to AC's.
I see a lot of negative comments about the op-ed. I really don't get it though. A lot of posters complain that it's wrong to alter the curriculum so you can attract more female students, that it's all liberal or/and feminine hogwash.
Most universities tweak their curriculum so they are up to date and attract more students that way. So what is so wrong with making a curriculum more attractive to women? We are not talking about excluding males here, but if you feel that way maybe your ego is a bit fragile.
The whole op-ed it can be summarized in one question:
Do male engineers want to work with more female engineers? If yes, make the curriculum more attractive to women. You don't even need to change the curriculum, you only need to change the description so it shows what good engineering can do for society. It most instances, it's how you describe something that makes a sale.
--- Reality doesn't care about your opinions, it happens anyway and if you are in the way you'll get squished.
a new program that, without any targeted outreach, achieved 50 percent female enrollment in just one academic year
A PhD minor "achieved 50% female enrollment"? When someone tosses out a meaningless statistic like that it triggers my BS detector. How many people are in the program? How many stayed with it? What is their major field of study? How many qualified men applied but were not selected for *cough* some reason *cough*?
Or is it more that men are encouraged to think of the money as a parameter of success?
I became a doctor because of the vocational urge to do good. I totally utterly sucked at it because the work did not suit my personality at all - I have the typical ADHD traits of being very focussed but easy to distract, and that combined with a pager going off constantly and 10 different tasks pulling you every which way was hell for me.
Since then I've worked in healthcare computing for most of my career - I was always a computer nerd, I got to combine my medical degree and my hobby (I'm a better programmer now than I ever was a doctor though), and there was always the sense of still feeding my vocation. I do periodically consider a change of industry (especially when a recruiter waves a tasty wage packet under my nose), but you couldn't induce me to enter the financial industry with a cattle prod, I'd feel like I was earning money by shitting on people.
I square the fact that as an engineer, I increase productivity, with the fact that in the healthcare industry, this probably leads to better healthcare, rather than fewer jobs. I would have a hard time, personally speaking, being one of the engineers working on those automated supermarket tills.
The only reason I moved out of the public sector into the private sector was that I was having doubts about how much good my work in the public sector was actually doing. Although at the moment, I'm having doubts about how much good the healthcare IT sector does at all - it mostly seems to be oriented around meeting the needs of the Medical-Insurance-Industrial-Complex rather than the patient and bogged down by so much legislation that true innovation is virtually impossible. I have some very cool tech for the healthcare market in the back of my head, but I can't see it flying in the current environment.
You are a fucking retard.
A man be an engineer. The same man may spend his time helping others. The same man may enjoy that work. The same man may be using his engineering skills in his work.
Nothing in that stream says that the man became an engineer to help others.
Which means those MEN are also doing something which they consider to be a societal good.
Or they just took it for an easy job / they didn't have other career options.
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." ~Thomas Jefferson
Why should it matter if there are fewer female engineers than male engineers? Women outnumber men by a large percentage in most humanities graduate programs but it would be absurd to suggest we need to do something to fix that situation. People have gotten so caught up in the numbers that they have forgotten the *REASON* we care about underrepresentation.
THE REASON TO WORRY ABOUT THE UNDERREPRESENTATION OF WOMEN IS BECAUSE YOU BELIEVE WOMEN ARE BEING DENIED A FAIR OPPORTUNITY TO PURSUE CAREERS THEY WANT.
This supposed solution is at odds with that concern. After all, if women aren't entering engineering simply because they don't find engineering jobs as attractive (and not because they were discouraged) there is no problem at all. Both men and women are simply choosing the type of work they prefer to do. If it turns out that women find work that is more socially meaningful more fulfilling that's great for them and we shouldn't mourn because they choose the type of work they prefer.
Moreover, this kind of "solution" doesn't really address the underlying problem we care about. If women are being discriminated against or discouraged from studying STEM subjects then no incentives at the college level removes that discouragement or discrimination. Even if you gain gender equality in engineering you haven't made things any better if, but for discrimination/discouragement, women would have made up 75% of the profession. This is just a band-aid to make people look better not a solution.
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
I didn't know there was male engineering and female engineering. I might have enrolled in female engineering, to make one my way, of course.
Women aren't that irrational
Well, we found the guy who's never been romantically involved with a woman. Get a girlfriend, then come back to us in a year and see if you still support that statement.
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." ~Thomas Jefferson
You are a fucking retard.
Touche my man, touche.
Nothing in that stream says that the man became an engineer to help others.
That's nice, but I didn't claim that. I dispute that no man ever would become an engineer for the good of society.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Sexist nonsense.
Stop giving dolls to girls and cars to boys, it starts on the crib.
Easy, give them jobs instead of locking them out because they are "not a good fit" with the org.
There's more women in mining than in IT for fucks sake, and IT is what grandpa would put down as "womens work" and no task for a strong young man in the first place.
Increase the duration of the male engineer harvest season and increase the bag limit to 4 male engineers per season. In order to harvest a male engineer, the engineer must have at a minimum 1 set of calipers, a pencil and slide rule in either the left side front shirt or lab coat pocket...
That should do it
They are not excited by the promise of Khaki Fridays, unlike their male counterparts.
They are not excited by the promise of 60-80 hour work-weeks that prevent them from being at home, parenting, unlike their male counterparts.
They are not excited by the promise of a dead-end job where they live in a uniform maze of grey cubicles, all alike, unlike their male counterparts.
I wouldn't call this forcing it, as this sounds like it's trying to appeal to women's interests. However, while this sounds interesting (I'd really be interested in seeing this implemented and tracked over a long period of time), I think it overlooks whether or not there are a lot of engineering, IT, or computer jobs for this kind of societally meaningful work. I think that having an engineering degree means that a person has the kind of mind to apply themselves well to almost anything, but if we have these droves of women leaving the profession after working for a few years because most of the jobs are for the hum-drum kind of things that they don't appear to be interested in, is anyone really better off?
If it gets some people to tackle these problems that no one else is looking at great, but the real world is a lot of code monkey going to boring meetings and writing goddamn login page.
