Why fewer women in the realm of science and engineering?

[4568131947]

Look at other species before we kill them all of course and you will have insight to your answer. Watch how they act and why. The frequencies involved. I can tell you that woman are without question better at multitasking than men because those traits have evolved and lived on. Think about it. The woman who did this the best had their young live longer than those who did not. That simple. When it comes to depth a man on average may be able to do better in certain things. There is no cage to hold one back but one cannot deny genetics. I am sure southern people can radiate heat better from their skin, and innuits can probably maintain heat better... It is survival of the fittest but it is also many other things. A woman who wants to be anything can be anything. The question is what does she want to be. Maybe the question for which we toss aside so liberally because it does not enter the world of science is the greatest question one can ask. "To be or not to be." That really is the only question.

 

[4568131947]

Kahneman and Tversky (Cognitive Scientists) and many economists have clearly documented that people do not always act rationally:

It's function in society is directly proportional to the little pyramid of self actualization and can spike upward and downward within any given system within any given moment.

The fact that this is actually quoted as study is very funny.

Life is not about the truth it is about what people want. This was conveyed to me many years ago in a dream. I could not rationalize why people act the way they do and it took me a long time to try to learn this. Still learning.

 

[4568131947]

It takes a long time for entropy when you consider the nature of nature and the nature of the economic system on top of that when considering a woman's role in society since the beginning. The explosion of women into the "work force(Woman have always worked)" in terms of history is a recent event and it take quite some time for structures to normalize.

 

[Digitalism]

I will preface my remarks by saying that I don't think this is the entire story, but I do think this is a contributing factor. Often women are more prone to receiving disparaging remarks (as seen on the first page of this thread) about the capabilities and motives of women and their abilities in the sciences. Persons stay in a field and encounter success for a variety of reasons including things such as income potential, prestige of the field, social inclusion, similarity of personalities in the field which impacts ability to form a social network to achieve success (study groups, science clubs, etc), and attraction to the material and other group members. When a person encounters thoughts such as "persons of <insert demographic group of which they are a member> are just bad or uniterested at math and/or science" etc then they are encountering resistance which they must overcome alone without the benefits of a community which actively supports their goals. It takes a very strong individual who is able to withstand the barrage of criticism, not identify with it, and persevere within the face of it. Often men are more encouraged to express conflict and if a woman does so is more prone to be seen as being illogical or emotional when doing so. In addition many men will feel emasculated if confronted by a woman and shown to be in error by her. For historical reasons some fields have tended to be dominated by men and have established rules and regulations which promote others who are similar to themselves (in my opinion this is not necessarily an intentional bias, it is just something that evolved progressively over time. This sort of "sorting" can be seen for example in terms of what sort of media one is exposed to based on gender on the internet as trackers built into webpages offer related links based on demographic information it gleans about you based on browsing history,
etc). These things become so entrenched that those who are not affected by them do not notice them (because they do not encounter them). This same sort of thing acts as a barrier to women becoming CEOs for example (or being hired because of fear they will go on maternity leave if they decide to start a family, etc). I think this also applies to any other difference between humans such as intelligence, height, weight, hair color, race, religion, sexual orientation, etc.

 

[harborsparrow]

I am female and have worked in computer science since the government first forced corporations such as AT&T to start considering women as candidates for technical jobs (back in the early 1980's). My specialty in college was computer hardware and operating systems--programming close to the metal, or what you might call embedded software. I was valedictorian in high school (out of 500 people), was a National Merit Scholar, and a Fulbright Scholar.

In computers, when you get closer to hardware, there are fewer women to start with. Usually, there have been anywhere from 5 to 15% females in my work groups, but over 30 years, this percentage has not increased and in fact has been actively decreasing.

Here is just a small sampling of things I have encountered over the years that might cause women to leave my profession:

1) In meetings, I make a suggestion. No one responds. Sometime later, a male makes the same suggestion, and the supervisor says, "Good idea!".

2) In social situations, colleagues remarked (without knowing anything about my actual abilities), "You were just hired to fill a quota."

3) In a meeting, I interrupt someone who has gone on a long time (who has previously interrupted me), and I'm told, "You interrupted me."

4) Someone asks me a question, and a man sitting next to me answers the question for me before I can open my mouth.

