wrote in message
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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. I've worked at several companies where I was the only female
engineer out of a staff of from 5 to 10 engineers.
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).
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. 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." There's
probably a whole raft of reasons having nothing to do with discrimination
that contribute to the disparity.