[sudo-discuss] Are Women Exiting Engineering Because Men Have All the Fun? - IEEE Spectrum

[robb]

i wish the sudogals would host a matriarchy hack night where the ladies
choose the projects & tell the guys what to do.
not that i necessarily think that's the ideal but we guys sure would learn
a lot

On Thu, Sep 8, 2016 at 7:09 PM, Romy Ilano <romy.ilano at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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-women-being-pushed-out-of-engineering-
> because-men-have-all-the-fun
>
> Are Women Exiting Engineering Because Men Have All the Fun?
> By Tekla S. Perry <http://spectrum.ieee.org/author/perry-tekla-s>
>
> Posted 17 Jun 2016 | 16:00 GMT
> [image: null] 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 <http://wox.sagepub.com/>*, 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
>
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