How To Increase the Number of Female Engineers 634
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."
But why? (Score:5, Insightful)
Honestly, why do you need to forcefully increase it?
Why?
Re:But why? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Because the US has some insane fascination with everyone being equal, no matter their own personal interests.
So, are you claiming that universities shouldn't do courses which cater to different interests?
Because that's what this is about: changing the emphasis of the course means that people interested in the new emphasis will enrole because they find it interesting.
Re:But why? (Score:5, Insightful)
So, are you claiming that universities shouldn't do courses which cater to different interests?
Correct.
I didn't refuse to go into Comp Sci because the school wouldn't teach the stuff I was interested it. It was/is my job to use and extend what the University taught so as to *then* do what I want.
Re: (Score:2, Troll)
I didn't refuse to go into Comp Sci because the school wouldn't teach the stuff I was interested it.
So in other words you chose a course which was completely of no iterest to you but you did it anyway?
Or perhaps universities should make the courses as boring as possible because why bother trying to interest students at all?
Or perhaps universities should only offer courses that you have personally approved???
It was/is my job to use and extend what the University taught so as to *then* do what I want.
That's y
Re: But why? (Score:4, Insightful)
I think that the point is he adapted to the needs of the job market rather than require that the job market adapt to suit his interests.
Re:But why? (Score:5, Insightful)
Or perhaps universities should only offer courses that you have personally approved???
You numb-nuts. Universities are *not* trade schools, which only teach what is popular.
(Well, they should not be trade schools.)
Re: But why? (Score:5, Insightful)
Liberal arts departments already tried that. Now you can take classes like Erotica in Middle English or Grievance Studies, because that's what students want to take, when they would be much better served (and prepared for their future jobs) by Pulling An Espresso Like Pro or Passing Time While Flipping Burgers.
Re: But why? (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm actually a-ok with my barista being able to discuss, intelligently, the evolution of literature, arts, and what not vs some kid who just wants to spit in my order, go back home, smoke pot and call me a racial epithet on xbox live.
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We've also got some insane history that has caused a lot of the disparity. We still have living people today who had the crap beat out of them just to go to a non-segregated school, to have full voting rights, and so on.
Engineering sticks out as a field that has very few women, which is not really a good thing. My current group has 2 out of 20'ish, while my previous job was 0 out of 30'ish (we did have one female assembler, but I am counting engineers). We whine about the lack of STEM graduates, and even
Re:But why? (Score:5, Insightful)
There's nothing wrong with being inclusive, and in fact, any elements in STEM groups which are actively keeping women out or making things hard for them due to sexism should be addressed and punished if necessary. I really wish there were more smart engineering women out there; I would really prefer to work in a 50/50 environment with both male and female engineers (hell, I'd be happier working in an all-female-engineering workplace, with me as either the only or one of a few men; I'd probably have a much better sex life if nothing else, and have an easy time finding a really good marriage partner; lots of people meet their spouses at work, after all).
The problem is that very, very few women seem to have any interest in the field, and those that do seem to all come from an Asian background. (Not that there's anything wrong with Asians, it shows there's something wrong with westerners actually.) You just can't make people interested in something they're not interested in.
From what I can tell, this lack of interest comes from the way little girls are raised in our society; parents and schools just don't encourage them in these things, and traditionally these things are seen as "geeky" and derided by everyone. Boys want to be jocks and girls want to be cheerleaders early on. So the boys who are quiet and smart and not-jocks go into computers and engineering, while the girls who are smart go into something like medicine.
Re:But why? (Score:4, Insightful)
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal...
The US Declaration of Independence."
Well, this article is about the very opposite: since men and women are *not* created equal, we need to act differently if we want to attract woman talent than we'd do to attract man talent.
In the end, this action is not about egalitarism but about feminism.
Re:But why? (Score:5, Insightful)
"Equal" doesn't mean what you think it means. It doesn't mean "the same" or "identical", it means "equally valued". For example, everyone has basic rights, everyone is treated the same by the law, that sort of thing. It doesn't meant we are all clones or must wear the same clothes or like the same things or think the same way.
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Well, the progressive reasoning is that the gender imbalance is a result of the patriarchy snapping up all the desirable jobs, leaving the shitty, low-paying work to women. Of course, that reasoning is utterly wrong on several levels, but you can't accuse them of not trying to come up with a justification.
