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Are women exiting engineering because men get the challenging assignments?

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Re: Are women exiting engineering because men get the challenging assignments?

#91

Post by dpark »

DisposableMike wrote: post #72
dpark wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that the term "rape culture" is unhelpful. It's an extreme term that alienates people. When you equate undesired behavior to rape, you both trivialize rape and cause people engaging in the undesired behavior to disregard anything of substance you might say. When you call someone a rapist, they aren't going to listen to you when you try to explain why hitting on a 21-year-old coworker is inappropriate. I do no…

I completely agree that repeated attempts to ask out a woman who is clearly not interested in you can come across as creepy, and I'm not really insinuating that it's not a problem. People that do that will earn their association with that term. I can only comment from personal experience, but many of my female friends will call ANY interaction with an unattractive male 'creepy', regardless of how polite or nonthreate…

Well, there are two things to consider here. First, as you called out, your friends' behavior is anecdotal and may not be representative. Second, there is a big difference between work colleagues and strangers. If someone at work does something like complement my shoes, I'm much less likely to see that as weird/creepy than if a stranger does it.

Certainly, there are interactions that get labelled as "creepy" when they really shouldn't. But there are also plenty of legitimately creepy people making others uncomfortable at work.

Re: Are women exiting engineering because men get the challenging assignments?

#92

Post by heartbreak »

zzalpha wrote: post #86
heartbreak wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The example seems like a problem that quiet people have. Not all women are quiet, and not all quiet people are women.

Sure, but when you have a culture that punishes women for not being quiet by labeling them as aggressive, b*tchy, etc (after all, a certain presidential candidate often demeans his female opponent for "yelling" and so forth, despite that behaviour being perfectly acceptable in a man), you have now sown the seeds for gender bias.

That candidate (and especially his vocal supporters) attack beta males with as much vitriol as women.

No intention of conflating "beta" with introvert. They aren't the same but I'm sure you get my point.

Re: Are women exiting engineering because men get the challenging assignments?

#94

Post by zzalpha »

ffn wrote: post #39

Or it could be that tons of girls get sold into taking up the tech field at a young and impressionable age by presidential speeches, books telling them to "lean in", and articles like this that hint there is some conspiracy of men out there actively working to damage women and they are needed to right the wrong. Then, after spending 4+ years in college studying surface friction losses or CRDT applications without tom…

Then, after spending 4+ years in college studying surface friction losses or CRDT applications without tombstones, and n+ years in industry trying to debug someone else's too-clever binary-flag-in-ruby code, a large number of them ... realize they really don't enjoy this work

So... on average you believe men just like engineering more than women?

Because of... what... genetics or something?

Re: Are women exiting engineering because men get the challenging assignments?

#95

Post by loco5niner »

snovv_crash wrote: post #41
loco5niner wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or rather, men just by nature being more assertive.

I've got some Amazonians who disagree with you. Perhaps the bell curve is slightly towards the male side in terms of baseline, but I'd argue that the majority is conditioning.

I would certainly agree that there are outliers in each gender. I believe the bell curve is _much_ less slight than you.

Re: Are women exiting engineering because men get the challenging assignments?

#96

Post by AnthonyMouse »

eevilspock wrote: post #9
Redoubts wrote: post #5

> Twenty percent of engineering graduates are women—but only 13 percent of the engineering workforce is female. >It’s not a pipeline issue Aren't women half the population? That still sounds like a pipeline issue.

Not necessarily. It could be the experience of the 20% that leads to a whittling to 13% influences women to never enter the pipeline in the first place, which means the root problem isn't the pipeline but what lies at the end of it.

The problem is it's self-reinforcing. When you have a gender imbalance of something like 10:1, everything bad that happens in the 1:1 case now happens ten times as often even if all the men behave exactly the same. A bad experience that would have occurred to 3.5% of women then occurs to 35%, assuming exactly identical behavior. And worse than that if the bad actors become more aggressive for lack of prospects.

Which means you can't solve it there. You're not going to reduce the number of bad acts to 10% of the general-population level because the good methods of inhibiting bad acts are going to be widely deployed. You can't use them to get a relative advantage.

Probably the only way to fix it is over-representation at the start of the pipeline. Make it so that 75% of high school seniors applying to CS programs are female so that by the time a third of them drop out the gender balance is right, and in ten or fifteen years that will no longer be necessary because then the gender balance at the end of the pipeline is fixed and the female dropout rate goes down.

