I spent a good part of my childhood playing with Legos and making mud road cities in our backyard. I also played a lot with stuffed animals. I learned to sew and did a fair amount of it at one time. I was good at math, and took AP Calculus BCin high school, but my (girl’s) prep school at the time had lousy science and didn’t require much. I took Bio and Chem - no AP classes. I liked art and history as much as math so architecture seemed a way to combine all my varied interests and for the most part it has worked out that way.
I have one D in gaming and another in software engineering. They both complain about things like being ignored in meetings and feeling discounted frequently. They don’t like being the only woman in the room. It doesn’t help that they both look much younger than their ages. (The 27 year old was asked if she was there for “bring your daughter to work day” and is often confused for an intern. She has 5 years at this company and 8 years in the field!) They are learning how to navigate it, but it does make me sad that they experience many of the same things that I did 30 years ago in a male dominated profession. Neither of them had lots of male friends growing up and they only have sisters so the social environment both in college classes and now is something new to negotiate. They have many opportunities, but it also sometimes seems that their managers don’t know how to use them effectively. Navigating pay is another issue. They’ve seen the stories that say women don’t get raises because they don’t ask, but managers don’t like women who ask. Lots of double binds.
@pizza, i should have said asia minus japan. Japan is an outlier in many ways, and Japanese women definitely don’t have cheap domestic help.
I think some young women come around to Engineering/CS later. My D is a senior in high school, and always enjoyed math and did well in it. I suggested this year she take an online Computer Science class since her school doesn’t offer it. She is doing well in it and looks forward to working on it everyday. So, now, she is considering majoring in CS. I am all for it, I think she has a natural affinity for programming. However, I know she will be in classes next year with young men who have been working on robotics for a few years, or writing their own apps, etc. I am afraid she will feel like she doesn’t belong, and I think this is a huge problem for young women choosing to study Engineering or CS.
I also think because some women feel a little insecure, when they have a problem with a class or classes, they choose to switch majors. This is certainly a generalization, but I wonder if boys are just naturally more confident, and when they have problems in classes, it never occurs to them to switch majors.
The lack of confidence is validated when alpha males don’t really listen to the them, or relegate women to less important jobs when part of a team. I think the way project groups are set up is really critical, especially in the early years, but largely ignored.
Just my 2 cents.
Let me be clear that I DO like my job as a mechanical designer, and to the poster who suggested (me the oldtimer!!!)complaining about the male engineers’ misogyny is a hindrance, I say it is just the opposite. Should I just sit down and shut up? Women who go in with eyes open will maybe not be so discouraged and so inclined to give up and change professions. We have to hit these problems head on. I work with wonderful men all the time. But sometimes they are only wonderful in personal situations. Most of the men I work with like me and appreciate my work, but when there is someone new to the company or a new client, I find myself having to prove myself in situations that no man would have to. I’m used to it, but it gets old. I could tell you stories that would make your jaw drop. That’s reality and only getting more girls growing up being taught to use tools and think of themselves as capable in engineering will change that. I’m only speaking of mechanical engineering, but even in the support roles of designer, drafter, and technician, I see little progress. And women are really, really good at mechanical engineering jobs! It definitely suites my intellect even though I have a degree in English literature.
I think the demographics might change in a few years since more top schools have favorable admission policies for the qualified female applicants. But it is not just an engineering that has gender preferences. I see more male in accounting as well. Large, publicly traded company I am working for has 7:3 male – female ratio in finance department. Our external auditors just sent a team of all males.
I agree @preironic. Girls need to be taught to be independent thinkers and to express themselves clearly and with confidence. Sometimes a little persistence is helpful. As an engineer, I have had to work on this myself. These are important skills, male or female.
I’ve been an electrical engineer for over 30 years and I do think progress has been made. There are many programs available for middle school and high school girls to get them exposed to and interested in engineering.
I would agree that it isn’t a very family-friendly occupation and it is more challenging to be a working mom than many other fields. But lots of us have been successful at it and I think it is getting easier and better all the time. The infrastructure that exists for before/after school childcare has improved dramatically since I had young kids.
I agree that Japan is horrible for women engineers, actually for most any career for women. The rest of Asia is a different story. I lived and worked in China from 2008-2011 and had many women engineers working for me. They were all smart and hardworking but they had a lot of support that made being a working mom much easier - domestic help is cheap and readily available and many of them had grandparents living with them taking care of their child. Singapore is similar with plenty of female engineers - almost all of them go back to work after having children but then some leave the workforce when their kids are older to help with their schoolwork (kind of the opposite of what many women do here in the US staying home with babies but then going back to work when kids are in school).
