Breaking News: Girls don't become engineers because they don't want to

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2008/05/18/the_freedom_to_say_no/?page=full

by aggieben • 18 years ago

51 104 18 years ago

Seems a pretty childish analysis... The question is - why do girls "not want to" by the time they reach age 18?

Prrometheus2• 18 years ago

My general feeling from the articles I have read on the issue is that there seems to be a significant biological factor and a significant cultural factor. That being said, I'm not sure that there is anything "wrong" with a world with few woman engineers, or that we should be doing something to address it outside of fighting concrete instances of negative discrimination.

rufo• 18 years ago

Devil's advocate: What's wrong with them not wanting to?

Assuming there is no discrimination or other judgement going on in the workplace causing them to choose a different career, and women simply choose not to enter IT/engineering fields, what's the problem with that?

projectileboy4• 18 years ago

There's absolutely nothing wrong with them not wanting to. What's wrong is a society that for 18 years tells them "you don't want to do this, you want to do that".

demallien2• 18 years ago

What's wrong? Fr each individual, nothing, but for the country as a whole, this is a quick path to economic disaster. These are exactly the types of skills needed to maintain an economic advantage against large countries such as India and China.

Goladus• 18 years ago

Fewer ideas, not as much innovation, and more difficulty creating products and services with broad appeal. So long as they're more productive in fields like medicine and epidemiology it may not be a net loss.

Note though that a couple of my friends work for scientists and claim gender discrimination is pretty bad. The picture they described of a scientific research company is nothing like what I've seen in the IT industry for the past 8 years or so.

jcl• 18 years ago

Devil's advocate: What's wrong with them not wanting to?

I think the reason people are uncomfortable with the gender imbalance in IT is because of earlier studies showing that women tended to get paid less in jobs where they are doing the same work as men. Now whenever we hear of a gender inequality, we assume -- perhaps incorrectly, in this case -- that the inequality is due to a hidden, unfair bias.

So there is nothing wrong with women preferring non-IT jobs, per se. But I think we are right to feel cautious about conclusions in this area: Someone could take this general result and erroneously apply it to specific women, thereby assuming that female IT employees are less interested in their jobs than men and thus less deserving of raises or promotions... which creates a new source of gender bias.

m0nty4• 18 years ago

'The question is - why do girls "not want to" by the time they reach age 18?'

For the same reason not many men become maternity nurses or kindergarten teachers?

Frankly, you couldn't have kept me away from IT if you'd tried. Despite low wages (when I started, at least), poor conditions, working on short-term contracts, being required to educate myself, putting up with being treated like some kind of idiot savant, etc, etc -- still, I wanted it very, very badly.

Now, for people who don't feel that way, we're supposed to engage in this collective hand-wringing exercise: "Oh dear! Not enough wimmin in IT!" If they don't want it, I would seriously question the morality of (so to speak) tricking them into joining the profession on the basis of a collection of half-truths. Either you want to play with the shiny toys or you don't. And if you don't, good luck, because 90% of the time it's not exactly what you'd call fun anyway.

Incidentally, I've been around a bit and I have never, ever witnessed any indication of prejudice against women in IT. Where I've worked with female engineers, they've always been welcomed and treated with respect. Maybe we should just accept what any parent can tell you: there are gender differences, and we need to accept those rather than pretend we're all the same.

/rant. calming down now ;) talk amongst yourselves...

projectileboy4• 18 years ago

I actually agree with everything you said - I, too, have never felt or seen bias against women in IT, once we're all adults. My perspective is that of the parent of a six-year-old girl, and if you actually believe that society doesn't start drilling into girls' heads from day one that their mission in life is to play with dolls, put on make up, and do little else... well, then you don't see much mainstream media.

silencio7• 18 years ago

In regards to the first half of your comment, it's probably the case that a lot of professions are like that.

To the second half...I haven't even graduated college and I've dealt with more than I've wanted to. Sure, with some profs and at some of the places I've worked at it was awesome - people were friendly and treated me as an equal. But I've gotten my fair share of discrimination.

In fact, why do I end up writing so much about this. Lemme just copy and paste what I wrote on a similar reddit topic: I was interested in computers and programming in particular since elementary school, and since then I've been harassed about it by the most unexpected people. My parents gave up the fight but not after more than a decade, and I get irked by the various types of people I end up talking to when my job/major comes up. "You're kidding, right? You're a woman, do you know what to do?" is not that uncommon to hear, despite the decent resume with good references or a word-of-mouth recommendation from some happy client who wouldn't shut up telling them about how much they liked me and my work.

