Phil Kane wrote:
On 15 Jun 2005 17:01:18 -0700, wrote:
In all my 43 years in engineering I've met a grand total of four woman
engineers, two MEs, one EE and a Chem E.
In my 50 years in engineering I've =dated= more women engineers than
you seem to have met, was engaged to one (nuclear engineer) and
married another (EE). In my wife's office alone there are more than
4 =PEs= on her floor, including the chief of the structural engineering
section (imagine that, a lady tower engineer). Had my wife gone
through the paperwork as she talked about twenty years ago she, too,
would have been a PE.
Our contesting club alone has
three female members, an old girlfriend is a ham and I met W3CUL. Out
of Lord only knows how many engineers and hams I've met over the years.
In our club, the largest radio club in the state if not in the
Pacific Northwest, about 1/3 of the hams are women, and of them,
about half are active on the air in some fashion or other.
This topic is getting interesting, I'd like to take it a bit further.
I'm at a complete loss to understand why there's such an obvious
disparity in the numbers of woman hams & engineers in this part of the
country vs. in your part of the country.
With respect to the socioeconomicpolitical mindsets Oregon is well
known for marching to it's own occasionally quirky liberal drummer
while PA is a typical old-form mid-Atlantic centrist sort of place. I
'spose there are some of the usual left coast / right coast differences
which sort of favor left coast women and might explain part of it. But
good grief, we're not talking Albania and Sweden here.
I've mulled the matter off and on for a few hours and it occurs to me
that maybe, just maybe our exposures to women engineers in particular
have been quite different. As in where you've churned your coin vs.
where I've gotten mine over the years. I've only spent a total of ten
years working for large entities, six as a Navy employee back when
woman engineers simply didn't exist for all practical purposes, then
much later I did four with the DuPont central engineering center in the
mid-1980s. Three of the four woman engineers I've met and cited were
DuPont employees, the fourth was a short-time part timer I ran into on
a specific small-biz project whose real job was with some large firm or
another.
Except for the six I did with the Navy, a gig I loved and was enormous
fun I've spent most of the rest of my career in smokestack small-medium
size busineses. I have allergic reactions to huge employers for a
number of reasons and generally avoid them. I despise corporate beige
with a purple passion
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?
--
73 de K2ASP - Phil Kane
From a Clearing in the Silicon Forest
Beaverton (Washington County) Oregon
w3rv
Out here in the smokestacks of Delaware County PA