Change is slow to come but things are so much better for women now than when I started out that I think it will only continue to improve.
"If only 18% of engineers are women, then they should expect to make up approximately that amount in the workforce. " - Or maybe less. Many companies still have a lot of older engineers from a time when there were even fewer engineering grads.
I graduated in with a MechE BS i 1984. I’ve been lucky. In school and at work (big company) there have been very few times when I felt my gender was a disadvantage.
Someone asked about my residency experience. Anesthesiology. Only a very few women in various surgery specialties back then. One obnoxious (I remember an encounter with her), the other two I can recall (not counting OB-GYN, btw) were nicer personalities. Residency was the forefront of changes. Private practice OTOH was back in the dark ages in the surgical world. Now there are more women surgeons where I was- wish I could have continued working to be with them. Enjoyed most of the subspecialty women surgeons.
Like the engineers tales school versus the workplace can be vastly different. The few women are likely to end up in different places so classmates disperse. The workplace includes not just recent grads but can have decades older men who make life difficult without thinking. Long after I retired- changes and politics but stayed for H’s practice, long story- I went to the funeral home visitation for an old but nice surgeon. A male OB-GYN told me it was nice that I had retired to be home with my child… Arggh! Both I and a woman friend who was his partner never did like him, his wife was nice, however. I held my tongue out of respect for the deceased. But- didn’t he realize women were just as passionate about their fields as men??? Etc.
When I started as an engineer 30 years ago, the group I worked in had 3 other woman, 1 engineer and 2 programmers. Some of the men in the group often felt it was wrong if one of the women were given good projects, or (gasp) received a promotion. Since they were men, they HAD to work to support their families. I, on the other hand, didn’t have to work. (I was single, so I’m not sure how I would have paid the rent without working.)
I was often asked if I could fix the jammed Xerox machine. I guess since the secretaries were experts with copy machines, that was a natural progression - when no secretary was around, ask the nearest woman. They seemed to forget they were engineers, and hopefully capable of fixing a paper jam.
I had my first child 21 years ago. Many older male engineers, in a grandfatherly way, assumed my 10 year career as an engineer would come to an end, especially since my husband was an engineer and could bring home the bacon. I worked for a division of a very, very large corporation. I and other women championed the idea of part-time work for some period of time after the birth of a child. I am proud to say that the division instituted a part-time/flexible schedule policy which made life quite a bit easier for all of us (husbands included). My husband and I staggered our hours to reduce the daycare hours. There was no ability to work from home, but still, this really helped.
Since that time, said large corporation has been very good to women. There is an emphasis on providing as much opportunity as possible to women with an extensive mentoring program, and, unlike 30 years ago, no “girly” posters allowed!
I know this is anecdotal but…a very close female friend of mine who is an engineer worked part-time for years . Another female engineer friend works from home and a third also worked part time. All of these women have kids.
H is an engineer and has worked in government contracting for 30 years. He has worked with several female engineers and the jobs have always had some flexibility. His current boss (who he says is terrific) is a woman with 2 small children.
Based on the above I would not necessarily rule out engineering as a career if I were a young woman.
@FallGirl I think things are much better in engineering now than decades ago. The current generation understands better that mothers can work, and it pays for companies to be flexible. From what I have read, though, the culture in Computer Science is not quite as progressive, again, depending on where one works.
The situation varies wildly from discipline to discipline and company size and culture. I think the mechanical, gaming, and computer fields need women the most right now. And as far as older engineers being the main culprits, I haven’t found that at all. I think the blame can be spread around pretty evenly. Some of my best mentors have been older men. They can be a little more mellow and willing to share their knowledge after years in the workforce. And younger workers can be more aggressive in walking over a quieter woman. Good and bad across the generations. I work at a small company and I think my boss’s attitude towards me is contagious, again in positive as well as negative ways. I’m heartened to hear of women’s positive experience in engineering. I just know that if you saw a company staff photo for each of my company’s 20 years of business, you wouldn’t think there was much progress. Just first hand, personal experience. I’m typing this at my desk surrounded by my great male coworkers right now. The only other women in the building is the receptionist and I think the boss’s daughter might come in this afternoon to help during her college break. Nothing anecdotal here.
