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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.
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?
They offered no "data", only slurs that the work done by mainstream engineers is not as "relevant to societal needs", that "better engineering for all" is to be provided by female engineers.
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...