Why is there this sudden panic to force a 50/50 ratio between men and women in STEM? Where is the push to have this same ratio applied to teaching, sanitation, nursing, day care staff, construction, and the countless other fields with lopsided employment practices? I've been in IT for nearly 20 years and the vast majority of my bosses have been women. Maybe a 50/50 ratio there, too?
Well, we found the guy who's never been romantically involved with a woman. Get a girlfriend, then come back to us in a year and see if you still support that statement.
Women are no more irrational than men. The fact that you appear to believe otherwise is a pretty good demonstration that I'm correct.
I'm prepared to accept that you're being an inveterat pedant, however and aren't actually indicating that there are any gender differences in this regard.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Even if your job is figuring out a way to shave a couple percent off of the cost manufacturing of a product that helps society become wealthier as well.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
You do realize that money was not first on my list. I would guess that the majority of engineers are not primarily interested in the money the career will bring them. Rather, it's the 'build shit' mentality that calls most engineers. But the type of guys to get an engineering degree, especially the ones who join one of the P.E. societies, do not do so because of the societal good they can accomplish.
How to increase the number of female ditch diggers.
How to increase the number of female bricklayers.
How to increase the number of female concrete mixers.
How to increase the number of female welders.
How to increase the number of female dump truck drivers.
This sense of entitlement to just wanting a leg up to the good jobs is horseshit. Pay your dues like men have too if you want access to the good jobs you have to do the shit jobs too. So sick of this more women in "x" crap. Toss your hat in the ring, thats how you get in. Its not freaking rocket science. There no secret alchemy to applying for "x" type of job....
So, sick of this recurring meme.
Remove the patriarchy. #killallmen
I'm going to posit that engineers in general have been desiring more vaginas in close proximity for pretty much ever.
Wait, that's not what you're saying?
Well, it is in fact exactly what your saying.
-Styopa
I am, gasp, a female software engineer. I work at a defense contractor, and I'm thankful to say that every year there are fewer fossils who think that women don't belong in software, let alone working on military software. The hostile environment is sometimes present in subtle ways, such as important discussions that occur spontaneously in the men's restroom or cubicle artwork that borders on inappropriate. Or, of course, trying to get projects assigned to other, male, engineers. Heck, I once heard a co-worker complain that he would have gotten his promotion if he's been a woman, with an obvious implication since I had gotten mine - ignoring that I've worked here three years longer, am considered more helpful and, oh yeah, _trained him_ when he got here. Nope, obviously, it's because I'm a woman.
Anyway, Slashdot is a perfect example of said hostile environment, from the subtle ("You're joking, there aren't any women on the internet!") to the cesspit that the discussion turns into whenever the topic comes up. I'm sick of it, frankly, and I really should just stop bothering to read the comments on most stories, causing me to lose out on the occasional insightful nugget, but helping my blood pressure. Someday, it might even be bad enough to drive me away.
Which was my point. Telling someone that they are imagining there is a problem is highly offensive, really, and tends to make people not want to be around you.
Nothing is holding back women form entering science / engineering. I would say leave everything the way it is and let those who want to come, come.
Why do this? Why make someone do what they do not want or are not able to do.
Actually we need more plumbers in general, and most of the trades for that matter, but nobody is beating a drum and spending billions of dollars trying to get more women to take them up.
You are really taking the biological fitness line are you?
So, you sit indoors typing all day and say men are better suited to it? Grandad would call it women's work and tell you to stop being so much of a sissy making up excuses as to why you think you are better at woman's work than a woman.
The biological fitness excuse not only doesn't fit in this case, it argues against the line you are taking if you look at the full history of the IT industry.
Seriously, guys, what's wrong with this? What's wrong with getting more women into engineering?
It's not like the curriculum is changing to be all SJW-y. Or that the courses are any less rigorous. Or that women simply can't handle math, science and engineering at a high level. So why the consternation over adding some programs in applied engineering? Was there this level of consternation when science was hived off from philosophy? Or science into chemistry, physics, and biology? Or when branches of science were thrown back together (biochem)? When electrical engineering became its own thing?
Before anyone gets too POed at me, there is also a SJW-y movement afoot aimed at tackling the over-feminisation of elementary school education. Yes -- it really is a thing, and it relates to boys underperforming girls in elementary schools. It flares up and down in Canada (and I think also in the States). And it's something that my kids' Toronto-area school is working very hard to fix, to the point of hiring moderately under-qualified men (like the grade 7 / 8 English teacher who, demonstrably, doesn't read what he assigns and pulls all of his lesson plans off the intertubes) at the expense of better qualified women. That's right, if you're a male elementary school teacher, you will be actively recruited by a variety of schools to close the gender gap.
If you think women don't prioritize emotions when making decisions, you're dead wrong. Emotions are inherently irrational, thus those who primarily use emotions to make decisions are irrational.
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." ~Thomas Jefferson
So, please take your ill-formed opinions about me (just because I happen to be a man) and kindly shove them up your ass.
Aha, you mean:
So, please take your ill-formed opinions about me (just because I happen to be a man) and kindly shove them up your ass, you insenstive clod.
I am curious, what are they doing to increase the number of female plumbers?
I really liked this paper that "challenges a rarely examined orthodoxy" and asks "Is Diversity Good?": http://www.mathieu.bouville.na...
Is there a clear and consistent definition of diversity? Is diveristy inherently good, or an instrumental good? Perhaps diversity is simply a factual description, a side effect, or a symptom?
Would this be published?
Ralph Jones writes in an op-ed piece in the YN Times that he looks with despair at estimates that only about 14 percent of teachers in elementary school are men. But there may be a solution to the disparity that is much simpler than targeted recruitment efforts. "An experience here at the university, where I teach, suggests that if the content of the work itself is made more objective and scientific, men will enroll in droves," writes Jones. "That applies not only to elementary school but also to more traditional, equally female-dominated fields like nursing and kindergarten."
"It is not just about gender equity - it is about doing better teaching for us all."
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
An experience here at the University of California, Berkeley, where I teach, suggests that if the content of the work itself is made more societally meaningful, women will enroll in droves
What truly is more "societally meaningful" than engineering? Engineers design almost literally every piece of technology used by human kind and we pretty much define ourselves by our ability to build tools. It doesn't get more societally meaningful than that.