Re:But why? (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't get that at all. 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. It's an axiom against the idea of divine right. It's an axiom against the notion of absolute monarchy. In the context of English politics, it's an axiom against the political primacy of an un-elected monarchy or hereditary aristocracy; an argument for the primacy of Parliament. In the context of American politics, it's a political argument against kings and aristocracy; an argument for representative government.
The concept is ante-government, or "meta" as we say (in this half-literate age). It comes before government. It's the rationale for what kind of government is right and just, and it's a strictly political concept—not a social one. It doesn't have anything to do with the egalitarianism that you allege. It has nothing to do with society, and certainly nothing to do with the modern concept that styles itself as "social justice."
Slave owners claiming all men are equal (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re: (Score:3)
Slavery was an institution the US inherited from hits colonial days. The Constitution represented a compromise that postponed hard decisions on slavery; its authors definitely saw the contradictions between its ideals and the continuation of slavery, but they believed such a compromise was necessary at the time.
Jefferson, Washington, and
Re: But why? (Score:5, Insightful)
I just had this /exact/ conversation with my wife. She said that the idea presented in this op-Ed is condescending (speaking a civil engineer herself). She said "what, women engineers just aren't getting enough hugs?"
It sounds like the author is saying that the problem with women engineers is their lack of vision or creativity. If they can't extrapolate "chemical engineering" into "salinity reduction in east-African water sources" then why do we need to create a new major course of study with that name? It's the it obvious that (nearly) any type of engineering can be used to help (nearly) any group of people anywhere in the world?
Re: But why? (Score:5, Insightful)
I just had this /exact/ conversation with my wife. She said that the idea presented in this op-Ed is condescending (speaking a civil engineer herself). She said "what, women engineers just aren't getting enough hugs?"
Indeed. I found the op's bit '"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.' to be incredibly sexist in a number of ways.
1. Implies that women are more interested in 'socially meaningful' work
2. Implies, by correlation, that men aren't.
3. That the current engineering work isn't 'socially meaningful',
Oh, and news lady, Berkeley isn't 'normal'.
Oh, and it's not her fault, but remember that at this point men are highly outnumbered at most universities by women. They're the minority, not women.
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These are students looking to take an introductory course. That implies that they don't know much about engineering, and hence require an introductory course. So it isn't really clear how they would otherwise make the leap from "chemical engineering" to "salinity reduction" without first doing the course, or at least reading the advertising material that now points this fact out.
Re: But why? (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Re:But why? (Score:5, Informative)
No, of course not. Who is suggesting we force it?
They made their course more attractive to women, nothing else. It even says they didn't make any other effort right in the summary. No forced sign up, no press gangs etc. They just made the courses more interesting to female students and they signed up of their own free will.
Mind blowing, huh?
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The idea of changing the course content is presented as a "solution" to the "problem" of low female participation in the engineering workforce.
That means if you'd actually want to implement this "solution" then it would involve changing the contents of the other engineering courses as well.
Re:But why? (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't see why you have to change the content of courses. You can't really. There is no "women's calculus." They're talking about a program of guided study towards a particular goal. That is, a different collection of courses and independent study, not different content for the same courses.
My brother-in-law got a building construction degree. However, he did so as part of a "green construction" program at the university. In addition to the courses on calculating loads on walls and tensile strength of materials and all that, he also had courses on ecology and environmental law, so he could better understand the context of the problems "green construction" is trying to solve and the legal frameworks in which you'd have to work.
I imagine a "socially-conscious engineering program" would be similar. You still have to take the standard civil engineering classes to learn how to build a new water pipeline or desalinization plant to solve California's water problems, but perhaps law classes on water usage rights would be helpful. Or sociology classes to help you deal with how to communicate with the public that your new clean fusion reactor is not really one of satan's demons in a box that's going to give you canceraids.
Sounds good to me.
Re: (Score:3)
but perhaps law classes on water usage rights would be helpful.
I doubt that a few extra classes like this will have much impact on female participation. When I decided to study computer science, I did that because I was interested in computers. I didn't even know exactly what classes I was getting until I was already enrolled. I think it's similar for most people.
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I think that's kind of the point. Right now many programs are geared towards the idea of just "study this thing because you're interested in this thing, and whatever you do with that afterwards...shrug." Or "study this thing to get a job as a civil engineer."
