It is not unconscious, it is conscious because most engineers are men. Women can become engineers exactly the same way they became doctors or lawyers, then we will refer to engineers differently to represent that.
You really should not speak for all female engineers, as it is a generalization, which is against your rules as I understand them. There were 50% of women in my previous team. My wife successfully switched to IT several years ago. Maybe the key to success is just to do your thing and not to whine about the unfairness of this world? It’s a bit more difficult than fighting for pronouns, but it makes more sense.
Looking at the facts, it seems clear that engineers are far more sexist than doctors or lawyers. Where other professionals have decided that they don't need to pretend superiority over an entire gender, engineers have chosen to embrace last century's discarded psuedo-science. Sad.
I think this sort of affirmative approach is going to become more common as tech is dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century.
When I was an engineer, I never worked under a woman in a technical role. Since I've been a lawyer, I've had a majority of female bosses and mentors. 50 years ago, this would have been unthinkable.
Doctors, accountants, and many other professionals can tell the same story. Today nobody thinks twice about the head of internal medicine at a hospital being a woman. Medical schools don't go out of their way to find qualified female candidates. Because of measures taken decades ago, these professions have achieved a level of normalcy that has totally eluded engineering as a profession.
Ironically, when I left engineering for law, I met tons of left-brain women, many of whom would’ve been great engineers despite never even considering it. And thinking back to my AP computer science class in high school with just one girl it, and all the push back taking about whether gender parity in engineering is even a justifiable goal to strive for—who can blame them? Who wants to struggle with being a minority in their profession when they don’t have to?
But it’s a shame. Engineering is a socially valuable profession, and a great analytical framework for approaching almost anything else in life. We as a society lose out when our best and brightest women (quite rationally) stay away from it and do something else.
It’s also a tyranny of low expectations situation. Life isn’t just about you. You have an obligation to use your talants to serve society. Doctors, nurses, and teachers contribute a lot, but they’re not going to save humanity from global warming or turn us into a multi-planet species. People who can do that—including women—should feel some social pressure to do it.
Even if there were equal numbers of women and men starting out in engineering, but women never 'recycle', then the flows would be different. That's all.
I capitalize Engineer as an occupation, like Doctor Smith. Yeah, probably don't want to capitalize it as an adjective.
So, at the risk of being flamed into oblivion - wouldn't a great way to attract more women into engineering be to stop fawning over them as soon as they show up, treating them like they're a rare and special orchid?
"oh you're a woman engineer, oh how wonderful!"
How creepy. How about we just call them engineers and call it a day?
Personally, I'm glad you did. I'm a male engineer, but there are two women engineers in my family (mom and sister). They always bring up these situations to me that few seem to notice. And honestly its really difficult for them at times to be in this industry. More discussion is good.
I read a study a while ago (didn't pinboard it, sorry) by an engineering professional society on why women who do engineering degrees don't go on to work as engineers. For some, it was obstacles: sexist colleagues, unsuitable workplaces, etc. But for the majority, it was because they didn't want to be an engineer: they used their degree in engineering as a springboard into things like starting their own companies or being investment bankers.
Which rather implies that men who get degrees in engineering tend to carry on into working in engineering because they lack the imagination to do something else.
It's a choice, but it's not the same choice. When a woman signs up to be an engineer, she's signing up for long hours debugging segfaults, just like a man. But unlike a man, she's signing up to spend four years in school being one of the handful of women in her class, then entering a workforce with the likes of Uber, etc. There signing up for a life of awkward encounters with coworkers, supervisors who try to date female employees, limited support networks, etc.
This is the fourth instalment of the series, the first question answered was actually:
"On a typical day, how conscious are you of being a female engineer and can you tell us about the ways in which you feel (or are made to feel) this way?"
it is not about who is the greater engineer. it's a fact that women on average prefer to go more to fields other than engeneering.
Some state that this a culture problem and that there is a hidden bias.
Some also state that women might go to other fields because they have a greater capacity at empathy. which is a proven fact. women that go and study those fields won't apply to cs positions they will apply to positions in their fields.
and by the way there was a study that indicated that women get short-listed less in sex-blind hiring
"The trial found assigning a male name to a candidate made them 3.2 per cent less likely to get a job interview."
"Adding a woman's name to a CV made the candidate 2.9 per cent more likely to get a foot in the door."
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