How come the over-representation of female kindergarten teachers is never addressed?
Answer: because a majority of males are more interested in engineering!
Not to mention special ops, infantry combat, mining and ditch digging. These professions are all mostly male. I guess we'd better go figure out how to get more women there too.
Equality doesn't mean you just get to do the nice, clean, fun stuff. It means you do *all* the stuff.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
will it ever be accepted that maybe just maybe men and women arent interested in the same things... amybe men typically think checmical engineering is interesting where as typically a woman does not. Why weigh that much into the fact that it may just solely be choice.
So, what exactly is preventing women from forming these focused organisations? If women are naturally drawn to such things, shouldn't we see the creation of numbers organisations, some of which should be hyper mega corporations now?
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
Why don't they actually talk to female engineers?
The vast majority I have known have moved on. Some left in school because it wasn't a good fit. Some left while in the workforce to other non engineering related jobs.
But here's the thing, so have many of my male colleagues.
When I ask these people why they left, the answers are pretty much there. ...
1. They're bored. The work doesn't interest them anymore, but it still requires you to be interested to make a decent contribution. You can't really go on auto pilot and still do your job.
2. work-life balance, deadlines...
3. More power/respect in other areas
4. More social in other areas
In short, general problems that I don't think are female specific at all. Maybe females are less likely to put up with it than males? But the issues are pretty much cross gender.
Let's face it, when women wanted the right to work, they wanted the right to work in nice jobs. Not the oil rigs, not the garbage man, not the grinding away lowly tech worker...
Let's face it, most men would like not to work such jobs either. We do it mainly because we feel we have to.
The reason women don't go into tech is the same reason they don't go into many other fields... it's not a nice job AND for those qualified women, there are way nicer jobs available. Make it a nice job and they will come. But then again, so would many men.
I'm not saying it is a horrible job. It is a decent job for me to make some decent money.
But for those women who are qualified to be in tech, being a teacher, nurse, government worker, doctor, lawyer, business person... is far more up their alley. Just as it is for many qualified men.
...so they can attract a woman, who will then be able to do what she wants, regardless of the pay, because he is making up the difference.
Now that I have "gone my own way," as they say, I am free to accept a job with lower pay in order to get to do exactly what _I_ want. Which just happens to be computer engineering for a social cause: free education for all.
I don't understand all the comments about watering down engineering curricula or targeting women (which some feel means to exclude men.) In the original NY Times article Nilsson says: "I contacted the dozens of universities that have programs aimed at reducing global poverty and inequality" and "none of the programs, clubs and classes were designed with the main goal of appealing to female engineers." She is talking about programs with a particular focus which already exist. How is she advocating a watered down curriculum? What's wrong with encouraging women to consider engineering with this particular focus?
Stories about the breakdown of technology workers by gender really bring out the best in Slashdot readers. It's like when drop a corner of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich on the patio and don't notice for a week. It's amazing what comes out for the party.
You are welcome on my lawn.
More likely it will lead to a generation of very disappointed and disillusioned engineers, who find that real world engineering is VERY different from the kind of engineering their university taught them was the norm.
That's because many college engineering professors have absolutely no idea what engineering is like in the real world. Some have worked as actual engineers but most of them in my experience went straight into academia with its toy problems and research focus that has little to do with real world engineering. They gloss over stuff that you'll spend a lot of time doing in the real world.
Things they don't teach you in engineering school
* They don't teach nearly enough CAD which is a huge part of doing actual engineering for many engineering disciplines
* They don't teach you how to write good engineering documents and work instructions (most engineers are quite bad at this)
* They don't teach you about process improvement methods (Six Sigma, Kaizen, etc) used in the real world
* They don't teach you about budgets, accounting, cost justifications, or financing (they're REALLY bad about this one)
I could go on an on. You'll learn a lot in an engineering college curriculum but relatively little of it will be directly useful in real world engineering.
No, they became engineers because their math scores weren't good enough to get into a science program.
Engineers are the chiropractors of technology.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Instead of having H1B visa holders take all the engineering jobs?
Why would anyone want to be an engineer if there are no jobs open for them? People DO want to earn a living, regardless of their sex or other characteristic!
This sort of narcissism is insulting to anyone to whom it's directed. A child wants to easily complete the big showy job and garner the praise.
If you can sleep well knowing you did the best you could do to make a contribution, that will bring you satisfaction. Praise from others is empty even if deserved it will never be enough by itself.
My father's profession was at one time regarded as the 'save the world' kind of thing. But he just wanted to provide a service to those who needed it. Black, White, Rich, Poor, Pay me or don't--his duty was to serve and the respect he *earned* in the community over many decades was through service, not 'saving the world'. He never sought praise as fulfillment; outside of his work where it was required, he didn't put letters in front of his name.
He taught me whatever I do I should do well. If I dig ditches for a living (great grandfather did), then I'd better be the best damned ditch digger I can.
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And, by the way--if you are an Engineer, you're *supposed* to be working for the good of society:
Google if you want the whole thing; here's the beginning:
NSPE Code of Ethics for Engineers
Preamble
Engineering is an important and learned profession. As members of this profession, engineers are expected to exhibit the highest standards of honesty and integrity. Engineering has a direct and vital impact on the quality of life for all people. Accordingly, the services provided by engineers require honesty, impartiality, fairness, and equity, and must be dedicated to the protection of the public health, safety, and welfare. Engineers must perform under a standard of professional behavior that requires adherence to the highest principles of ethical conduct.
I. Fundamental Canons
Engineers, in the fulfillment of their professional duties, shall:
Hold paramount the safety, health, and welfare of the public.
Perform services only in areas of their competence.
Issue public statements only in an objective and truthful manner.
Act for each employer or client as faithful agents or trustees.
Avoid deceptive acts.
Conduct themselves honorably, responsibly, ethically, and lawfully so as to enhance the honor, reputation, and usefulness of the profession.
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
If you read John Locke, as Jefferson did, and as did just about every educated, politically-minded person of the time, you'd know in what sense "equal" is being used. It's a very narrow concept. "All men are created equal" means that there is no man or group of men on earth who can claim a right to be the political rulers of anyone else.
