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I work in the engineering profession, and there are hardly any women here. The ones that are here, you can tell they have to struggle with the "well, you're just a woman" attitude day in day out. Having said that, they're as good engineers as anyone here, and better than some.
In past history, women were not steered towards many professions, including engineering. It was classified and promoted as man's work. Apparently folks still think that that attitude needs to be pushed back, and I can't say I blame them. I want my daughter to be able to do anything she WANTS to do and not have to worry about whether she's going to be judged because she's female.
The tried and true method of recruitment, of course, is to provide a role model. You have to search pretty hard to find a female civil engineer hero or role model. But you need one or two if you're going to hook little girls. You need something to show, hey, it hasn't been ALL men all this time. It's an uphill battle, for sure.
Think of it in reverse. Think of a female-dominated career and then ask yourself how you could recruit boys to be interested in it. You bet your a$$ they're going to want to see successful men who've blazed the trail in front of them!
Don't worry about men's civil engineering achievements getting "glossed over". There's no way in hell that will happen. The rest of us guys (and we're still the majority, by the way) will see to that!
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by Anonymous User on 03:10 PM July 28th, 2004 EST (#2)
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Yes I too am an engineer, I doubt you would ever see boys being encouraged into a female dominated field. Females already outnumber males in college. Now if this curriculum is pushed in high schools I think it will turn off some potential male engineers. Its just the constent pandering that I find hard to stomach. Why can't a great engineer be a role model?
Do you know of any programs designed to interest boys where they are the minority?
It seems like if there isn't at least 50% of both if not more women in a field then "something must be done".
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by Anonymous User on 04:37 PM July 28th, 2004 EST (#3)
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I've worked in both the construction industry and as a computer programmer.
No women in the construction trade. Can you imagine seeing a woman with a shovel loading a cement mixer or moving wheelbarrows full of mortar about??? The idea is laughable.
Almost none doing computer programming (and that, I believe, is because the male brain is better suited to the abstract concepts involved). Those few I did work with have been adequate at best, the best programmers I've met are all men.
Men and women are suited to different careers by the very nature of the genetic influence on the construction of their brains (proven scientifically).
The feminazis can rant away, all they will achieve is to lower standards and thus have a negative effect on the industry as a whole regarding competitiveness on the world stage.
Once again, we see the socialists trying to reduce things to the lowest common denominator and condemning the areas where men excel to stagnation and ruin.
Red.
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We have two E/I engineers at our company who are both VERY good. And both are female. One is actually pretty cute, too, the other, well...
We have hired consultant PLC programmers in the past and several of them have been women. Each of them were very good programmers. Extremely opinionated, too, I might add. Yes, nerd-dom does cross the gender "barrier".
Oh, and I've seen women quite often on our construction sites. There was one woman who had to be in her 50's operating the backhoe digging the foundation for the building addition I was in charge of. Then there were the women who dressed in HAZMAT suits for the government to help clean up the decades-old radioactivity at our downtown factory.
We have MANY female chemical operators, engineers, safety engineers, managers, etc. at our factories.
So, I don't buy the "women aren't suited for this" or "women don't want to do this". Certainly that may go for SOME women, but not all.
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I too have worked years in high tech, and I've known lots of female software engineers. I would disagree that men are automatically better suited for this work for reasons of gender. I would also say that in my experience women are generally less interested in the field, especially as a long-term occupation. Of all female engineers I've known for more than ten years, all of them either gave up the profession to become mothers, or they gave up programming to go into management.
In general I think you are missing the point, and that is, that this another example of feminist social engineering based on the worn-out premise that such disparities between male and female must be due to discrimination. That fewer women are interested in engineering is unacceptable to them, but then, their goal is not to open up opportunities for women, but to restrict opportunities for men while "empowering" women. They want "equality of results," but only when it benefits those of the female gender.
Clearly, women have the opportunity to enter into engineering if they want, so why force a politically correct result on those men who are motivated to pursue engineering? Why should any man be forced to sacrifice his career so that some numbers look right to an anti-male feminist ideologue? Social engineering is the type of engineering they excel at.
I also disagree with the old "role model" argument. Competent people are welcome in all fields. Minimally compentent affirmative action recruits do more harm than good.
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I'm not missing the point, I just don't agree with the emphasis put on it by the message originator. Personally, I don't think special programs designed to attract girls into a profession in which they traditionally haven't been represented is a threat to men at all. I welcome the effort.
And who said anything about "forcing" anybody to do anything? Nobody is forcing girls to be engineers if they don't wanna be. This program, and others like it, is just trying to find a way to get girls to think that, hey, engineering just might be something that they can do, too.
