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June 18th 05, 01:17 PM

wrote:
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.

Me too!

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.

But there are other differences. Population density in BosWash is
much higher than in the Pacific Northwest. Things like telephones
and TV were here sooner, particularly in terms of "most people have
them". And most of this area has been "settled" by non-Native Americans
for 300+ years.

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.

Another factor is which engineering disciplines and sub-disciplines you
encounter. There may be a lot more female
ChemEs than MechEs. Etc.

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.

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?

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.

--
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

Ditto if you can say Radnor has smokestacks.

73 de Jim, N2EY