Which is rich considering that many of the guys who were behind the writing of that document were slave owners. You're quite correct of course but the irony is rather thick.
I'm sorry but the argument that there *needs* to be more women in computing just because vagina makes no sense to me.
Why does she just blindly assume that we all see the relative low percentage of women in the field as a problem? There is already nothing inherently gender specific in the subjects that make up CS (math, AI, good algorithm design etc). Lets keep it that way.
Remember the road to equality (and freedom of choice) is to keep the opportunities equal to both genders, not make equal numbers of both genders take those opportunities. If you introduce artificial advantages that only benefit one gender, even if it is to address some perceived numerical imbalance, you're necessarily reducing ACTUAL equality.
1) People are getting tired of being told that there's a problem which needs to be solved.
2) This sounds like making up a program that's not Engineering and calling it "Engineering" in order to make a quota
Without fail, every week or two there's an article posted here on Slashdot about how there need to be more female engineers, or female programmers, or female SETI students or whatever and we need to coerce them to join typically male dominated fields. All of this in spite of the fact that there's nothing really stopping them from doing any of this.
Are the engineering schools going to deny you when you score well on all your math and science tests? Are mommy and daddy going to stop paying for the education if their daughter decides to go the route of an EE or something?
Now someone will come along an argue that society is just preventing women from tapping into science related interests, and that they all really want to do it. Except that now you're encouraging a specific career path for them instead of being open minded to simply letting them explore all possibilities available to them and deciding their own interests.
Is it not also possible that they've evaluated these paths and decided they were not interested in them? My dad never tried to teach me how to work on cars or anything in spite of being a professional A&P. Not until I straight up said to him, "I want to learn how to work on cars." And since he always worked on our fleet of vehicles, I got to join in and learn that. I also messed around with sewing on my own initiative. My mother and sisters know how to sew, I gave it a shot. It did not interest me all that much. Now I'm an EE student because I discovered programming at the age of 11, and realized it's a relatively easy 'science' field and that I would learn much more going into EE, which I already have.
Long, but worth the read:
http://www.cypress.com/?rID=34...
tl;dr: A CEO tells a nun in great detail that requiring the board reflect a greater makeup of diversity for its own sake is "immoral".
A choice quotation from the letter follows:
"A search [for board members] based on these criteria usually yields a male who is 50-plus years old, has a Masters degree in an engineering science, and has moved up the managerial ladder to the top spot in one or more corporations. Unfortunately, there are currently few minorities and almost no women who chose to be engineering graduate students 30 years ago. (That picture will be dramatically different in 10 years, due to the greater diversification of graduate students in the '80s.) Bluntly stated, a "woman's view" on how to run our semiconductor company does not help us, unless that woman has an advanced technical degree and experience as a CEO. I do realize there are other industries in which the last statement does not hold true. We would quickly embrace the opportunity to include any woman or minority person who could help us as a director, because we pursue talent -- and we don't care in what package that talent comes."
Some people don't believe in fairies. I don't believe in The Patriarchy.
I'm not sure the difference is the "luring" of more women into STEM. Whether it be via watered-down-socially-attractive versions of STEM to pretend it's the same thing, or special outreach programs to get women to join up.
It seems to me that if you want more women in STEM, and this is an important national issue, then start celebrating STEM. Move the national awareness of the value of STEM and make heroes of STEM leaders/workers. If you want parity in STEM, make STEM part of the national dialog and identity such that those inclined (of either gender) will be more encouraged to choose it.
Some of this is changing already, but I think the solution has to be general awareness and attractiveness for all, not specialty "carrots" to lure women into your windowless STEM van.
Warning: Teh poster of this messaeg is lysdexic
... about this "debate":
1) Why nerdy men/boys don't want to be around more women.
2) Why more women don't have the imagination to see that any/all engineering can be turned toward a socially conscious purpose.
Have all these nerdy men just gotten bitter and given up on ever "getting" a woman? Do they now not want to even be around women so they won't be reminded of what they can't have. Maybe, just maybe, if more women "went into" STEM then more would eventually "be _into_" STEM. Then they would appreciate the nerdy guy's interest in it.
When I was young, I was interested in tech mostly because it was interesting in and of itself. As I got older, and even more liberal, I came to see how tech could be used for the good of humankind. Perhaps it would be good for both women _and_ men to be introduced to all the ways tech can help humanity (and still be hugely profitable) rather than see it as either just a nerdy hobby you can get paid for or just a way to make lots of money.
>suggests that if the content of the work itself is made more societally meaningful, women will enroll in droves," writes Nilsson. "That applies not only to computer engineering but also to more traditional, equally male-dominated fields like mechanical and chemical engineering.
For example, this story was recently on NGC TV:
The german jewish inventor of WW1 poison gas attacks was married to a chemist, who was the first ever lady to earn a university diplom in chemistry in Europe. She committed suicide after finding out what her husband has done. The guy then went on to invent Zyklon-B gas, originally meant to rid city sewers of rats and other infectious rodents. Then the nazis came to power in Germany and started using Zyklon-B on jews and he fled to the USA for fear of his life. I don't think swapping the gender roles would have brought the same line of events.
As a sidenote, there was an intl' treaty in the 1890's meant to ban the making and use of poisons and gases for warfare, for ever. It failed to gain enough signatures to enter power, because the US representative argued the creativity of american inventors cannot be legally hindered in a free, capitalist society... After that no other country signed up and those who had, retracted.
Apparently if we had more women in higher tier of politics and STEM worldwide, there would be no more wars on Earth.
>> She notes that....at Princeton, the student chapter of Engineers Without Borders has an executive board that is nearly 70 percent female,
I trust that she is equally concerned about that gender bias and getting more men into that board then? No? Funny how she suddenly gives equality a hall pass when it happens to be women that dominate something.
... is not appealing to women, change the work so that it appeals to them.
That way we can create projects that don't need to be done and can't be sold so that people will feel good about doing them.
Makes perfect sense if you're a liberal.
Societal good? Like drinking wells? Well first that isn't very difficult.
Look, we all want to do special cool little projects and make money. None of us want to do boring menial tasks that aren't fulfilling, don't allow us to be smug and feel like we're better than everyone else because we're charging the world.