Another thing: you have to take into account what society says to girls during their growing up years. Society says to girls that engineering is NOT for them. Society tells girls that they shouldn't pursue nerdy work like that. How do we know for sure that if society DIDN'T send that message that girls wouldn't be just as likely to choose engineering as boys?
This same logic applies to Title IX sports issues. Some quote "studies" saying that girls don't desire to participate in sports at the same rate boys do. But how do we know it's not society's conditioning of girls and boys to be non-competitive/competitive respectively which gives that result? We don't.
Nature or nurture? These issues always seem to come back to that unanswerable question.
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Special programs for girls are a threat to male students. Or did you not notice that women now make up 60% of university students? This is the result of the message being sent to girls for the last 30 or so years that their success is more vital than that of the boys and their "hegemonic masculinities." Or have you not read The War Against Boys?
Such concern as in the call for female role models and affirmative action and Title IX are always one-sided, and assume that discrimination is the cause of female non-participation in any area.
And who said anything about "forcing" anybody to do anything?
Not me. I said we should not force a set of results (as in 50% female engineers) on a male student body. The only way to achieve this would be to restrict opportunities for male engineering students, just like what is happening with male student athletes under Title IX.
I support a system that allows women to participate fully in whatever field they choose. They have been able to do so for decades now.
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by Anonymous User on 08:42 AM July 29th, 2004 EST (#12)
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I am a Structural Engineer, and if my daughter wants to follow in my footsteps I will lead the way. But, You think of all the men who are Engineers, they must be fathers with daughters like I am. What better role model than dad. What I object to is the hypocrisy. Engineerig was founded on the backs and minds of great men. So why doesn't ASCE put some program together to get more men into college, don't you think this is a problem. Men have and and seem will always do society's grunt work, and if more men don't go to college, this will not change.
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TLE, was it ever illegal for American women to obtain engineering degrees or pursue careers as professional engineers? That's what I think you just said.
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I doubt it was ever "illegal" for women to get degrees in engineering. I'm not sure what my previous post said that gave you that impression. I do believe that women were discouraged from entering various engineering fields as recently as 40 years ago. I remember my mother complaining in the early 1960s that when she signed up for an advanced math course she was the only female in the class of 30, and the professor asked her what she was doing there. I think there was some level of discrimination against females in male dominated professions at that time, but I also think such discrimination ended by 1970. There were plenty of women in my software courses by 1975.
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In my high school, I took Computer Sciences courses. Some of the teachers once talked about how there used to be a lot more girls in the classes 10 years earlier (circa 1990). However, by my time there were only a handful taking the classes.
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by Anonymous User on 01:31 AM July 31st, 2004 EST (#20)
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Sorry for being obscure. You said
I support a system that allows women to participate fully in whatever field they choose. They have been able to do so for decades now.
... which suggests women were somehow prevented from participating prior to several decades ago. I should probably have asked what you meant by prevented rather than inferring you were suggesting it was illegal for them to pursue engineering degrees.
The bottom line is, women have always been free to pursue the unusual, but they had to be honest with themselves they were doing something unusual. Something happened in the 60's that made unusual women want to feel normal. The definition of normal had to change. That meant that the traditional role of women had to change. And that brings us up to date.
What happened to all the women? And why aren't they in engineering?
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Last year I was advisor to a middle school math team. In April, I received an announcement for a Space Camp being held at Oregon Institute of Technology.
Oregon Institute of Technology is sponsoring a free program for young women students at the 7th, 8th and 9th grade levels interested in engineering. This program is being sponsored from July 11th through July 16th on the OIT campus in Klamath Falls, Oregon. It is a $500 value (including faculty orientations, room and board, etc.), but students must get their own transportation to and from the K-Falls campus. One can find out more of the particulars by going to the following web page: www.oit.edu/met/11 for an application.
It’ free for women students. Men students have to pay. Do you know of any potential interested students. What if you sent this out to the *** withheld *** teachers to solicit interest.
Try as I might, I could not get comfortable with the notion that seven out of eight of my club members were being discriminated against. I did not share the announcement with my team members.
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by Anonymous User on 05:56 PM July 28th, 2004 EST (#5)
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There is no longer a shortage of women in the life sciences; in fact I think medical microbiology has a majority of women. Want more women in engineering? Wait a decade or two. Change doesn't happen overnight.
And even if there is a shortage of women in science, HOW EXACTLY is that the fault of men? Is it possible that women has a rule don't choose engineering as a profession?