Just because you don't see it doesn't mean it's not there. Or maybe you just..don't notice it?

axod• 18 years ago

Same reason most men don't want to be midwives?

apstuff• 18 years ago

Enrollment by young Americans, both boys and girls, is dropping in all fields of engineering. The nation doesn't need that many hedge fund managers does it?

aggieben2• 18 years ago

I'm not so sure a simple drop in enrollment is such a bad thing. I recently taught a couple of graduate level courses in a nearby CS department, and I can tell you that they should "un-enroll" about half of their graduate students, and it would vastly improve the quality of the department almost overnight. (I can only speak to the graduate program - I haven't been in much contact with undergrads). The U.S. will never graduate as many "engineers" as China and India, and we shouldn't try.

We should graduate the best engineers and scientists.

nostrademons• 18 years ago

Chances are, "un-enrolling" about half the graduate students would improve a department no matter how big it is. Sturgeon's Law - "90% of everything is crap".

But if you have a bigger pool to draw from, the 10% that's not crap will amount to more engineers. And the 0.01% that's really spectacular will be more spectacular. That's the way a bell-curve works - if you raise the area under the curve, the tips spread out as well.

There're a lot of smart people in finance whose talents are being wasted making sure that the market reflects all information within microseconds instead of within minutes. If the economic incentives were such that they started companies or did basic research instead, I bet you'd see quite a few more breakthroughs.

mamama4• 18 years ago

Thank you. You've restored my faith in academia. You're doing God's work.

asnyder• 18 years ago

"Women who are mathematically gifted are more likely than men to have strong verbal abilities as well; men who excel in math, by contrast, don't do nearly as well in verbal skills."

Hmm, all the men I know that excel in math and science have excellent verbal abilities. I'd be curious to see their research on this.

spydez• 18 years ago

I excel in math and science but do not have excellent verbal abilities.

There. I ruined your statistic. :P

sealedidentity2• 18 years ago

Well it boils down to the simplest of things: Boys generally are interested in things while girls are interested in relationships and people. That explains why there are more guys as engineers than girls. It's not a question of smartness, more of interest and personality.

silencio7• 18 years ago

Stop generalizing. I hate people, I am antisocial until I need to be nice (networking?), I'm with friends, or I'm drunk. Relationships I can stand because I really like cuddling and sex.

I also know some guys who are the complete opposite, and it's sort of amusing because of how much I had to deal with as a kid for being what I am just because I was a different gender and I didn't meet society's stereotypical views on it.

modoc• 18 years ago

The whole point of statistical trends is that they ARE generalizations. Yes, you can find individual cases which buck the trend, but across a large sample group, these are the tendencies...

How could you talk about gender roles and differences without generalizing? Or really talk about any demographic larger than a handful of people? Just because it's a generalization, doesn't mean it's not a useful piece of information.

mhartl2• 18 years ago

Stop generalizing.

Is it not meaningful to say that men are taller than women?

andreyf• 18 years ago

ahem This is not saying anything about boys or girls in general. Let's be clear as to what we see evidence of - that boys raised in this society at this time are more interested in things while girls raised in this society at this time are more interested in relationships and people.

Don't be constrained to the fashions of your times. Less than a century ago, would you could have said "boys are generally interested in making money, while girls are generally interested in cooking"?

etal3• 18 years ago

Consider the following analogy:

  psychology researchers : gender differences :: moths : flame

Rosalind Chait Barnett at the bottom of the article has it right. Investigating gender differences is the first quest every psych grad student embarks on, and 19 times out of 20, they're disappointed to find nothing significant. (The other 1/20 is the false positive that comes with 95% confidence testing.) It bothers me that this article pursues so many hypotheses at once -- planning for career flexibility; language aptitude; discrimination; women fulfilled through biology, men through machines. None of them is a satisfactory answer because in a properly controlled gender-differences experiment, having filtered out the noise, there's no signal left.

On the surface, the differences are there, but it's not due to anything innate. The East-versus-West comparison in the article should make that obvious. (The article claims it's because we're more "free".) It's cultural. Duh. I don't see anything wrong with that, either; it doesn't mean there should be a 50:50 gender split in every field. But looking for the explanation in biology is a dead end that enough researchers have run into already.

Tichy8• 18 years ago

Could you point us to some examples, please? Not saying you are wrong, but the researcher cited in the article didn't convince me. She just said "there are so many factors we can't possibly interpret them", but didn't really give a counter-argument. Sounded more political correctness to me.

etal3• 18 years ago

My fiancee is a psych researcher; this is just what she's told me (via rant) a number of times. Plenty of studies showing significant gender differences show up on sagepub.com, but the findings usually have culture mixed in as well, and they aren't nearly as strong as Cosmo and the rest of pop culture would have us believe.