I graduated with a chemical engineering degree in 1985. I had no problems in school competing with men (I think our major was about 20% women at the time). I graduated ranked very high in my class of engineers. I liked math and science and had been steered toward engineering, but had several co-op experiences and did not like any of them. I got my degree, figuring at least I could support myself and pay off my loans, but became a SAHM after 5 years of working a job I grew to hate. I never steered any of my kids toward engineering, although all were good in math. Oldest went for economics, youngest 2 (one male one female) for computer science. I think women should be able to pursue any field they want, but what if enough women don’t want to be engineers to make up 50% of the field?
And GMT, I found this remark really offensive - Working women in Asia don’t beat themselves up for being bad mothers if they are not personally wiping their kids butts.
if only 18 percent of students are female in engineering, then it should be the same in the workplace. I wouldn’t expect the girls to be 50/50 in the workplace for engineering until the schooling is 50/50. as for why girls don’t go for engineering… it’s hard to say. I do think a lot of girls gravitate more towards nursing and things like that. What are the numbers for males in the nursing field? You can pull stats like this from various fields and it will show the same thing.
i had thought about going to school for computer engineering but then decided it wasn’t where i wanted to be. Not that deeply involved. I do have to say, the IT department at my work has a lot more females than I expected it to have, based on how many females were in IT majors at my college. It’s not 50/50, but it’s not 18 percent either.
It depend on whether the demographics are changing. This year’s graduating class may have demographics greatly different from the existing demographics, but since it only replaces 1/30th or 1/40th of the existing demographics (i.e. new entrants to the work force replacing retirees or others leaving), the change in the work force will be much slower. (However, the change can be observed in the demographic difference between older and younger people in the work force.)
http://jobs.aol.com/articles/2009/01/26/10-industries-where-women-rule/
It’s not like women don’t have industries that they dominate. How come people aren’t out there in force advocating for more male day care providers? Or social assistance? Or health care? Just a thought…
My son knew a few girls who changed majors. His theory is that they were perfectionists. While that works well for an engineering career, it can be frustrating as an engineering student who may have difficulty accepting a grade of 50% as a top score.
My daughter is a freshman in engineering and sharing this thread with her generated some interesting conversation while she was back home for winter break.
Anyone considering any profession needs to consider how that job will balance with their hopes and expectations for home/family/social life. This is a more complex question for women, and engineering as it’s currently practiced seems to be less family friendly in general than some of the other STEM careers out there. We haven’t discouraged our daughter but have encouraged her to consider these things as she makes decisions and plans.
As far as the engineering school environment, my daughter has found her smallish tech focused school to have enough women for a critical mass of friends. Still, she finds she has lots of guy friends as well. The school as a whole is about 70/30 m/f. The dean of the engineering college is a woman, and her particular engineering major has a good percentage of women as students, but no women profs in her particular department. D isn’t particularly bothered by this and feels supported and encouraged by her professors.
Her math class started out with less than 10 women of 50 or so. She said half the girls dropped but nowhere near half the guys. We had an interesting discussion about why girls might drop instead of asking for help if they are struggling. I think the intimidation of having to ask a guy for help could come into play here.
D did join SWE or WISE, not sure which, but didn’t like it being all women, she’d rather be in a professional engineering society that’s not so much about being a girl. I’ve encouraged her to try the other group, but it conflicted with something else last semester.
On encouraging girls to be engineers:
I think it would be helpful to break away from associating engineering with Legos. My brother is an engineer and still loves Legos so I had that stereotype to work from. D commented that she never liked Legos because things aren’t built entirely of brightly colored cubes in real life. She had an opportunity to do a Lego machines class at one point in elementary school and chose a different option. She didn’t do robotics–no robotics club at her school, no engineering camp, none of the things you read about associating kids with engineering, except maybe doing math problems for fun, LOL. However, we took her on a construction-related service project every year since she was young. She framed, roofed, stuccoed, worked with cement. She saw how real things are built. She helped build. She also took art classes. Lots of them since she was very small. She loves art. In high school she took a year of general art and two years of metals and jewelry. She learned to solder copper and silver, but not circuit boards. Lost wax casting. Setting stones. Making chains. She did build lots of things, but not with Legos, or any other of the building sets we do have around the house. She enjoys knitting. She didn’t sew much, but I agree with a previous poster that sewing incorporates the engineering type of spatial thinking. We encouraged her to pursue her interests (even though I wasn’t entirely sure at the time about the metals class, I thought painting or ceramics was a better idea) and we can see now how these things shaped her interests. Girls going into a male dominated profession need confidence that they can do what they are passionate about, and that confidence can come from better connecting their earlier interests with what they are looking forward to in a profession. They don’t necessarily need pink Legos.