^And that women profs will complain strenuously if they are relegated to teaching intro classes …
Post #38, I have a male friend who hasn’t been able to find employment as an engineer since the dot come bust. He took a year off going back to CC and taking classes, it doesn’t look good on his resume and he hasn’t found any job since.
One of the above posts proposed female elementary school teachers could not be sexist because they are women. My experience is very different. When I was younger most of the disapproval and disbelief of my engineering choice came from females, not my male classmates who understood very well why someone would want to be an engineer. Not that they didn’t have some doubts girls could succeed, the professors too.
Little girls are praised for conforming to rules and social conventions, and being compliant and submissive instead of finding creative, if somewhat disruptive ways to get what they want. In contrast “boys will be boys” is the general response when boys break the rules and conventions to get what they want. Engineers are by definition rule benders. Solving engineering problems is all about finding new ways to accomplish a goal, and not taking no for an answer. I think engineers are often odd ducks less likely to conform to social norms because their brains perceive the world a little differently than most. You don’t have to be a little weird to be a successful engineer, but it certainly can help. Boys may get some small amount of grief for those attitudes growing up. Girls get socially ostracized and often get significant pressure from parents and other authority figures to conform to societal norms of behavior.
My DD went to a prep school where more than half of her class in BC Calc was girls. Fair number went on to study math, economics and/or life science in college. Very few engineers. YMMV.
Let’s not generalize. I found species of both type, male and female, to be equally sexist.
The Dean of the UT engineering school is a woman - a very accomplished engineer. She attended my nephew’s funeral in August and we talked at length - such a nice woman.
http://news.utexas.edu/2014/05/30/sharon-wood-cockrell-school-dean
This is from the ASEE paper that Data10 referenced earlier.
For 2014:
http://www.asee.org/papers-and-publications/publications/14_11-47.pdf
% of Bachelor’s Degrees Awarded to Women by Discipline:
Highest:
Environmental: 48%
Biomedical: 40.6%
Chemical: 36.3%
Industrial/Systems: 31.6%
Lowest:
Mining: 11.7%
Computer: 12%
Comp Sci (outside Engineering): 13.2%
Mechanical: 13.5%
Electrical: 13.7%
Comp Sci (inside Engineering): 13.7%
In 2005, 19.5% of Bachelor’s Degrees were awarded to women. Surprisingly (to me) this dipped down to 17.8% in 2009, and now has steadily increased back up to 19.9% in 2014. The rate could dip down again in the future.
As is the dean of UF’s COE, Cammy Abernathy.
https://www.eng.ufl.edu/about/contact/college-directory/?id=337
In fact, here’s a listing I found: