Phil Kane wrote:
On Mon, 01 Nov 2004 15:34:10 -0500, Mike Coslo wrote:
There is an ongoing effort to recruit underrepresented groups to the
engineering fields. There are very few female engineers and few that are
in college. This despite lots of effort to recruit. There has been some
limited success in recruiting people of African descent.
The pendulum must be swinging backwards. When I was in engineering
school 50 years ago we were lucky to have one female student and
one student "of color" in a class of 100. From my observations at
the school from which I graduated (one of the top three in the US),
twenty years ago the female students outnumbered the male students
and a majority of the students today are from groups which were/are
considered minorities, largely Asian and other peoples "of color".
Interesting! I've been at a prominent university for just about 27
years now, and I have never seen any case where the females outnumbered
the men in engineering classes, even though the university population is
over 50 percent female.
Certainly at UCLA, they have a different situation:
http://www.joannejacobs.com/mtarchives/014477.html
When we have the Bring your daughters (and sons) to work day, for the
last few years, none of the young ladies wanted to be engineers. Most
wanted to be lawyers.
I have often thought that the engineering "lifestyle" has been one of
the worst advertisements for the profession.
Become an engineer, and you get to:
Work long and uncompensated hours
be looked at as a major oddball by a large segment of the community. I
wish I had compiled a list of all the engineer disses I've heard over
the years.
And if you are successful as an engineer, you get to choose one of two
paths. Choose to enter management, and essentially stop being an engineer.
or
Continue to be an engineer, and continue to be a subordinate.
Guess who makes more money?
Years ago, I needed to make the choice between becoming an engineer, or
becoming an artist (who also had technical duties) Guess what won out?
- Mike KB3EIA -