Why isn't there an effort to get more men to become pre-school teachers?
Amperro
Paranoia Is A Virtue
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by Anonymous User on 05:57 PM July 28th, 2004 EST (#6)
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by Anonymous User on 05:42 AM July 29th, 2004 EST (#11)
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"There is no longer a shortage of women in the life sciences; in fact I think medical microbiology has a majority of women."
Angryharry site reports that, in UK presently, medical students are 61% female and 39%male.
Hotspur
See link
http://news.scotsman.com/health.cfm?id=830222004
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Here in the UK, females outnumber males in law school, medical school and higher education overall. Females outperform boys at school, and today in Scotland, it was reported that women now outnumber men at all levels of teaching.
So the question is this - Where are the programmes specifically designed for boys at school? Where are their "role models"? (Teachers)
If females ignore professions like engineering because they are not encouraged to think about it or have role models, how could a vast majority of female teachers not dissuade boys from further education?
It is breathtaking that such obvious analogies are just simply ignored.
There is a definite agenda to ignore these issues, and if you pose the hypothetical question: "What do we do in 20 years when the majority of lawyers and doctors are female?", there is a bemused look on the face of women as though that could possibly be a bad thing.
Role and job proportion reversal is now a definite goal of feminism. And when they get there, rather than there being any need to redress the balance as there is now, we will be told that it's simply because women are just naturally cleverer and why try to fight that?
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by Anonymous User on 10:00 PM July 29th, 2004 EST (#16)
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Women should be able to work any job they can do. But I'm a lot more concerned about the 60/40 female/male imbalance in college graduation than how many college educated female engineers there are. This whole female engineer effort is just another attempt to give special privileges to already privileged females.
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So, feminists think that there aren't enough women in engineering. Why? What difference would it make if 50% of engineers were women? If gender is purely the result of cultural conditioning, and the sexes are interchangable, then a single-sex workforce is no better or worse than a mixed one.
Of course, no-one should be actively *prevented* from entering a profession, and in fact no-one is as far as I’m aware. My first point is just that getting more women into engineering is not going to bring any clear social benefit, and it will certainly incur costs.
However, the dogma of social constructionism is false anyway - of course men and women are different. Among children who have an unusual gift for maths, boys outnumber girls 13 to 1 (Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate). Women seem to have superior social and language skills. These facts of human nature will affect both supply and demand in the job market: workers will tend to choose professions which match their strongest skills, because they will be happier and earn more, and employers will tend to hire the people with the best skills for the job because they will be more competent, and therefore productive. This means that different professions will have 'natural' differences in sex ratios determined by the nature of the skills required to do the job (See 'Free Market Feminism', by David Conway, CIVITAS)
It is a dogma of feminism that *any* numerical disparity must be - can only be - the result of discrimination against women. This is nonsense. Feminists consistently refuse to take account of women's choices. If women are not interested in engineering, then that is their choice. I would like to say to all the feminists: If you don't think there are enough female engineers, then YOU become an engineer - put your money where your mouth is. But oh dear, you don't WANT to, do you? Well, stop whining then. You seem to believe that there is a hidden army of girls out there desperate to become engineers, but the nasty old Patriarchy is cruelly preventing them. How come you don't actually KNOW any of these girls yourself?
Feminists must stop denying the significance of women’s personal lifestyle choices.
I don't go in much for the no-good-role-model theory either. Why does a role model have to be of the same sex as yourself? Why only sex, why not ethnic group, sexuality, disability, social class etc. Does it make any sense to say that in Physics Steven Hawking is not a good role model for me because I'm not disabled, or that Lord Kelvin is not because I'm not a 19th century aristocrat, that Einstein is not because I'm not German or Jewish? Apparently these people are not good role models for my sister, just because she is not male. What nonsense. Even if there were more women in engineering, my sister wouldn't know any of them, so it is not clear to what extent they would serve as role models for her. It is just not that obvious what anyone is going to take as their role model - as one respondent has said, what could be a better role model for a girl than her dad? However, that is not politically correct.
If feminists were really interested in (1) improving society by improving men's behaviour and (2) the importance of role models (as they claim) then they wouldn't be so busy separating men from their children, producing thousands of boys with no positive role models. There is abundant evidence that fatherless boys have more chance of failing at school, using drugs, becoming offenders and so on. I would like to hear a feminist explain this.
Feminists only want change where it benefits feminists.
Feminism=Fascism : Get Wise to the Lies
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Thanks for the well-articulated sanity, angryman.
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