Mike Coslo wrote in message ...
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.

From what I've seen in schools and in the workplace, the number of
non-white-males in engineering is definitely on the increase. But it's
still got a way to go before the ethnic/gender background of the
engineering fields matches that of the general population.

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.

Any ideas why?

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?

All valid points. Here are some mo

- In engineering, there's a good chance your particular field may
undergo radical changes in employment levels.

- Getting an engineering degree not only requires taking lots of math
and science courses, but also pretty much requires that you have a
good background in those courses from high school.

- The reward system is unbalanced in ways beyond pay compensation. For
example:

Example 1: Suppose an engineer set out to design, say, a system to
turn sewage and garbage into fuel, and do it practically, profitably
and cleanly. Suppose s/he succeeded, and the result solved two
problems at once. And suppose said engineer got patents to protect the
rights to the process.

Those patents would only be good for a limited time (14 or 20 years,
depending on the type of patent) and once they were gone, anyone could
use the process. Improvements to the process could make money for
other people, too. So the engineer had better make his/her money
quick. But the only way to make money from the process is to build
actual functioning recovery systems, or sell/lease the right to do so.

Suppose a writer wrote a book about an engineer set out to design a
system to turn sewage and garbage into fuel, and do it practically,
profitably and cleanly. And suppose said writer copyrighted the book,
and the book was a success.

The copyrights would be good for as long as the writer bothered to
renew them, and the writer's estate could continue to renew them for a
considerable time after the writer died. Rights to a movie version, TV
series, and other media not yet even invented would belong to the
writer unless sold or leased. The writer could make money for a much
longer time than the engineer.

The engineer's process would actually have to work. The writer's book
could be pure fantasy.


Example 2: How many TV shows, movies, books, and other media do you
see today or in the past 40-odd years that are about the law and law
enforcement, or medical care? How many about any sort of engineering
or technical jobs?

73 de Jim, N2EY