5) My software isn't interfacing correctly with a male colleagues software. When I arrive at work, they are awaiting me, and the first thing I hear is, "There is a bug in your software." I listen to them for 2 minutes and explain to them why the software is not responding. The error was in my male colleague's software (he had failed to read the interface specification). No one apologized for jumping the gun.

6) I go as the lead presenter on a sales team to a group of engineers in Bell Labs at Denver. We walk into the meeting room, and their chief engineer asks me to get coffee for him (and calls me "honey"). My group (all men) regard me in stricken silence. I get the man his coffee, and then I stand up and start the meeting.

7) In almost every venue, programmers and system administrators are spoken of as "guys". If I object, I'm told that I'm a wet blanket and should get over it.

8) During a social luncheon with colleagues, a male colleague tells a sexual joke about a man being serviced by oral sex by a woman. My male colleagues laugh. I am silent.

9) One year at Bell Labs, I received a low performance review and when I asked why, I was told that "You made errors." I asked what errors. I was shown a memo that I had written and was told that a certain sentence in the memo was incorrect. I looked at the supervisor and said, "You signed this memo after I wrote it. Did you get a bad performance review?" I didn't even believe that the memo contained an error. I asked, "Do you have any other instances of my having 'made an error'? And, who said this about me?" He had no answer, but my performance review was not revised upward. I concluded, after much thought, that the supervisor wanted to fire me because I had officially reported an egregious case of another woman being sexually harrassed (worse than anything I've reported here) on the project where we both worked. I transferred laterally within the company to escape from this supervisor.

10) The company's attorneys forbade me to speak to the woman whose harassment case I reported on. However, after she and I had both transferred to another part of the corporation, we became lifelong friends. (See, good things sometimes come out of tough times).

In recent years--now in my fifties and having continued to work hard, study, learn and deepen my experience in the profession--I ended up teaching computer science course at the University of Pennsylvania for a few years. When I started teaching (in 2002, I think), I assumed that most of this kind of behavior was now old hat and didn't happen any longer, and I made a point of never mentioning anything about gender to any of my classes or to students, especially females, in counseling sessions.

After graduating, however, a number of my former students who were female eventually reached out to me privately and asked me about certain experiences they had encountered on their jobs. Had I ever experienced anything like that, they asked? And so THEN we talked.

Now--most of my male colleagues are wonderful and would never, ever do anything like the things I have mentioned above. On the other hand, if these things happen when they are present, those same male colleagues have often given a green light to the behavior by remaining silent and acting as if there is no problem. Because FOR THEM, there was not a problem. But there is. I've found over time that the same kinds of bullies who target women for abuse--and they mostly know they are doing it--do so because they think that the women are weak and have no allies in the workplace. And as such, they also will target any male whom they consider to be poorly connected or less well regarded or weak.

So allowing that kind of thing to go unmentioned, unaddressed, and so forth, does make things worse for everyone. It affects productivity. It affects people's ability to earn a living for their families. It's just plain bad. And it does still happen.

I wouldn't change a thing I've done. Although I had little mentoring and had to learn a lot of the things I now know the hard way, I love computers and I've loved being able to work with them for so long, and sometimes, I'm great at it and that is satisfying.

Young women should not be deterred at all from entering technical fields despite all this. One thing I hate to see is parents who buy their sons computers and encourage their daughters to dress provocatively and paint their fingernails instead. It starts early in life, and it's everywhere, the signs of gender difference that are mostly all unnecessary if not useless, as far as I can tell.

Marissa Mayer's book about "bearing down" (or whatever it's called) is annoying to me in particular. Bear down my ***. Just bear it and keep on keeping on, I say. And tell the truth about what it's like--otherwise, things will never change. Her book is insulting because it makes it seem like women aren't really serious or aren't trying hard enough (excuse me, we've tried our guts out).

 

[harborsparrow]

And it seems like every sign of inequality (even of outcome, as in the case of pay) for women leads to a generalized outcry, laws being passed, but not so when men are in the wrong side of the stick; women are getting 60%+ of college and graduate degrees. Outcry? Discussion? Measures to help more men get into college? Men are 80%+ of the prison population, but around 48.5% of the total population. Look at a man's odds in the family court system. Look at the percentage of male deaths on the job to the total. Lack of reproductive rights for men, etc. I have not seen any outcry re any of these topics.

It may not exactly be an outcry, but colleges these days are balancing genders in admissions. Since many more qualified females apply, it is basically easier for a guy to get admitted to most colleges.