Men have been the provider for a long time, so they got used to "Tough shit, you need to make money, do it anyway"
I'm glad we have equality or well, trying to reach that because women are just as capable as men.
However some of them are getting a rude awakening I guess. Then they blame society for not having jobs that they want or some shit and it's mens fault. No, welcome to the real world, not all this shit is fun and fantastic like what you were raised to believe.
I saw a TV show doing undercover boss for waste management. There were no time for breaks to go to the washroom, so you brought a pale for you.
It was a big issue for a women to have to piss in a bucket or whatever they had to do. /anyone/ should have to on a job like that.
No one gave a shit at all that men had to do the same thing. Now, don't get me wrong, I don't think
However apparently when women get the same shitty stick men do, it's a sexist thing or improper. Welcome to the world, you wanted an equal part of it. You don't get just lick the icing off and not eat the rest of the cake.
Women are no more irrational than men.
said no man. ever.
projects and in academic research, which are an already tiny, extremely competitive, and ever-smaller part of the general pool of engineering labor.
Most of what engineers do is in the broader consumer economy, engineering objects, systems, etc. for people that are already amongst the world's wealthy (i.e. consumers in the largest national economies), that they don't really need, to enrich still wealthier people that don't really need any more enrichment.
I may be a woman underneath it all, because despite being gainfully employed in a high-skill position that makes use of my Ph.D., I can't stand my job, which is all about making stuff with little direct bearing on daily life to help make rich people even richer—yet of course it is taken deadly seriously by everyone in the company, and there is a general disdain for and scoffing at "causes," like say, preventing climate change, expanding human knowledge and capability, or helping to address the massive wealth inequality on the planet.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Why?
Its not a problem that most women chose to do other things. Its nice to see freedom of choice in action.
Unless you can prove to me that women actually have less opportunities than men to get into STEM in the first place, this whole article is just misandry.
Things that men designed that we sure don't need:
* razors with more than 2 blades
* cars that go more than 200 mph
* anything made by Dyson
* any military project which turned out to be a boondoggle; this is how consumerism is expressed when you're spending government money.
* etc. etc. etc.
Now I must point out that the entire fashion industry is the feminine equivalent. What a waste of money.
Perform sex change operations on male engeneers.
You can keep your societal good and mine too, and give me the money. I won't complain.
... and raise better girls.
Seriously, if you want to increase the number of female engineers, you have to start young. You can just be all patronizing and say, "Hey, we want you to be engineers, so we'll allow you to build a pink bridge out of Paul Frank stickers!" or you can actually raise your girls to appreciate the value of engineering for what it is: the practice of making things work well.
It's a pretty piss-poor plan to change an entire global industry/area of study to meet the socially-enforced preferences of an entire 50% of the human population just because **you** feel the need to see a 50/50 workforce when you can simple modify the "socially-enforced" part and stop raising your daughters to be helpless Disney Princesses or mothers-in-waiting.
The social change to making previously male-dominated industries into equitably shared industries, like all social changes, takes generations. Older people need to die off and new people with different upbringings need to replace them. That's just how human society works.
So stop forcing your sons into blue and black and preventing them from playing with dolls. Stop forcing your daughters into pink and purple and limiting them to tea time play sets and flowing dresses. If you actually want a human society where everyone feels comfortable taking whatever classes or entering whatever industry without sex or gender boundaries, then you need to raise your children without those sex/gender boundaries to begin with.
Leaving aside the question of whether increasing the number/percentage of female engineers is good in and of itself, starting an engineering program aimed at reducing global poverty levels is probably a good thing.
Or rather, why bend over backwards just to have more female engineers? For what? For ... uh ... well ... to have more female engineers.
There is no reason whatsoever that we "need" female engineers. Or male ones, for that matter. I don't give a shit about the gender of an engineer I work with, I want to screw together a project, not screw out their brains.
What's with that craze of getting more $underrepresented_demographic engineers? What's next? We need more black engineers? Or more lefthanded ones? Or do we need more gay engineers? What the fuck is this shit about?
People will choose the profession that they want to choose. You know, back when I was young (before the PC-craze set in), we had the same. People would tell their kids that they HAVE TO GO into a certain set of professions because they were of that gender or that color of skin. You're male, you have to be a mechanic because that's a "manly" profession, you can't be a hairdresser, that's for girls and sissies! And lo and behold, it's the same shitty gendering again, just the other way around. You're female, you have to go into engineering because women HAVE TO get into these professions, don't go into a profession that's typical for women to choose because that's so backwards.
Why the fuck do you think you can force people into professions they don't want to go into? I know a few female engineers. Some of them good, some of them bad, pretty much like their male counterparts. And they all chose that profession because they wanted to, because they enjoyed it. Nobody will EVER be good at something if he is pegged into the slot because that's "the right thing to do" or other PC (or non-PC) bullshit.
Take yourself. You. Yes, you there. Why do you have the job you have? Probably because you CHOSE to have it. You became an engineer, a PR manager, a KAM, a project manager or whatever else you went for because that's what you wanted to do. Hopefully. I really, really hope for you that you didn't listen to some bozo trying to tell you that you HAVE TO go into this or that field, neither because "it's what $your_gender does", nor because "it's what $your_gender has to break into". But because YOU WANTED TO.
And that's how it should be!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
People like to harp on those 2, but lately with all this SJW garbage, it seems Atlas Shrugged is in too.
"created equal" is /has been said to be "under the law": not abilities. not gender. not eye color.
Legal rights.
As for engineering being "socially acceptable" by catering, well...
how many civil engineers are women that maintain/design/build sewage treatment plants? Water treatment plants?
Chemical engineers? Chemical processing for drugs/pharmaceuticals? safer cars? better fire supression designs?
Civil ? better roads? Safer bridges? easier to maintain housing? more efficient insulation?
I find these to be socially acceptable and desirable. Engineering for the sake of engineering.
If the minorities and women can't see the need or desirability of any of this, they don't need to be engineers, or parents, for that matter.
Free chocolates in the break room.
Stylish lab coats.
Error messages that make you FEEL better instead of just telling you what the problem is.
