Dee Flint wrote:
wrote in message
ups.com...
wrote:
Phil Kane wrote:
On 15 Jun 2005 17:01:18 -0700, wrote:



[sni]

My class of 33 at Penn (1976, Moore School of Electrical Engineering)
graduated 3 women - all specializing in computers. I don't think Towne
School graduated any female engineers that year.

Of course that's ancient history compared to today's ratios, but
it shows a starting point almost 30 years ago.


I will add some anecdotal comments to that. At my school we graduated
approx 200 engineers and about 10% were women.

[snip]
If I have it right you spent most of your career with the FCC, another
huge entity. Is it possible that women in engineering tend to
gravitate
in large numbers to major entities where fair employment
practices are
actually practiced and you've gotten involved with more of them than
I've ever managed to meet?

Perhaps not so much "gravitate" as in "are forced by circumstances"?

All of which is and has been changing. But it takes a long
time for such trends to make their way through the workforce.

Keep in mind that the majority of engineering jobs are at major entities in
major cities. Thus they will be more apt to be statistically
representative. In small companies and/or rural areas the numbers are going
to be skewed.

Phila. and it's surrounding five-county region is a huge and
technology-diverse Gotham City with hundreds of small
engineering-based employers and the numbers are *really* skewed - in
the direction of the very small number of woman engineers I run into
where I work.

I've worked at several companies where I was the only female
engineer out of a staff of from 5 to 10 engineers.

Can't imagine any such thing around here . . As an example go back to
when I popped out of Drexel which in 1963 was the biggest private
undergrad engineering school on the planet. Probably still is. There
were 87 ME grads, 89 EE grads and significant numbers of civil,
chemical and metallurgical engineers plus the physics and chemistry
majors. Maybe 400 all told. There was ONE, uno, singular woman in the
whole bunch and she was chem major. I haven't seen any huge shift since
then either, one female engineer out of ten in a small organization
where I've been are still true oddities.

I've been in engineering for 30 years. I've seen virtually no
discrimination in this field as this country remains chronically short of
engineers. Oh there are spots in the country where it is difficult to find
a job and sometimes the economy slumps but that does not mean engineers are
not needed but that the companies make do with a short handed staff (been
there done that).

.. . . Tell me . . ! I think you've brought up an important side issue.
My experience strongly indicates that many in the general public
consider engineering a lousy biz to get into as far as employment
stability is concerened. They're right, and it's gotten much worse
over the years. I'd have a hard time today recommending engineering to
a kid male or female considering career options.

Instead I believe that women are more prone than men to select jobs more on
the perceived desireability of the job location. They are more prone to
select the office jobs rather than the plant jobs, thus placing themselves
at the headquarters and technical offices rather than the factories out in
the boonies and so on.

I think you just hit the nail on the head Dee, the skew is in my court.
I work in areas women simply don't get into. Schlepping around
neighborhood machine shops for a living like I have is obviously not
"woman's work" for any number of valid reasons which go 'way beyond the
fact that they happen to be engineers. So of course woman engineers are
scarce the way I see the engineering biz.

Also there is a difference in what defines a
desireable location. A higher percentage of the men will look at a facility
in a rural location and say "now I can go fishing more often."

I'd like to be there when some lady engineer/ham lusts for a nice quiet
antenna location out in the boonies and is married to some city boy . .
..

There's
probably a whole raft of reasons having nothing to do with discrimination
that contribute to the disparity.

Indeed: The code has been cracked.

w3rv

wrote in message
oups.com...
Dee Flint wrote:

[snip]

Also there is a difference in what defines a
desireable location. A higher percentage of the men will look at a
facility
in a rural location and say "now I can go fishing more often."

I'd like to be there when some lady engineer/ham lusts for a nice quiet
antenna location out in the boonies and is married to some city boy . .


Well I'm a lady engineer/ham who lusts for a nice, quiet antenna farm in the
country and am married to a city boy. However, he's also a ham and happens
to like the quietness of the rural areas. But the work is in the cities.
Oh there's some engineering jobs in rural areas and I used to take those.
But then when the company cuts back, you are automatically slated to move
when you find a new position as it sure isn't going to be in that rural area
where you worked at the only firm using engineers. Moving every 5 years or
so got old fast.


There's
probably a whole raft of reasons having nothing to do with discrimination
that contribute to the disparity.

Indeed: The code has been cracked.

w3rv

That is my opinion too. There's another factor that crops up. Women do not
like to just arbitrarily change jobs in search of higher pay or a promotion.
They prefer stability. So they seek out and stay with those firms that seem
to fit that bill. There's been some sort of study that I read somewhere on
that. The end result is that they rise up the wage scale and promotion
scale more slowly. The men who get ahead rapidly are usually those who make
judicious job changes every 5 years or so in the early years of their
careers.

Dee D. Flint, N8UZE