I feel equally supportive of men's issues. Gender stereotyping is just stupid, counterproductive, and its rampant in our society. Things like men not being supposed to cry, or not being supposed to wear jewelry or have long hair (simple examples--there are many more). The worst is the "Be a man" admonition. I hear you, and I agree.

This particular discussion is about women in science and technology, but a new thread on men's issues would be welcome by me.

 

[Best Pokemon]

Backing that anecdote with numbers,

• Environmental engineering - 43.1%
• Biomedical engineering - 37%
• Chemical engineering - 34.5%
• Industrial engineering - 30.1%
• Biological/agricultural engineering- 28.8%

Source: http://www.asee.org/papers-and-publications/publications/college-profiles/2010-profile-engineering-statistics.pdf

Environmental, biomedical, and agricultural engineering -- Those make sense. These are the engineering sides of the life sciences. Women outnumber men as students of the life sciences. Chemistry is close to 50/50 male/female, so it's not surprising that chemical engineering also has a relatively high participation by females.

But what about industrial engineering? Industrial engineering is as dry a field as can be. It is rather heavy on math and statistics. Most importantly, it is quite dehumanizing, treating humans as just another of the set of objects to be optimized. Dryness, math-heavy, and dehumanizing are often invoked as explanations of why female participation in engineering and the physical sciences is so low. So why do females enter this field?

The only explanation I can see is that IE is a sane field. It was IEs who helped make the 40 hour week a reality in the first half of the 20th century. Their studies of correlations between work hours and productivity and errors showed that making people work excessively long hours is highly counterproductive. Productivity goes done and error rates go up when people are forced to work long hours for any extended period of time. It's not just blue collar workers who perform worse and make more errors with long hours. It also happens with white collar workers -- including IEs. IEs know that they themselves should be working 40 hours or so a week, with infrequent upticks when push comes to shove. A long spate of 60 hour weeks is viewed as a sign of a serious project management problem.

The hard sciences apparently never got this message. In physics, a grad student, post-doc, or untenured professor working a 60 hours a week is perceived as a sign of a slacker. There's a problem here: Working 60+ hours weeks until one is well past 40 years old pretty much rules out being a mom.

Women are normally well over 40% of math majors. In this study they are 43%:
http://www.ams.org/profession/data/cbms-survey/full-report.pdf

There was an MAA study that showed over 40% (probably over 43%) as well. They changed the link to so I can't find it at the moment.

This article lists math as a major common to both men and women: http://www.payscale.com/career-news/2009/12/do-men-or-women-choose-majors-to-maximize-income.

This evidence suggests why women might do industrial engineering since they apparently like doing math (and stats).

 

[harborsparrow]

Well I wonder what would happen if you had a real figure as your role model:

Grace Hopper
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Hopper

Like other women, she also "squeezed" one out, but it's COBOL, first machine-independent language.

Grace Hopper did a lot more than create COBOL--she invented the idea of the compiler--the most important thing, ever, at the time, to move computing forward. And she didn't win any Turing Award for it.

 

[harborsparrow]

Hey all, I'm staggered to find a profession possibly worse than EE/CS "close to the metal" in the old days: Philosophy (in academia). Who knew?

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/03/a...osopher-to-leave-his-post.html?pagewanted=all

and

http://beingawomaninphilosophy.wordpress.com/

Feeling saner to know it wasn't just me, but sad to know how bad things still are. And glad to see a light being shone on it.

 

[HallsofIvy]

There was, several years ago, a case at University of Maryland, Baltimore Campus, in which an professor, meeting his "Introductory Engineering" class for the first class, saw that he had a single black female student. He told her that very few women as well as very few black people did well in Engineering so she had "two strikes against her already" and advised her to drop the class. I don't believe he was fired but he was sharply disciplined. One reason women do not major in engineering is that they are discriminated against, both by teachers and employers.

 

[harborsparrow]

My teachers were, thankfully, always super supportive (after high school). It's only in the business world (corporate) that I encountered a lot of really bad stuff. However, there are still few if any women professors. Penn had (at one time) four of us women as non-tenured lecturers, but all have since been discontinued (and the successors hired were males). You'd think they would at least try to get a woman or two, but no one seems to think it matters. It matters, though, that they are still mostly all men, even if they are supportive men.

 

[Viracocha]

women are less likely to be the financial providers and thus less likely to pursue professional degrees, they're also less likely to work (ie more women stay home to raise children than men). And there are some societal inequities.