How much time, money, and gnashing of teeth is being invested in making sure that 50% of nurses are men?
The latest stats show that something like 52-54% of university students are female.
Can we pleeeeeease stop with the quota mentality?
A pox on web designers who feel that window.innerWidth == screen.availWidth
I believe that this is a lack of understanding of the global benefits of free market capitalism among students.
While all of these "engineers without borders" and "development engineering" things are nice, they are pretty insignificant in terms of actually enhancing the wealth and well-being of poor people in developing countries versus good old capitalism - where those poor people have the opportunities to make things and perform services of value to other people.
Deng opening up China to the global market has brought hundreds of millions of Chinese out of absolute poverty (making under $1 per day) through market exchanges. China did not have large amounts of foreign aid. They just made it OK to carry on capitalist trade.
Instead of setting up Wi-Fi in a poor village, it would be far better to teach the local people about the importance of secure property rights, the needs to reduce regulation to reasonable levels for a poor country which both enhances commerce and reduces the level of corruption, the needs to allow for free trade for imports and exports. And hopefully they can change their democratic government to enhance economic freedom, and if their government is not democratic, other solutions may be required.
If you want to know why a country is still poor, go read its entry in the Index of Economic Freedom.
Honestly, just reading the comments on this thread makes it pretty clear why. Rabid misogyny masked as an argument about fee will ("why make them be engineers when they don't want to") it mostly boils down to men (or, being /., I should say boys) feeling their territory threatened. Of course it would be better if engineering was more gender diverse. Anything too homogeneous always lacks in flexibility and inventiveness. Grow up, lads.
(PS. I am a man, if that wasn't clear)
The fact that you appear to believe otherwise is a pretty good demonstration that I'm correct.
Hmm... I read that several times, and it's still not making sense, amusing as it sounds.
Should sexist opensource developers have their projects censored or removed?
Recently an opensource game release story was removed due to the game developer's open sexism(0) and harrasment(1) of women in tech.
A story posted by the editor of the popular Phoronix linux news site about a release of an Open Source videogame was later manually removed(2). The reason cited was the game developer's unacceptable views on social issues such as gender equality (3).
The release story was titled "Xonotic-Forked ChaosEsqueAnthology Sees New Release - Phoronix" and can be accessed via the google cache(4).
With the recent inclusion of a code of conduct(5) for those wishing to contribute to the Linux Kernel some questions now need to be asked and answered about the inclusion of code from people who are known to engage in or promote socially unacceptable attitudes or harrasments of those whom the free-software movement would prefer to attract in their place:
* Are the social or political views of an author of free software relevant to that software's inherent quality?
* Should the beliefs of an opensource developer weigh when when evaluating whether a piece of opensource software is worthy of any publicity or public notice?
* Should men with unpopular or "forbidden" views be excised from the opensource movement and "not allowed" to contribute, in a manner similar to that which is done in employment?
* Has the free/opensource software movement changed in these respects since its founding? If so is this a positive change?
* Should there be gatekeepers to opensource that decide who may and who may not contribute. Should abusive developers be "blackballed" to maintain proper social order and controls?
and
* What are the consequences of not doing this
Citations:
(0) Past related incident: http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1310
(1) http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/...
(2) Removed story URL: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.p...
(3) http://www.phoronix.com/forums...
"Fortunately, the article has been removed now."
"Thanks everybody for speaking up."
(4) https://webcache.googleusercon...
(5) Linux "Code of Conflict"
Just a thought...
Olin teaches engineering in a totally different way from other engineering schools. Design projects start in the first semester of the freshman year, and by the time you have graduated you have been in at least 10 project teams. Also, design isn't framed as a technical problem with a technical solution. It is framed as a problem for people with a solution that must work for people. The technical part is just a couple of stages in the middle. They have design classes co-taught by engineering profs and anthropologists for that reason.
Women drop out of engineering because they don't see it as meaningful, and have less tolerance for the bullshit of the two year calculus/physics death march before anything remotely meaningful happens. The traditional engineering curriculum does a poor job of answering the questions: "Why am I here? What is the point?" If you don't bring in your own answer before you start, and one that is powerful enough to sustain you through the bullshit, you will not find an answer in your coursework.
"Lina Nilsson writes in an op-ed piece in the NY Times that she looks with despair at estimates that only about 14 percent of engineers in the work force are women"
WTF!! Tell her to dispair about the lack of white guys in football and baseketball... tell her to dispair at the number of Indian run hell holes springing up all over the US. Tell her to dispair over the millions of illegal and legal invaders from turd world countries every mega company is hiring. Tell her to dispair over the fact that employment in this industry is dead stale but you have every industry lobbiest from Main to Washington bribing Congress to raise H1B visa limits. l Tell her to dispair about the fact that wo many MEN that are DRIVEN to be engineers by skill and desire are getting worked to DEATH because of an industry that uses you up and spits you out.
If she cares about women she'll help them stay out of this field until it becomes a decent career again. Otherwise it's just another commie NY Times BS blast from the left. She wants women in engineering? If its so awesome why isn't she sitting in a sweaty little room coding away? hummmm?
Her card says development engineer (as in R&D), XX billion $ company. They nominally wanted a PhD chemical engineer. She finished calculus at 15, was touring inside the better medical school classes at 19, after summer research. Aim, MD-PhD. Decided medical school was too rote, went into fundamental medical research for grad school with a nicely titled/paid fellowship. Went to work for a small biotech, decided she wanted to work for a large company. She's not classically degreed as an engineer. Why not?
1. Nicer liberal arts colleges typically don't offer engineering, nominal 3-2 programs not withstanding.
2. Much of engineering is not typically seen as a desirable school/work environment stresswise.
3. In my generation, female engineering classmates largely failed to reproduce, 0-1 kids. Only one I know with 3 kids, was summa cum laude, married a (to be) highly successful doctor, and quit after his med school.
In his great wisdom as a leader, he was able to solve a similarly tricky issue.
So what's the pay scale on "societally meaningful" engineering jobs, because if it's not the same (and quite likely it isn't) we'll just be back to the whole "but it's not equal pay" argument.
The fact is that many "better feeling" jobs tend to come at a cost in regards to monetary compensation.
