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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."
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
Be "that guy", because female engineers want to work with "that guy".
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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?
Hrmph... just like a man. We're talking about women's feelings regarding engineering, and you're talking about "data".
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
I dunno, but I guarantee you that in my college years had we had "Engineering solutions to kill people from orbit", I'd have signed up for that shit in a heartbeat.
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai