lack of female engineers

[jteef]

While I was in school I thought the lack of girls in the engineering programs was astonishing. There are even fewer practicing.

What do women find so undesirable about working in the this profession?

 

[brigden]

Look in the mirror and the answer shall be revealed!

 

[Imdmn04]

woman + logic = incompatible

 

[Mo0o]

There are tons of girls in the engineering school of my university, alot of them are really hot and dumb.

 

[mugs]

Life on the rails just isn't for women.

 

[weezergirl]

<-- female engineer!

i have 3 roommates..all 3 are also female engineers....

 

[Yossarian]

let me tell you, I met one of the cutest women EVAR today and she's an engineer where I work.

 

[J0hnny]

Whoa, what school do you go to?

 

[NutBucket]

They're few and far between. There are some at work. Amazingly one is really hot.

 

[FrogDog]

It's the same thing in CS. I think there are 2 girls in my year in CS.

 

[RU482]

my wife is a chemical engineer. she says it is not a woman friendly environment

 

[Barnaby W. Füi]

Women's minds are biologically and socially pushed away from the traits that would make a person want to be an engineer.

 

[jteef]

Originally posted by: BingBongWongFooey
Women's minds are biologically and socially pushed away from the traits that would make a person want to be an engineer.

There are plenty of girls who are good at math, but for some reason they don't choose engineering. Hell, they rarely choose accounting. I'm just trying to understand why.

Certainly I've met a few attractive women in the field, but you can't deny the tremendous void relative to the general population. (emphasis on few)

 

[Barnaby W. Füi]

Originally posted by: jteef

Originally posted by: BingBongWongFooey
Women's minds are biologically and socially pushed away from the traits that would make a person want to be an engineer.

There are plenty of girls who are good at math, but for some reason they don't choose engineering. Hell, they rarely choose accounting. I'm just trying to understand why.

Certainly I've met a few attractive women in the field, but you can't deny the tremendous void relative to the general population. (emphasis on few)

True, there are probably more women suited for engineering than actually go into it. Hard to say why, but I do know there are efforts to get women more interested in computer science. This is pretty interesting.

 

[myusername]

In addition to math, the female gender is inherently deficient (on average, and comparatively) in pattern recognition and spatial coordination. It just simply isn't how their brains are constructed. Why didn't you go to Julliard for dance?

Edit: Also, though I have not seen a gender breakdown, cognitive spontanaety is a huge factor in comfortability with computers. How do most of the people on this forum react when they encounter software or hardware they are unfamiliar with?

Other than posting a software question on OT, I mean ..

They start pushing buttons and clicking menus - playing with it trial and error style, until they have an idea of how it works. Most women simply do not seem to exhibit that kind of behavior, probably due to the aforesaid deficits.

 

[Barnaby W. Füi]

BTW, I wonder how many women go into math for the teaching aspect instead of for math's sake itself?

(maybe not many; I'm just curious)

 

[jteef]

Originally posted by: myusername
In addition to math, the female gender is inherently deficient (on average, and comparatively) in pattern recognition and spatial coordination. It just simply isn't how their brains are constructed. Why didn't you go to Julliard for dance?

because I'm not gay? I don't think the same sort of stigma applies to female engineers..

When I was in school they were able to increase the female population to about 60/40 for freshman, but tracking that class through 4 or 5 years it was back to 70/30 or 80/20. And there is at least an order of magnitude more girls in computer science than there are in the engineering disciplines (civil possibly excluded) Interesting article nonetheless...

 

[DaWhim]

that's the nature. men are better in math than women.

I have a nephew(4y/o) and niece(3/0), they are totally different. my nephew doesn't care what he looks. my niece does. I never believe men and women can be equal.

btw, women are better in literature than men.

 

[myusername]

Originally posted by: jteef

Originally posted by: myusername
In addition to math, the female gender is inherently deficient (on average, and comparatively) in pattern recognition and spatial coordination. It just simply isn't how their brains are constructed. Why didn't you go to Julliard for dance?

because I'm not gay?

Ah. So you had a promising chance at the ballet - were really quite good at it, and enjoyed it too - and you turned it down because you thought your buddies playing admin at the computer lab would call you a queer. Consequently you pursued ... engineering? ... even though it didn't come naturally and took a long time to understand the fundamentals, and now you have squeaked by with a degree and find yourself somewhere in the bottom 5 percentile of your field in terms of qualifications and skills? Not to mention the social life, but there's not need to go there.

Are you sure "I'm not gay" is your final answer?

 

[Schadenfroh]

because people like us are engineers

 

[CanOWorms]

I wonder how it is in Asian countries. A lot of engineering graduate students are females that come from Asia (mainly India, China)

Biomedical engineering also has a lot of females, too.

 

[nageov3t]

I don't think it's a female-friendly enviornment.

One of my best friends in college was a female Comp Sci major; she complained all the time about a) every guy CS major hitting on her, and b) male professors looking down on her because she was female.

 

[jteef]

Originally posted by: myusername

Originally posted by: jteef

Originally posted by: myusername
In addition to math, the female gender is inherently deficient (on average, and comparatively) in pattern recognition and spatial coordination. It just simply isn't how their brains are constructed. Why didn't you go to Julliard for dance?

because I'm not gay?

Ah. So you had a promising chance at the ballet - were really quite good at it, and enjoyed it too - and you turned it down because you thought your buddies playing admin at the computer lab would call you a queer. Consequently you pursued ... engineering? ... even though it didn't come naturally and took a long time to understand the fundamentals, and now you have squeaked by with a degree and find yourself somewhere in the bottom 5 percentile of your field in terms of qualifications and skills? Not to mention the social life, but there's not need to go there.

Are you sure "I'm not gay" is your final answer?

alright, in addition to not being gay, I am good at math, I want lots of money, and I'm generally curious why different stuff works the way it does as opposed to having a facination with prancing around in circles all day.

The big flaw in your reasoning is that there are probably millions (billions?) more girls like me than there are men shooting for a career with the Bolshoi. Or are you saying there aren't?

If you buy into that whole statistics thing then, given similar education, there are probably similar amounts(within a few % anyways (in case we actually aren't equal)) of people in each gender with the capability to calculate the change in a magnetic field on one of the moons of saturn due to a non uniform electric field passing through the area. (disclaimer: I can't back any of this up with paperwork)

One of my best friends in college was a female Comp Sci major; she complained all the time about a) every guy CS major hitting on her, and b) male professors looking down on her because she was female.

I can't speak to the latter, but as "some guy making a comment" I think she'd get hit on just as much in any job/major if she was attractive. Probably moreso; techie types tend to be more introverted and self deprecating than avg.

 

[nageov3t]

One of my best friends in college was a female Comp Sci major; she complained all the time about a) every guy CS major hitting on her, and b) male professors looking down on her because she was female.

I can't speak to the latter, but as "some guy making a comment" I think she'd get hit on just as much in any job/major if she was attractive. Probably moreso; techie types tend to be more introverted and self deprecating than avg.

it's a much different attitude when the ratio of males to females is 20:1... I went to an all-boy's high school, and attractive female teachers gotten eaten alive; they rarely lasted longer than a year before either quitting or turning into feminazis.

in college, the male to female ratio in my major was something like 1:10 and the enviornment was a lot different. there was never any issues with the males looking down on the females as sex objects and not being able to see past their boobies.

 

[johnjbruin]

They are rare - but occasionally you find some - and when they are hot - like 2 girls at my work place - its like icing on the cake.