What this lady is saying is instead make a program like: "want to help people in developing nations (and soon, everybody...) have access to clean drinking water? Come here and follow the 'Clean Water Engineering Program.'" At the end you're a civil engi
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It doesn't have to be a different degree. I got an electrical engineering degree and we had different "directions" to choose as well, but we all got the same piece of paper. You choose the electives you want. For instance, if you want to design power plants, you take the power electives. If you want to do analog stuff, you take the analog electives. If you want to do computer stuff, you take the microprocessor and digital electives. At the end you have engineers who specialized in different things, but we a
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You are not changing the content, just the delivery methodology. The content can be the same; Calculus, Dif. Eq., Statics, Fluid Dynamics, etc. But wrapped up in a more practical and meaningful set of course work.
Re:But why? (Score:5, Insightful)
"They made their course more attractive to women"
Thus accepting that there is a man/woman inequality or else, you shouldn't need to purse gender-based interests.
So, on one hand, it is politically incorrect to point that there exists gender inequality but, on the other, it is politically correct to address a gender inequality that you can't point at.
Re:But why? (Score:5, Insightful)
Ok, fine, I will bite.
Now let's say the university alters their courses to be more attractive to women. But the jobs that engineers will not change. You may want to change them, but if they want them to actually achieve something useful, they really can't change. It's like asking painters to be more like actors, so actors can also enter the field of painters; this will not create more painters, since the skill of painting, remains the skill of painting.
"more societally meaningful" ?! And I don't get it either. My job does not get more societally meaningful; if I don't do my job (Software Engineer, Industrial Automation), you don't get any power to your home, don't drive a car, don't get air condition in the mall and many more things. Sure I am only a small cog in that bigger scheme of things, but without engineers modern society would not exist.
I would like more women in engineering; many of the colleagues I like to work with are women. And talking with them, the content of their work is not what is holding them back. In some cases it may be social or cultural and in other cases just "math is hard".
On that note, I demand more male nurses!
Re:But why? (Score:4, Insightful)
Ok, fine, I will bite.
Now let's say the university alters their courses to be more attractive to women. But the jobs that engineers will not change. You may want to change them, but if they want them to actually achieve something useful, they really can't change. It's like asking painters to be more like actors, so actors can also enter the field of painters; this will not create more painters, since the skill of painting, remains the skill of painting.
"more societally meaningful" ?! And I don't get it either. My job does not get more societally meaningful; if I don't do my job (Software Engineer, Industrial Automation), you don't get any power to your home, don't drive a car, don't get air condition in the mall and many more things. Sure I am only a small cog in that bigger scheme of things, but without engineers modern society would not exist.
I would like more women in engineering; many of the colleagues I like to work with are women. And talking with them, the content of their work is not what is holding them back. In some cases it may be social or cultural and in other cases just "math is hard".
On that note, I demand more male nurses!
When a man doesn't want to be a nurse, that's OK because most men would prefer not be nurses.
When a woman doesn't want to be an engineer, that's because the male dominated field is holding them back, and remedies must be made!
Re:But why? (Score:5, Insightful)
They just made the courses more interesting to female students and they signed up of their own free will.
Hold the phone! Are you saying that women didn't previously sign up for this course because (gasp) they were not interested in engineering just for engineering's sake? That certainly puts paid to your previous unsubstantiated theories of sexism being responsible for the lower numbers of females in STEM.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Whats mind blowing is you just admitted that the reason women were not joining the courses had nothing to do with sexism, they just weren't interested.
Ignoring the Elephant (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
To create a more varying and interesting world.
Wouldn't the fact that different jobs have different amounts of male/female interests be a sign of variation ?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:But why? (Score:5, Insightful)
There are different jobs with different characteristics. Some people like math, others enjoy pruning trees in the park. Some jobs involve dealing with people, other jobs involve dealing with mechanical objects. These jobs have different appeal to different people. The average interests of men differs from women. For instance, a larger percentage of men prefers to deal with mechanical objects, and a larger percentage of women prefer a job that involves social contact with other people. Naturally, these preferences will be reflected in the job ratios.
Things aren't "fixed", but on average, you're going to see differences. To me, that sounds a lot better than having each job appeal equally to every person in the country.
So its..... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
A delicious double entendre indeed - and if you read closely the bio of the writer, you see something similar too. Noun phrase or gerund?
"Lina Nilsson is the innovation director at the Blum Center for Developing Economies at the University of California, Berkeley."
