<p>A friend has been involved in engineering education for a number of years. He hasn’t seen much of a change as far as girl enrollment in engineering is concerned in spite of efforts by engineering schools as well as organizations such as the NSF to recruit girls into engineering. He is quite puzzled by it. To attract girls into their programs, engineering schools go out of their way to hire more female professors. The percent of female engineering professors is much greater than the enginineering population in general. Some women professors actually said that the reason that they choose to teach at college is because they don’t like the working environment in the industry. Lawrence Summers said something about genetic factors and touched off a firestorm a few years ago, but the fact that all these recruiting efforts yield litte result is puzzling.</p>
<p>Oldfort wrote. <thumper -=“” your=“” daughter=“” will=“” be=“” supporting=“” son,=“” not=“” to=“” worry.=“” i=“” have=“” a=“” few=“” women=“” working=“” from=“” home=“” 3=“” days=“” week.=“” we=“” do=“” what=“” can=“” keep=“” our=“” employees.=“”> I have to figure out the quote function!</thumper></p>
<p>I was very surprised to find out how many men are coming in late to drop of kids at school or working from home part of the time. I think I was surprised because I have an older male manager who frowns on such arrangements. He has a reputation of giving those employees the lousy assignments, raises and promotions. He thinks he is a progressive manager, but we all know better. There are depts though where flexible hours and work from home arrangements are the norm.</p>
<p>We’re hoping that S will be desirable enough that he will have flexibility in his work schedule since early mornings have always been a huge problem for him. So far, he’s been able to get the hours he wants in his EE program as well as for his summer internships. This ia a huge attraction to S as he physically can’t handle the rigors of a retail or food service job but is great with the mental challenges of EE work, so long as he has more control over his hours & working conditions.</p>
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<p>I hope hiring the best-qualified candidates is and will continue to be the status quo.</p>
<p>Imagine announcing a “fact” that, say, the Asian male will no longer be the status quo.</p>
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<p>This is based on . . . ?</p>
<p>Why does that surprise you? Is this any different than URMs are admitted with lower stats? Logically, doesn’t that make sense? Are you surprised boys with lower stats relative to girls are admitted to LAC?</p>
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It has less to do with desirablilty of the employee than the particular workplace, manager, and of course, the type of work. A lot of engineering places are flexible to a certain extent in the hours as long as there’s adequate overlap for hours for collaborative meetings. The advantage to the employer in being flexible are longer coverage windows (ex: 0600-1900), happier employees, and keeping employees longer since working the hours they find amenable is like a no cost to the employer benefit they can provide.</p>
<p>When your S is interviewing with employers he should try to discuss the typical working environment to see if they’re flexible in this regard. Many of them probably will be.</p>
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While I don’t doubt that this is true, it doesn’t make much sense to me. By the time any of the students encounter these female profs they’ve generally already decided to pursue an engineering major. I doubt that simply having a female engineering prof will make the student more likely to ‘stay’ in the engineering major after they’ve already started. At that time they’re more focused on the material itself and trying to make it through the weeder courses. I think the issue is getting more females to consider pursuing an engineering major in the first place.</p>
<p>This might be a good time to say that when MIT studied the issue, they found that while the women they admitted often had lower stats than their male counterparts, they got better grades once they were at MIT. So I don’t feel too badly about my son losing out to some young women when he was rejected at MIT.</p>
<p>I agree with ucsd<em>ucla</em>dad that more needs to be done to get girls interested in engineering while they are still in high school, still I think it is also helpful to have more female profs. There’s still a bit of subtle discrimination going on in male dominated fields that most men probably aren’t aware of. I know that Carnegie Mellon’s School of Computer Science has an organization of women in computer science that both encourages girls to consider comp sci and to keep them feeling welcome once they are at CMU.</p>
<p>There is an organization called Society for Woman Engineers (SWE). I think that most of the engineering schools have a local chapter of it.