More precisely, the variation within a gender group is much larger than the variation between genders.

astine2• 18 years ago

If I recall, the article didn't mention any East-West differences, it mentioned GDP differences.

"The United States, Norway, Switzerland, Canada, and the United Kingdom, which offer women the most financial stability and legal protections in job choice, have the greatest gender split in careers. In countries with less economic opportunity, like the Philippines, Thailand, and Russia, she writes, the number of women in physics is as high as 30 to 35 percent, versus 5 percent in Canada, Japan, and Germany."

Japan is listed as one of the countries where women don't don't pursue IT carriers. The common trait is economic, not social.

I think that we should deal with people on an individual basis and not a group basis. It does not matter why people choose the careers that they do, what matters is that they are happy where they are. If you find that a bunch of women are unhappy because they didn't choose or were denied a career in IT, then you have a cause. If you find a bunch of women who are unhappy because a bunch of other women didn't choose careers in IT, then you have a bunch of busybodies that don't have my sympathy.

etal3• 18 years ago

You're right, I missed Japan in the other group. I'm always suspicious of industrialized-vs-developing groupings because the intersection of industrialized and Western is so large. What do the numbers look like in Latin America, for instance? And Russia seems to have a lot of respect for scientists, in particular.

Basically, the example countries look cherry-picked, where those researchers lined up the percentages of women in physics by country, then generalized about the high and low ends of the scale, rather than starting with a proper hypothesis and testing it.

xlnt• 18 years ago

"Don't read too much; no one will want to marry you."

Lost the source but not making this up.

mamama4• 18 years ago

I can confirm that you're not making it up.

Tichy8• 18 years ago

Girls always have a plan B: get pregnant and stop working altogether. Just ask some random female students whether income perspectives had any bearings on their choice of profession. More often than not, the answer is no (they might not even know what salary they can expect). It would make sense if men thought about that some more (since families need money), so they might tend to pick the more prospective subjects.

mechanical_fish• 18 years ago

Attention, Projectileboy: upthread, you said

I, too, have never felt or seen bias against women in IT, once we're all adults.

I hope you enjoyed that while it lasted.

Tichy8• 18 years ago

So I displayed bias against women in IT how exactly? Also, is bias always wrong? Would it be biased to say "women tend to have boobs"?

natrius• 18 years ago

Which is more common: men stopping working to raise children or women stopping working to raise children?

You are being overly sensitive.

silencio7• 18 years ago

Okay, so despite me being a girl with zero interest in having children (at most considering adoption), desperately wanting my girl bits out (if it wasn't going to be a hormonal disaster), being on hormonal contraceptives all the time and not sleeping with men, I have the option of getting pregnant and stop working?

Even if I were considering that preposterous option at any time, it sucks to say this but it is really hard to live off of one person's income today.

Tichy8• 18 years ago

What does "wanting girl bits out" mean?

Obviously there also girls picking maths and so on, so your one example doesn't really prove anything (statistics). Sorry for your plight with the hormones. Hint: if you don't sleep with men, you could actually stop taking the contraceptives.

Also, what is preposterous about having kids and staying at home to take care of them?

The income issue is easily solved by trying to marry a man with more income, or making him work more.

attack4• 18 years ago

If you don't have children then two people can live off of one person's income far more easily. It is children that are the huge money sink. Just saying.

giles_bowkett2• 18 years ago

Girls who go to all-girls schools do better in math.

If I ever have a daughter I'll send her to an all-girls school. Boys are going to find her either way, and I'd prefer her "wanting" to do X or Y to be based on her skills and brains, not peer pressure.

mamama4• 18 years ago

I don't think it will make much of a difference; people always succumb to peer pressure when they are with other people.

Another point to ponder on: would I accept a CS professorship at MIT? Hell, yeah! Would I accept one at Wellesley? I don't think so - I'll possibly end up being called a pussy.

carterschonwald• 18 years ago

now i just have to say WTF, that makes no sense, either way you're in boston, have intelligent students, and you're a prof at one of the best schools in the world. Yes, ones a liberal arts college and the others a research university and there are fundamental differences in ones time allocation and day to day priorities as a consequence thereof, but that doesn't justify your remark at all!

jimbokun3• 18 years ago

The point of the article is NOT that boys do better at math. The point is that girls who DO excel at math choose non-technical (or less technical) careers. Specifically, careers that involve more human interaction, or at least deal with living things in some form (biological sciences).

giles_bowkett2• 18 years ago

Yes, I know that, and I'm insulted by your misinterpretation. My point still stands. The article is tautological fluff. "If we explore the most obvious implications of a known phenomenon, and pad it with numbers, people will know we were awake, we'll still have jobs, and really foolish people will think we've discovered something."

mamama4• 18 years ago

These pointless "women in computer science" articles really make my trigger finger itchy.