Re: (Score:3)
A delicious double entendre indeed - and if you read closely the bio of the writer, you see something similar too. Noun phrase or gerund?
"Lina Nilsson is the innovation director at the Blum Center for Developing Economies at the University of California, Berkeley."
Its such a pity. I have enjoyed working with women engineers and scientists over the years. But they weren't trying to turn the workplace into something popular, they were there to do a job, and it was science. They did not set themselves up as different and superior to the male engineers, and were treated as equals because they were equals. And they added a real value to the workplace, because they did indeed think a little differently, and often came up with solutions that were just a little different,
Blame it all on our ancestors... (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
This bias can obviously be blamed on an ingrained bias dating to the male hunter/female gatherer sexism of early hominids.
Not sure if satire or stupidity. Seriously help me out here, is this genuine, or a victim of Poe's law?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Male and female ... emotions are different
I'll bite. How?
IHBT HTH HAND
Re:Blame it all on our ancestors... (Score:5, Interesting)
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... [doi.org]
http://dx.doi.org/10.1126%2Fsc... [doi.org]
http://dx.doi.org/10.1017%2Fs1... [doi.org]
So if we redefine STEM... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Redefining humanity to be genderless is pretty much the equivalent of social progress for some people.
Re:So if we redefine STEM... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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and the few that do exist are mostly filled by volunteers or pay absolute shit
That's when the complaints about the gender pay gap in engineering will start, of course.
Re: (Score:3)
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.
That's right. I wanted to be an engineer and save the world, but there aren't many jobs doing that.
I studied engineering during the Vietnam war, and a lot of us didn't want to go into engineering if our job would be to design better ICBMs and bombers to kill people. But those were the best-paying and even most creative jobs. HP, Fairchild, Intel Boeing, etc., attacked their greatest challenges with cost-is-no-object military contracts.
I remember reading Buckminster Fuller's notebooks from the 1930s, about h
Re:So if we redefine STEM... (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
Replace demographic with "white male", racist? (Score:3, Insightful)
If you replace the demographic with "white male" and it suddenly sounds racist or sexist, it always was.
Want to do something fulfilling? (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
How to increase the number of male secretaries (Score:2, Insightful)
"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."
Axe body spray, Frosted tips, and Ed Hardy (Score:5, Funny)
Be "that guy", because female engineers want to work with "that guy".
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Be "that guy",
I have no idea what you're talking about, but I can rant about Axe (or Lynx as it's called here). I, too, as a young man bought into the marketing.
But seriously that stuff is lung-searingly vile. Apparently dousing yourslef in something so obnoxious it's as likely to melt the victim's throat as anything else is not beyond the ability of the truly skilled to be able to market.
One has to take one's hat off to whoever managed to figure out how to sell that stuff. I mean it's not just bad, it's wi
Soooo.... (Score:4, Insightful)
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"....
Re: (Score:2)
Interesting that the argument being used is that "most of what engineers do does nothing for society, so
They aren't making an "argument". They are describing a phenomenon. If you have a better explanation for their data than theirs, that's legit (and I'd like to hear it). But you can't argue away the data.
Re:Soooo.... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Soooo.... (Score:5, Funny)
Hrmph... just like a man. We're talking about women's feelings regarding engineering, and you're talking about "data".
Re:Soooo.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes they are making an argument. The author of the article explicitly says:
i.e. engineering that is "socially meaningful" is "better engineering" and by logical implication, the reason women were not signing up before is because engineering had no positive social impact and was somehow not good enough.
This is a load of crap that's highly insulting to men, of course. They're seeing what they want to see in this data: that the reasons women don't do high paid engineering work is because of a fault with engineering rather than because of the choices of women. It's a fundamentally biased, feminist perspective.
By the way, despite the name this "Development Engineering" course does not have any prerequisites, like actual training in engineering. Their website says students from any department can apply. So it sounds a lot like they've invented some entirely new course from scratch, called it engineering and are now marketing this as a success for getting women to study tough, high earning subjects. But I see no reason why an employer would desire people with such a qualification.
So here's a different theory: it's just another example of men choosing higher paid work than women. Instead of studying an entirely new subject (specific to one university) which only focuses on very poor parts of the world and thus is likely to have far more constrained earning potential, men choose to do a PhD that has a better chance of letting them pay off their student debt faster (like an actual pure engineering PhD). With fewer men choosing to do the course, the proportion of women rises.
