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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?
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.
If you replace the demographic with "white male" and it suddenly sounds racist or sexist, it always was.
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 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'.
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"
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.
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?
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?
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.
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
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?
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I'm a female engineer. I've worked at my place of business for fifteen years. I plan on staying in programming. I have an eight month old daughter and a stay at home father husband.
Most of what you just listed, I would be lousy at. I'm an INTJ and lack the patience with idiots to be a teacher, nor do I have the calling to work the long hours required of many of those professions. (I should note that I'm lucky to be at a company that doesn't have mandatory unpaid overtime, like far too many software places.)
I am lucky in that I had supportive parents and teachers who didn't put up roadblocks to my doing what I wanted to do when I was growing up, indeed, they encouraged me. I went to an all engineering college that was accepting female students for the first time and I'm happy to say that the most sexist attitude I encountered amongst the faculty was from my psych prof (there's got to be a joke in that statement).
I think out of the female friends from college I'm still in touch with (say, 20 people at the periphery as facebook friends), there are only 2-3 who have stopped being engineers.