DaniFong4• 18 years ago

There may be a rock unturned here.

Neither women nor men have anything close to perfect information about what their careers might be like down years of a prospective path. Many career decisions are influenced by the crudest of stereotypes. If the stars of the computing world (who barely receive much press anyway) seem to be mostly introverted men, and if those already into computers seem lacking in either social grace or extraversion, then who's to blame them for choosing careers which would appear to help them be more socially engaged.

So women flock to fields like nursing, and teaching. Who told them that both operate in an often stiflingly apathetic bureaucracy? Of computers and engineering, they've in many cases never had the joy of being able to make something work on their own. For all they know, cooking is more creative. They have no idea how exciting the startup world is, how gratifying to work on something new, how empowering it feels to have the wind of social benefit at your back, how freeing it is to be able to choose your work to be most important, as opposed to being most externally justifiable.

Extraverted women and men have shied away from computers and related fields for a long time. But perhaps it's not so much a function of the nature of our field. Perhaps we just have bad press.

llimllib3• 18 years ago

> choosing careers which would appear to help them be more socially engaged... it's not so much a function of the nature of our field

Are you questioning which career is in fact more socially engaged? Can you name a field which is less socially engaged than CS/Math?

It seems to me that it is a function of the nature of our field, which demands long stretches of unbroken attention, that draws people who desire large amounts of social activity away.

DaniFong4• 18 years ago

Undoubtably some tech jobs are suitable only for hermits. But the variance within fields, as is the variance within genders, dwarfs by far the variance between them.

gizmo• 18 years ago

Electrical Engineering is the worst in my experience. Then Computer Science. Then physics. Then math.

Math people are probably as introverted as people from Electrical Engineering, but they don't proudly carry their social incompetence as a label.

Biologists who, say, monitor and log the behavior of animal life also wait for hours in pure concentration, so they won't miss anything when (or if) something happens. Usually introverted people sign up for that kind of thing, but not really socially awkward ones.

timr3• 18 years ago

It's not just bad press; engineers (of any stripe) are often frighteningly socially incompetent. In my experience, this is true far more often than for lawyers or medical doctors.

It's also a kind of stereotype to say that programming is about creation and empowerment; the existence of this forum (and most of what pg writes) seems to me a reaction to the utterly dismal, uncreative state of most programming jobs. So it's not really fair to say that people flock to other fields based on misinformation. Most computer-related jobs really do suck.

DaniFong4• 18 years ago

Perhaps I was insufficiently specific. The problem isn't that the conception of the median programming job is wrong. The problem is that technical people of both genders are often completely unaware of the existence of better jobs. Sometimes, when people talk of career prospects of becoming a programmer, they say it with such disdain that they might as well be talking about becoming a drone.

helveticaman2• 18 years ago

It's not just bad press; engineers (of any stripe) are often frighteningly socially incompetent.

It's not always their fault. A lot of these engineers have ADD.

menloparkbum• 18 years ago

Women are more sensible than men. Unless you start a successful startup, or are in the top 1% of engineers, having a typical engineering job is pretty lame. Statistically you will make more money with less effort by choosing a medical or legal related field. Greenspun said it best here:

http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science

This article is about science careers. Just switch a few things in his career path and it is the same argument for engineering careers.

tx• 18 years ago

Typical engineering job is pretty lame? That's very American, if you ask me, because you're measuring everything around youself in dollars. I've become an engineer because I create things: every day something starts spinning, cranking, rotating and pumping because I build it, while 100% of lawyers (without exceptions) are useless parasites eating off our own deficiencies.

Having an average engineering job isn't lame, your (and Greenspun's) line of thinking IS lame. In fact, it's pretty disgusting. That also explains why there aren't many women in the field: generalizing, they're simply more bottom-line oriented, as numerous studies have proven: they don't spend 6 years to get a Master's and build robots in a garage in their spare time for free, instead they'll "wipe ass" overtime in a nearest hospital with an associate degree, because overtime pays double rate.

scott_s• 18 years ago

The most important sentence from the article, emphasis mine: "The researchers are not suggesting that sexism and cultural pressures on women don't play a role, and they don't yet know why women choose the way they do."

krschultz• 18 years ago

From my experience not a large percentage of the guys who sign up for engineering programs actually WANT to become engineers. It sounds like a socially acceptable major, and sure maybe they like mechanical things, but a huge number of the guys washed out from mechanical engineering, (we started with 140, we are down to 80, of the 80 there are 15 girls, we started with 17 girls, the rest of the wash outs were guys). I think few girls go into engineering as a default major, so if they are there they really want to be there. In the end, the only ones who can get through it are those who really want to be there, so why encourage people who aren't committed?