Re: (Score:3)
reframing the goals
You quoted that bit from TFA but apparently don't understand what it means.
"Framing" is what you do to give context to something. They are not saying that engineering was not "good enough" before, they are saying that they can attract more women by showing it in a context that highlights the social benefits.
Try to understand that it's not an attack on men or on engineering. Quite the opposite in fact, it's saying that actually engineering does a lot of social good and by simply pointing that out we can attr
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Even less obvious stuff is done for society. Anything that furthers our understanding of science can be argued to be done for societal good. You mention weather satellites. Originally, we sent people and things to space just to see if we could do it. In the process, we got pretty good at sending things into space, and then came up with all kinds of other things that could be accomplished by putting things in space. It may not be easy to see the link between what you are working on, and how it will help s
Re:Soooo.... (Score:4, Insightful)
These are students, who have a lot of options when deciding what to study. It's not that building weather satellites doesn't help people, it clearly does. All they are doing is framing the same basic engineering in a way that makes the social aspects more obvious and apparent. Focusing on the end, rather than the means.
I remember seeing adverts for milk when I was a kid. Everyone knew it was good for them, but a lot of kids preferred fizzy drinks. The advert had a couple of boys in football kit drinking the stuff and talking about how it helped them be better players. Suddenly all the boys at my school were drinking milk. That's how life works; there are lots of things trying to get our attention, and messages need to be framed in the right way to have maximum effectiveness.
Women in engineering (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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Societal good? (Score:2)
Optimal solution (Score:5, Funny)
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?
Are you serious? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
That is so masochistic I don't even know where to start.
ITYM mysoginistic. Though your one reads pretty entertainingly too.
Is math more societally meaningful? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Totally Wrong (Score:2)
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.
It nearly makes sense (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Here we go with the gender politics (Score:2)
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 is
Gender Gap (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
So, she says to make the work less relevant? (Score:2)
... 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.
What's up with all the negativity (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re: (Score:3)
So what is so wrong with making a curriculum more attractive to women?
What's wrong is the assumption that because there isn't a 50/50 balance that there must automatically be something dreadfully wrong with the way things are being done.
Men and women are different, and - on average, in general - have different leanings when it comes to subjects. No point railing against it; it's a fact of life.
Make sure men and women will be treated equally in a subject, and make sure they understand this. Then let them sort themselves out.
A 50/50 mix does not mean you've got things right and
Re: (Score:3)
I think many of us have watched what they have done with primary and secondary education and are a bit leery of the changes- where they have focused on girls at the expense of what makes learning interesting to boys. I don't have a problem with them adding a few courses on engineering for third world solutions. I think most are fearful of an underlying change to the curriculum.
Hostile environments (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Hostile environments (Score:5, Insightful)
Hostile environments are a problem, and we should do whatever we can to have those fixed. Having different interests and preferences in men/women for a certain education or a certain job is not a problem.
Re: (Score:3)
Look, if you find your work environment to be hostile then that's entirely your opinion and none of us here can really judge except through what you just wrote.
That said, what you just wrote makes me wonder if I woke up this morning in a parallel universe. Important discussions happening spontaneously in the men's restroom? Seriously?
I have spent my entire life being a man
Would this be published? (Score:4, Insightful)
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."
"Societally meaningful"? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
And garbage, construction and sewer workers! (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
"... cloning..."
I know a more enjoyable way.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
So all we have to do is get men to stop being pigs
Nope: the article says nothing about that.
selectively recruit women
Nope, the article says nothing about that.
completely chance the workplace,
Nope the article says nothing about that.
and for the coup de grace, only work on things that women might want to work on so we have more women to work on the things they want to work on because the things men will work on do not suit women?
Nope. The article says nothing about only working on only those things.
If you bel
Re: (Score:2)
"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.
... except maybe a dog kennel or nest box
Re: (Score:2)
"ALL engineering projects are for the societal good."
I think some here might argue with you about hardware based DRM.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Furthe proof that men and women think different (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re: (Score:3)
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.
Re: (Score:3)
Speak for yourself. Some people have interests that go beyond the amount of money they can make.
Re: (Score:3)
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
Re: (Score:2)
and let people do for a living that which they like and enjoy doing?
The "didn't read TFS" is strong in this one, Luke.
This again - ask grandad about your job (Score:3)
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.
Re: (Score:3)
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 plac