So if Marshall Eriksen is going to work at a soulless lawyer firm as a shark for hire, he's going to make more money.
But if Marshall Eriksen is going to work in the legal department of an environmental protection company, the pay may not be quite as good.
Similarly, if Jane Doe wants to work at a firm that does the engineering for creating oil rigs, good pay. But if she's building aquifers in Africa or something similar, the pay might be good but not "as good".
But... I bet a lot of comparisons will say "look at how Jane Doe, is making less money as an engineer (at eco-engineering inc) than John Smith, also an engineer (at drill-baby-driill inc)"
Tell the Male Engineers not to be cocky assholes?
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
"But there may be a solution to the disparity that is much simpler than targeted recruitment efforts"
The Bruce Jenner method?
It would make more sense for the universities, that taxpayers subsidise, to focus on problems that the taxpayer's society faces.
...cue white male confusion. I am a white male and it frustrates me to no end to hear so many "peers" who think everything outside of their own experience makes no sense. Why make special allowances for minorities, or women, or people that are transgender? These people assume that everyone's experience mirrors their own, and therefore if any group is underrepresented in an area it is simply that they don't have the drive or desire. In my experience, people that express a similar confused opinion that is highly prevalent here are the same ones that were totally confused as to why there was any controversy over the name of the Washington Redskins football team. I heard a clueless white guy who literally just had no idea why anyone cared because he was so culturally isolated. It isn't even malice, its just the privilege of being ignorant because you are the comfortable majority.
So, in other words, the way to increase the number of women in engineering is to create a fake engineering discipline covering a topic which interests women.
I saw a college bound girl say: "I want to major marine biology."
Her grandmother then replied: "Wouldn't you rather major in Special Education."
Yes another instance.
Me to brilliant honors student: "So when are you going to take Calculus?"
Her lovely father: "She's got no business taking calculus!"
With assholes like that encouraging them, no wonder more girls don't move into technical/difficult fields.
"I would have a hard time, personally speaking, being one of the engineers working on those automated supermarket tills."
Not me, because I prefer the automated supermarket till. Whenever it's open at Home Depot, I'm there and out of the store in 10 seconds.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
When these women that are so enamored with the social good that they're going to do while in school get out into the work place and realize that most Engineering jobs *don't* help starving children in Africa, then what?
Ah, but the point of the professor was to get bodies into University and make her numbers look good so she can get her funding... it's not her problem what happens after the students graduate.
It's been quite some time since I looked at the methods for calculating load bearing strength of steel, concrete, and timber structural members but I don't recall there being a 'estrogen' factor with a nonzero coefficient in any of the formulas nor do I recall any such factors for "societally meaningful".
Has something changed in the past couple decades?
Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading
Slavery was an institution the US inherited from hits colonial days.
Inherited so enthusiastically that 100 years later we had a civil war over it and didn't get anything even remotely resembling real equality until almost 200 years later though many would argue we still aren't quite there. And we're still dealing with the effects.
Jefferson, Washington, and Madison all called slavery "repugnant" and "evil".
And yet Washington and Jefferson owned slaves until the day they died so clearly they didn't really believe that even if they said so. Actions speak much louder than words. Yes I'm viewing it with modern day viewpoints but the fact remains that they had the choice to free their slaves and I'm quite sure they were aware of that at the time and chose against it.
You can read up on it if you care. You may disagree with their reasoning, but their choices certainly were not "ironic".
I have read up on it and I very much disagree. Ironic, hypocritical, self serving... take your pick of description - they all fit. Yes it was a political compromise but there was nothing forcing Washington and Jefferson to continue to own slaves if they really believed it was a repugnant practice. Maybe they disliked the practice but clearly not enough to stop doing it.
Did you ever read Jefferson's original rough draft of the Declaration? In it, he wrote England had:
I don't really care what he wrote. He remained a slave owner which says everything that needs to be said about his opinions on the matter. Jefferson was a remarkable man but also a very flawed one.
Just put more pink on the book covers.
Ah pedantry. So fun. I believe most people prioritize emotions, which means I must therefore believe most women prioritize emotions being a proper subset and all. If you think men are more rational than women than I put it to you that you don't know many men or women.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
I wad implying that he was basing his opinion on feeling rather than a rational, evidence backed argument, thereby giving an excellent demonstration of an irrational man.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Well, 60% of soviet engineers were women. Talk about social meaningfullness now
That will raise the ratio of m/f engineers.
We already have more females graduating with college degrees. If they were interested in fighting against foreign "talent" for jobs, they'd be doing it.
-Anonymous Coward
We will never know why people do or don't take the courses they do. We will never know why they act as groups the way they do. If we knew why women didn't take engineering courses we would know how to stop genocides.
This article takes as an assumption that getting women to take more engineering courses and becoming engineers is a good thing. There has never been a good answer for why - but there isn't a good reason for why not. The real issue here isn't engineering. It's trusting people and letting them make up their own minds. In this sense we get a conflict between several different ideas of freedom. Rousseau vs Locke. We in America, IMHO, understand freedom to be something individuals exercise, not something we receive or have done for us by any external force. Freedom is limited because people do really bad things sometimes. Baltimore is not just an example of people now making bad, evil, choices. But an example of a history of evil or bad choices. Slavery and Jim Crow can't be defended.
So we are left with a pragmatic statement that women in America take these sort of engineering courses. Since this has worked, and if we take it that getting more women to go into engineering to be a good thing, we should continue to do this.
I'm good with this. The people who want to do this have the same freedom to do it as other have to ignore it. I can't see anything bad coming out of this.
Makes sense. If you're going into a field where your salary is suppressed and the fruits of your labor go to others with MBAs and no engineering prowess, then it had better be doing someone some good somewhere.
Let's see...Electrical engineering. Well, I kind of think that electricity, telecom, and computers for the entire world, including the third world is already pretty socially meaningful.
Medical device engineering? Last I noted folks in third world are able to get things like prosthetic devices (assuming they can afford it, which , come to think of it, is just like the first world).
Telecom engineering? I kind of thought third world folks had telephones -
Mechanical engineering. I kind of thought that cars, trains, buses, boats, and other mechanical devices were used throughout the world.