Re: Are women exiting engineering because men get the challenging assignments?

#97

Post by dbcurtis »

benbenolson wrote: post #68
socrates1998 wrote: post #47

I think whenever you are a "minority" in anything you run the risk of being felt left out. If your group comprises only 20% of something, then it is always going to be an issue. The problem with the gender gap is that it will never go away. Prejudice against a race, ethic group, or religion is a mistake. People are generally people and we have more in common than we don't. And as time goes on, I think you will see th…

Finally! Someone had to say it. These sorts of situations (low percentage of women engineers) are not issues; they're just facts, and most likely caused by, generally enough, the way that women and men think/act/desire. It's not a problem, it's just a fact of life that people, oddly enough, are having a hard time accepting.

In my observation, the differences are in what is found intrinsically rewarding.

If I may over-generalized, men have a tendency to find the math itself, the technology itself, solving the puzzle itself, to be rewarding. Women find it more rewarding to see the impact/result of their work.

There is also a difference in how they view competition/challenges. I've seen this with girls in robotics. A robot competition is more likely to get the boys excited. Reframing the task as a "challenge", ie: "Can you make a robot to solve this problem?" with the challenge being more open-ended and the result being an objective demonstration instead of a head-to-head run-off is much more motivating.

So I think it is worth looking at what intrinsic rewards girls find motivating, and connecting those possibilities back into the technology is important.

Re: Are women exiting engineering because men get the challenging assignments?

#98

Post by bargl »

sp332 wrote: post #80
socrates1998 wrote: post #47

I think whenever you are a "minority" in anything you run the risk of being felt left out. If your group comprises only 20% of something, then it is always going to be an issue. The problem with the gender gap is that it will never go away. Prejudice against a race, ethic group, or religion is a mistake. People are generally people and we have more in common than we don't. And as time goes on, I think you will see th…

http://i.imgur.com/reUNxYu.png Other engineering fields are not having this much trouble with it.

Are physical sciences a category of Engineering? If so then your graph proves your point, if not then I don't see it. What am I missing?

This is what Google told me it was. http://study.com/directory/category/Physical_Sciences.html

Re: Are women exiting engineering because men get the challenging assignments?

#99

Post by bduerst »

sp332 wrote: post #80
socrates1998 wrote: post #47

I think whenever you are a "minority" in anything you run the risk of being felt left out. If your group comprises only 20% of something, then it is always going to be an issue. The problem with the gender gap is that it will never go away. Prejudice against a race, ethic group, or religion is a mistake. People are generally people and we have more in common than we don't. And as time goes on, I think you will see th…

http://i.imgur.com/reUNxYu.png Other engineering fields are not having this much trouble with it.

I think you meant this one - http://i.imgur.com/nzEulzf.png

It shows the growth trend as typically being positive for all fields, while computer science is the negative outlier.

Re: Are women exiting engineering because men get the challenging assignments?

#100

Post by fatdog »

Before reaching for explanations to reinforce hackneyed oppression tropes, there might be a more economic reason women leave engineering and STEM fields in general.

Engineering is about developing skills, and all technical skills have a relatively early inflection point of diminishing marginal returns on effort.

Engineering has a high barrier to entry, and women who are in engineering are necessarily in the 80th percentile of intelligence, so let's say they are smart. Smart people have a different apprehension of risk than less smart people.

Roles that involve management, finance, and relationships, have infinite upside, where the benefits of roles that involve skills tend to have a fairly well defined peak.

A woman who is ambitious enough to pass the high bar for engineering is probably smart enough to recognize that for an equal investment of time and effort, if she switches to management or a non-technical role, she can achieve a management role with greater perceived stability, a multiple of salary, bonuses and eventually equity.

Depending on her motivation in regard to having children, a job that requires skill maintenance requires much more effort if she is caring for a child, but _with the same limited upside_. The divided commitment means she has to work some coefficient of effort harder toward the same result. Can she? Of course, but why would she?

Some women are content with this, but I think women avoid STEM work because, decades as a code monkey is not the most productive use of their time. If boring aspies and loud talkers chased women out of jobs, they wouldn't have stuck with "traditional" jobs that include handling rooms full of 40 screaming children, caring for violent drug addicts, serving drunks, etc. Outside academia, women aren't delicate flower petal snowflakes.

The more plausible explanation is that if it were worth it to them, they would do it. For some reason, engineering is still not worth it, and the answer is likely more uncomfortable for men than it would be for women.

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