Xichekolas• 18 years ago

> Now two new studies by economists and social scientists have reached a perhaps startling conclusion: An important part of the explanation for the gender gap, they are finding, are the preferences of women themselves. When it comes to certain math- and science-related jobs, substantial numbers of women - highly qualified for the work - stay out of those careers because they would simply rather do something else.

Am I the only one not startled by this? My reasoning was as follows... I can think of a ton of jobs that are traditionally dominated by females (elementary school teacher, housekeepers, talk-show hosts) that I happen to not want to do. It has nothing to do with me being male or some perceived descrimination against me by the females in the field. I just don't have any interest in being those things.

I would assume the same thing holds true for a female and some professions that just happen to be historically dominated by males. I mean, some of the disparity probably is because of gender-based slight, but it seems rational to expect that some jobs just aren't interesting enough to attract people in droves of equal and politically correct gender ratios.

> The United States, Norway, Switzerland, Canada, and the United Kingdom, which offer women the most financial stability and legal protections in job choice, have the greatest gender split in careers. In countries with less economic opportunity, like the Philippines, Thailand, and Russia, she writes, the number of women in physics is as high as 30 to 35 percent, versus 5 percent in Canada, Japan, and Germany.

My guess is this is because they have the option to choose careers, rather than being forced to accept whatever pays well and is safe.

> Benbow and Lubinski, at Vanderbilt, found that high-achieving women often pick their careers based on the idea that they'll eventually take time off, and thus avoid fields in which that absence will exact a larger penalty. In humanities or philosophy, for instance, taking a year or two off won't affect one's skill set very much. But in quickly evolving technical fields, a similar sabbatical can be a huge career setback.

I have seen this in talking with my girlfriend about her career goals. She is a chemical engineer, and often fears that taking time off to raise kids will doom her career.

strlen• 18 years ago

Two reasons: FUD and the fact that women are more rational (as someone said "more sensible"). Purely statistically speaking, you are more likely to do work that's both interesting and well paid if you go into medicine versus software engineering.

Medicine takes much longer and steeper learning curve, but once you climb that an average job requiring an MD is more interesting than an average job requiring a BS in CS and pays better (while if you fail to get an MD, an average job requiring a BS/MS in Bio-Chemistry is at least as interesting and still decently paying).

The FUD part is pretty self explanatory: introversion doesn't mean lack of social skills (the latter are learned and eventually most geeks do end up learning them one way or another) and given the amount of team work involved in any real engineering projects there are plenty opportunities for extroverts to re-charge.

The way to encourage women to go into these fields is to provide dual degree programs (no opportunity cost for seeking a CS degree and applying to engineering jobs as an undergraduate) and combating the FUD.

aswanson5• 18 years ago

Smart choice, ladies. Should have listened to you.

undetected2• 18 years ago

Let me give another perspective. I'm from one of the developing (an optimistic term) countries mentioned.

While I was still in my home country, I worked in an IT consulting firm. My boss' boss was female, her boss (a VP) was female. A lot of the other bosses were female. More than half my teammates were female. 30% female / 70% male seems awfully low, it was more like 45%-55% female.

The company would occassionally send people to the US. Over time, over a hundred of us have moved here to the US. So you have a sample of men and women who are good at math and picked IT while they were in a country with few economic opportunities, and took them to a nation with financial stability - the two environments the article mentioned.

What's happened so far? In time, some of the women changed careers. Some went to medicine, going back to school in order to switch. Some went to completely non-science fields, like real estate. None of the men have switched careers.

I know some men still dabble in computers in their spare time - open source projects, linux, etc. None of the women do.

From what I've observed, the article is spot on.

attack4• 18 years ago

Small open source projects are a far better measure of this phenomenon. It's completely unaffected by salary, no one gets paid, completely free of bias, you have to do everything yourself. And yet the disparity is enormous.

helveticaman2• 18 years ago

Breaking News: it's not necessarily or completely men's fault.

jaaron• 18 years ago

What a horribly mangled headline. Why not say, "Girl's don't want to become engineers?"

tlrobinson• 18 years ago

Ok, but why don't girls want to become engineers?

Breaking News: Girls don't become engineers because they don't want to

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