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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.
If you replace the demographic with "white male" and it suddenly sounds racist or sexist, it always was.
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?
I'm wondering what happens to these women AFTER their feel-good-engineering courses are over and they graduate. If the university taught them that engineering is all about saving the world, they're going to be in for a pretty rude awakening when they hit the job market and find out that there are very few jobs available that involve world-saving (and the few that do exist are mostly filled by volunteers or pay absolute shit). Not to mention that corporations and agencies are going to have to deal with an annoying influx of new engineers who think that any project that doesn't build wells in Africa is beneath them.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
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.
Just to chime in with fun theory feminists and masculinists often forget about when they start sperging about muh gender online: The mean IQ scores between men and women vary little. The variability of male scores is greater than that of females, however, resulting in more males than females in the top and bottom of the IQ distribution. What this means that yes, in absolute numbers, there are more males with above average IQ, but also higher amount of dullards, with women sticking closer to the center of the bell curve.
My personal pet theory is that back in the day, this didnt matter that much as computers were too much of a niche. When this niche became a mainstream subject though, this distribution (in absolute numbers) started to show. Overgeneralized pet theory: intelligent people flock towards computers, others to sports and other endeavors. In absolute numbers, theres more males of smae iq than females.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1037%2F00...
http://dx.doi.org/10.1126%2Fsc...
http://dx.doi.org/10.1017%2Fs1...
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.
It's not so much redefining STEM as redefining societal good. Much of the things they mention are certainly forms of engineering and so fit firmly under STEM, but the problem is they're a tiny subset of engineering, and similarly a tiny subset of useful engineering that the world needs.
The premise of the argument in the summary seems to be that medicine, healthcare and so forth are all in this arbitrary societal good category, but things like building houses, power grids, bridges, phones, video games, operating systems and so on and so forth are not.
So the argument seems to be that if we give disproportionate focus to certain areas of engineering application we can increase the number of female engineers. I'm not terribly sure that that helps though as it means the majority of engineering areas are still woefully underfilled, and still have a woeful lack of gender balance.
So what if we have an increase in the number of female engineers figuring out how to do large scale deployments of some new technology like low power computing devices and methods of charging them and connecting them into poor communities if we've done nothing to solve the electronic engineering shortage which is required to develop the low powered devices in the first place? Both things are necessary, but the summary seems to imply only the former does societal good even though the former necessarily depends on the latter. It's ill conceived nonsense.
So yes you could do something like that and pretend you've fixed it, but all you've really done is fix it in a very contrived and niche circumstance without addressing any of the underlying reasons for trying to fix it in the first place, like trying to fix gender imbalance across all aspects of the field, trying to fix pay imbalance, or solve the STEM shortage in general. A bunch of females doing low paid engineering work for charities in Africa, isn't going to sort out the pay or gender imbalance when back in Silicon Valley you have a male dominated engineering industry holding all the money. So they've fudged the engineering graduate numbers to look slightly more fair, great, then what? what about the actual problems we're trying to solve in doing that in the first place? Do they not matter providing we've pulled off an adequate fudging of numbers to whitewash the problem?
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.
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.