[The</a> Society of Women Engineers-The Society of Women Engineers](<a href=“http://societyofwomenengineers.swe.org/]The”>http://societyofwomenengineers.swe.org/)</p>
<p>Ugh, I remember in the mid-80’s (I was BSEE & female) some female students proudly approached me with an invitation to join SWE. I was, and still am, appalled that here I was thinking I was equal to and in fair competition with the guys when I learned there was a “girl’s only” club to “support” me. If we create “girls-only” clubs how can we possibly complain if there are “boys-only” groups? Imagine the uproar at a “White Men in Engineering” club!</p>
<p>I agree with the poster who said he hoped we are all hiring the best & brightest regardless of gender, nationality or whatever else!</p>
<p>Women at my work are very active in SWE (Society of Women Engineers).</p>
<p>IMO, you need to get girls interested in math/science by middle school. That is where we lose most of the girls.</p>
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<p>oldfort, I am simply asking if this is based on personal experience or statistical evidence. I didn’t say it surprised me, although now that I think about it, maybe it does.</p>
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I totally agree, but the question is how?</p>
<p>I joined SWE in college and found my first job through SWE. However, I’m not a member after that first job.</p>
<p>You don’t need to be the best and the brightest to do most jobs out there. There has been boys network for hundreds of years. Women in the 80s tend to want to compete on their own merit with the boys. Often, they need to be tougher, colder, smarter than their male colleagues.</p>
<p>As a minority and a female in a male dominated work environment, I have found women network and support to be extremly helpful. We sponsor women’s luncheon for younger women. We go to lunch among ourselves, and from time to time we’ll have a spa afternoon. Some of my male colleagues have protested about spa events they weren’t invited to. I asked them how many golf outings I have not been invited to because I did not enjoy golf, or any sports.</p>
<p>In any business, information is king. How do you get information? Through network. If you don’t acknowledge that, you will always be at a disadvantage. I think women need to support each other more in the work force. There has always been more camaraderie among men, and in some ways women have often isolated ourselves.</p>
<p>I encourage my women staff to stay at work even after they have children. I would make a point of asking their managers to allow them to work from home when they have child care issues. You can’t have it all, but you can slow down your career while you are raising your children then adjust your workload once demand at home changes. This is also much easier if you could have support of women network. </p>
<p>I will always remember when my D1 was only a few weeks old, she was crying all day, I was exhausted, and my husband was traveling. I called up a female colleague of mine, who was a trader, told her what was going on. She turned over her books to her colleague, told her boss she had an emergency, and she was at my apartment in less than an hour.</p>
<p>Oldfort, with regard to your claim “It’s easier for girls to get into engineering school than A&s” maybe you mean relative to boys with identical stats?</p>
<p>Most engineering schools are harder to get into than most A&S schools, for anybody.</p>
<p>As someone who hires grads at my env consulting firm, we have been seeing a consistent female shift in engineering candidates. For instance, so far this hiring season, our engineering offers are 75% tilted to women. I don’t pretend to know exactly why we seem to be seeing & offering more to women (beyond what we think is the supply share), other than perhaps our industry is more attractive to women, and men are perhaps pushing into the more conventional engineering jobs in traditional industry/manufacturing…any case, its been great for us (consultants) because we have some very smart new employees that can actually relate, talk & write!</p>
<p>Actually that’s not exactly what I meant. With my daughter’s math and science stats in HS, she probably could have gotten into MIT, Caltech or many of Ivy engineering schools, but she wasn’t interested in engineering. She was competiting with more girls to get into top A&S than for engineering schools. Cornell’s A&S and Engineering are at par when it comes to selectivity, but as a girl she would had a better chance of getting into engineering school.</p>
<p>We have two Ds who are studying engineering. The oldest will graduate this June with a degree in Materials Science and Engineering.</p>
<p>Both girls displayed a natural aptitude in math and science from an early age, and H and I encouraged and nurtured it. Almost all the members of our immediate family (and their children) have careers in science-related disciplines, including three engineers, a mathematician, two medical doctors, a cancer researcher, a college biology professor, and a nuclear physicist with NASA. H is a chemical engineer.</p>
<p>Their strong interest in math and science notwithstanding, both Ds did a lot of soul-searching before deciding on careers in engineering. It was a choice they had to make in high school, as both were accepted to a top engineering school that didnt offer many alternative choices of study (other than sciences) should Ds decide to switch majors. Below were some of the major stumbling blocks in their decisions:</p>
<p>1) Engineering is too nerdy. Both Ds wanted to be around people who had a broad range of interests and werent just science nerds. I believe their experiences in college have taught them that while theres some truth to this cliche, it simply isnt true as a whole. Ds couldnt have asked for more interesting, accomplished peers. (I hope no one takes offense to thismy kids proudly proclaim themselves nerds and have the t-shirts to prove it!)</p>
<p>2) An engineering curriculum is too rigorous. Our Ds have several extracurriculars that take up a lot of time, and they were afraid they wouldnt have time to pursue other endeavors if they majored in engineering. The stories they heard about impossible psets and drinking from a firehose didnt offer any encouragement. Since enrolling in college, theyve definitely found time management to be a huge issue. Im sorry to say Ive heard IHTFP on more than one occasion, although the overall experience has been positive.</p>
<p>3) Engineering as an occupation is poorly understood by highschoolers. Even though H and two aunts are engineers, Ds kept asking them, But what will I actually DO as an engineer? Ds said some of their high school friends had a negative impression of engineers because they didnt view it as a professional occupation. I only know of two other female classmates from their high school who were in the highest-level math and science classes that went on to major in engineering in college. Most of the others pursued different science and health-related majors.</p>
<p>Ultimately, our D’s decisions came down to this: They couldn’t imagine themselves happy in any career but engineering.</p>