New subject: Are Women Exiting Engineering Because Men Have All the Fun? - IEEE Spectrum

8 Sep 2016

I'm lucky I'm not in this trap .. i noticed women get mentored to do more non
profit / social good and qa work 

Maybe open source is the only answer ? 

http://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-valley/at-work/tech-careers/are-wome…

Are Women Exiting Engineering Because Men Have All the Fun?
By Tekla S. Perry Posted 17 Jun 2016 | 16:00 GMT

Photo: Paul Bradbury/Getty Images
Where are all the women engineers? That’s a question that engineering educators and
recruiters have been asking themselves for years now. Twenty percent of engineering
graduates are women—but only 13 percent of the engineering workforce is female. It’s not a
pipeline issue; engineering schools have been graduating women for a long time now. It’s
been easy to blame women leaving the engineering workforce to balance the demands of
family, but is that really it? Many have said there’s a culture problem, but what exactly
does that mean?

It turns out, according to a recent study, that at least a big part of it happens when
women are in mixed groups that need to divide chores. Typically, the division pushes the
routine or boring work at the women, the challenging or interesting work at the men.

Researchers Caroll Serron at the University of California at Irvine, Susan S. Silbey at
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Erin Cech (who performed the research at Rice
University but is now at the University of Michigan), and Brian Rubineau at McGill
University conducted the study to try to get a better idea of just why women who made it
through years of STEM education start migrating out of tech. The effort, funded by the
U.S. National Science Foundation, looked at 40 undergraduate engineering students, male
and female, spread among the four schools. The students were asked to write in diaries
twice a month, from freshman orientation through graduation, about anything of interest in
their lives. The researchers also conducted interviews with 25 students at each school
during years one and four.

In their paper, published in the May issue of the journal Work and Occupations, the
researchers say the problem starts early—the first time engineering students are asked to
work in teams. About the women, they write, “Their first encounter with collaboration is
to be treated in gender-stereotypical ways.”

Here’s one example they gave from student comments:

There was this one case where, in our design class, two girls in a group had been working
on the robot we were building in that class for hours, and the guys in their group came in
and within minutes had sentenced them to doing menial tasks while the guys went and had
all the fun in the machine shop.

Once the women get out of the classroom, the researchers say, moving into internships and
summer jobs, the problem continues. The women are assigned routine tasks while their male
peers are offered more challenging opportunities. One example from a diary:

So I’m two weeks into my research position and for the first time in my “working career”
I’m really enjoying what I’m doing. The last two summers I’ve been working in an
engineering internship position at X, the military defense government contractor . . ..
The environment was creepy, with older weirdo man engineers hitting on me all the time and
a sexist infrastructure was in place that kept female interns shuffling papers while their
oftentimes less experienced male counterparts had legitimate “engineering” assignments.

Ironically, the researchers noted, recent curriculum changes in engineering schools may be
making the problem worse, not better.

“Many engineering programs have introduced a greater emphasis on design and team-based
learning in the classroom, in essence mimicking and modeling the worksite, not only
because it is arguably more creative and effective work practice but also because it is
assumed that this will complement women’s social talents and enhance their opportunities
for persistence in the field,” they wrote. “We find, however, that a gender differential
in students’ professional role attachment tends to be produced in exactly those
collaborative encounters in team-based design projects.”

Can this be fixed? The researchers suggest that engineering schools should consider
“directed internship seminars” as one possible tool for ensuring that student internship
experiences “are dissected to help people learn from the problems women face.”

In the meantime, is there anything women can do to fight the problem themselves? Valerie
Coffman, chief technology officer at on-demand 3-D printing and prototyping firm Xometry,
says there is. After considering the study results, Coffman told me that, while this kind
of thing likely happens all over, she is indeed willing to believe it happens more often
in tech. “In situations like this,” she suggests, “you need to be your own best advocate
and aggressively seek out the most interesting and challenging projects. If your male
peers try to task you with menial work, you can tell them 'no'. They're your
peers, not your bosses.”

Sent from my iPhone