If you want a course in the meaningfulness of engineering, you shouldn't be an engineer.
You can't base your behavior simply on rational thought. You need to have some idea of what you want to be doing, which is fundamentally emotional. Ideally, you're trying to make you and your loved ones happier, and happiness is an emotion. If you don't think your decisions aren't firmly based on emotion, you're being irrational.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Of course I knew how this discussion would go as soon as I read the summary but I read through anyway. Near as I can tell the story is several universities started to offer engineering programs that focused on work socially conscious individuals would be attracted to (like previous focuses on 'green engineering' or any number of other incarnations) and in retrospect they find they drew in many more women to try the field than the more traditional programs. So we get this opinion piece that points this out and says all the outreach efforts so often decried here are probably not as important as holding up a vision to people how a field lets them accomplish something they desire. And the frigging crying and whining sets up again. If the glasses are all building Easy Bake ovens and calling it mechanical and electrical engineering I might agree. If they are using the goal of providing clean water to rural third world areas and having to master basic engineering skills to do so then you should all go have a beer and stop worrying some chick is going to be given your job.....
Very specific fact you've got there - pity the total employment numbers render it irrelevant isn't it?
So why is it you want to skew the discussion away from the completely obvious?
The women I graduated with who not only had better academic scores than me but later (after eventually getting work more impressive than the fixing pinball machines I did between jobs) had more impressive experience than me but have had longer periods of unemployment than I have. For example - five years in a cutting edge research lab (which was shut down after a takeover) then having to settle for being a University admissions clerk. Getting a doctorate and having to settle for being a web designer. The list goes on. Because HR weenies are scared that that if they employ a woman in an IT or engineering position they will leave a year later to have a baby they find it hard to get to the interview stage in a lot of places.
If you get off your arse and take a look you'll see some statistics comparing graduate numbers and workplace participation that confirm what you can see if you look around - many fields of engineering are a sausagefest no matter who studied it. IT seems to be an order of magnitude worse than even mining.
However, even limited to interviews observation makes your assertion extremely unlikely, so let's take a look on what you've based your mountain of bullshit upon - oh it's this molehill here:
(http://www.pnas.org/content/112/17/5360.abstract)
You've seriously taken a study on employment of scientists in Universities and applied it to employment in an entire country over a range of industries! Are you a fucking idiot or are you a manipulative prick? There doesn't appear to be room for a third option. What the fuck is it with this place that such whiny sociopathic shit keeps bubbling up every time there's a "women/blacks/asians want to take our jobs" opportunity to complain.
So now I suggest you lay off your copious helpings of irrelevant tripe because I'm not just some potential useless idiot you can infect with your whiny "why can't I get laid - it's the fault of women getting jobs" bullshit that was old in the 1920s.
PS - couldn't resist this commenting on this truly laughable bit of shit:
You mean making a living out of it like the men in college football where it can lead to a career? Where are those huge numbers of jobs in women's sport? You didn't think very hard before writing that did you?
At least it's getting a bit more clear why you want to skew the discussion away from the completely obvious. You have a petty little agenda to push and reality can go fuck itself.
Wait, you have a problem with automating jobs that are so simple they can be automated (like people who work supermarket checkouts)? What about all the filing clerks and managerial people your healthcare software is designed to replace? Weren't their jobs somewhat more challenging than running a supermarket checkout? I find such justification extremely short-sighted.
Increase the number of Chippendales working as Engineers.
Problem Solved!
about differences in male/female incentive structures. Perhaps explaining why there are fields where one sex dominates - if women prefer work with a focus on direct social benefit, it would explain why they comprise the majority of nurses, teachers, social workers, etc.
There is that factoid (true or not) that it's a lot more likely for women to leave the STEM sector within 10 years after graduation. (got no link to call this a fact I'm so sorry)
That will open up plenty of jobs for engineers. When women see they can actually get jobs in engineering because H1B visa holders are not taking the vast majority of them, they'll want to study engineering and get into the field.
The main barriers I've heard of from young women trying to get into engineering careers have been, and still are:
1. Being hired.
2. Being given tasks that are just as important as the men get.
3. Not getting ignored when they say the same thing a guy repeats a minute later.
That plus sexism.
Just an observation from someone who has worked with women in engineering all my life.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Trans-gender developers. duh.
Imagine a product advertised as "containerized dihydrogen monoxide from 18 10' S 178 27' E." Would you buy it? Nah, of course not. But if it's advertised as "Fiji Water" you're all over it.
You won't find a male engineer that became an engineer to feel better about himself and the 'societal good' he can do, that's for sure. Instead it'll be because it either interests him from a 'I get to build neat shit' aspect, or because of monetary consideration. Any 'societal good' he can do with the engineering will be a tertiary consideration at best.
I did.
Doesn't science help people by building things that work? Buildings that dont collapse? Computers that are useful? If you want to be in social sciences, stay away from STEM. Let people make things that work. Just because they work.
When I was growing up, my sisters would spend fully 1-3 hours a day doing makeup, hair, clothing, and other prep work to look presentable in public. Society expected this of them, or rather they felt society expected it. I spent 15-30 minutes a day on the same task.
When I was growing up, my sisters spent virtually no time at the computer, or building things, or learning about engineering. Society expected this of them, and my parents largely supported it. I spent 1-3 hours a day on these tasks.
The gender gap isn't due to lack of raw talent, or lack of ability. It's not due to the jobs not being "interesting" or "world changing". The gender gap is because women don't spend the same amount of time doing engineering that men do in their formative years, when it matters the most. We aren't going to fix the problem by trying to bring women into the picture after the damage has been done - the best we can do at that point is mitigate the issue. To really fix it, society is going to have to value engineering more highly than spending two hours on makeup and appearance.
Good luck with that.
Alter Aeon Multiclass MUD - http://www.alteraeon.com
Which doesn't even come close to being a figleaf on your blanket assertion - so not relevant as such at all.
No, however that describes your position very accurately since it's contrary to job market statistics and observable reality. You've defined your "worldview" with no reference to reality - merely idealogy and then grasped at straws afterwards in an attempt to fuel some misguided polemic about how those girls/blacks/asian are taking our jobs. What a pathetic little creature you are.