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from the we'll-all-be-getting-dates-now dept.
Lina Nilsson writes in an op-ed piece in the NYT that she looks with despair at estimates that only about 14 percent of engineers in the work force are women but that there may be a solution to the disparity that is much simpler than targeted recruitment efforts. "An experience here at the University of California, Berkeley, where I teach, suggests that if the content of the work itself is made more societally meaningful, women will enroll in droves," writes Nilsson. "That applies not only to computer engineering but also to more traditional, equally male-dominated fields like mechanical and chemical engineering."
Nilsson says that Blum Center for Developing Economies recently began a new program that, without any targeted outreach, achieved 50 percent female enrollment in just one academic year. In the fall of 2014, UC Berkeley began offering a new Ph.D. minor in development engineering for students doing thesis work on solutions for low-income communities. They are designing affordable solutions for clean drinking water, inventing medical diagnostic equipment for neglected tropical diseases and enabling local manufacturing in poor and remote regions.
According to Nilsson, women seem to be drawn to engineering projects that attempt to achieve societal good and cites MIT, University of Minnesota, Penn State, Santa Clara University, Arizona State, and the University of Michigan that have programs aimed at reducing global poverty and inequality that have achieved similar results. For example, at Princeton, the student chapter of Engineers Without Borders has an executive board that is nearly 70 percent female, reflecting the overall club composition.
"It shows that the key to increasing the number of female engineers may not just be mentorship programs or child care centers, although those are important" concludes Nilsson. "It may be about reframing the goals of engineering research and curriculums to be more relevant to societal needs. It is not just about gender equity — it is about doing better engineering for us all."
(Score: 2) by GungnirSniper on Wednesday April 29 2015, @01:18AM
Female engineers are not as rare as unicorns, but there are always a few exceptions to prove the rule. And those handful make my heart flutter.
The problem starts much earlier than college-level recruitment would fix. Girls are better at math and school in general while they're young but once they hit high school that advantage typically disappears particularly for math. I'm not sure if it is puberty or social pressure, or both.
[In before the male nurse comments.]
Tips for better submissions to help our site grow. [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 29 2015, @01:32AM
> Girls are better at math and school in general while they're young but once they hit
> high school that advantage typically disappears particularly for math.
Yes, it evens out to basically no gender-specific difference. [apa.org]
Why is that a problem for college recruitment?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Hairyfeet on Wednesday April 29 2015, @02:13AM
Maybe they just decide they would rather use their other skills instead? Women make better cops, translators, negotiators, hell women make better fighter pilots as the female body handles G-Forces better, so as long as there is not any discrimination going on? I see no reason why every profession has to have X number of this or that group.
I find it hilarious that the left has gone so SJW radical that classical social liberals like myself are labeled "right wing" for daring to hold onto the beliefs of the 60s and 70s, that we should all be judged NOT by gender or race, but by who we are as individuals. Maybe women don't like all the bullshit that goes along with being an engineer? Maybe they looked at the outsourcing, the H1Bs, the long hours with zero corporate loyalty and said "I can do better" and decided not to go into that particular field?
To say "there should be more X" is just as racist and sexist as saying "we don't need no X here" because you are saying "They can't do this job without interference" when we have proof this is not the case. Make sure there is no barriers to entry if they so choose and leave it be. If they want to go into that field, just as women seem to be gravitating toward medical (which is damned smart, plenty of jobs there) then great, if they don't want it? That is fine too, that is the nice thing about treating everyone as individuals instead of a "hyphen" this or that.
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: 3, Touché) by DeathMonkey on Wednesday April 29 2015, @04:14AM
Women make better cops, translators, negotiators, hell women make better fighter pilots as the female body handles G-Forces better, so as long as there is not any discrimination going on?
So women are actually better than men at policing, translating, negotiating and fighter piloting (your words)?
Seems odd that those are all such male dominated fields. It would almost be logical to wonder why there are so few women and if they should be encouraged to join. We want the best, don't we?
(Score: 2) by Common Joe on Wednesday April 29 2015, @04:57AM
I can't comment about policing, negotiating, or fighter piloting, but I can comment about translating. Two people in my immediate family are university-trained translators -- as in the university specialized in translation and the degrees my family members received are in translation. Both of them can translate using three languages. When they went to school, it was completely female dominated. On the order of 90% - 95% female. People who claim to be translators (without the degree) may be more heavily male dominated, but I find the percentages reported by my family very interesting.
(Score: 2) by Common Joe on Wednesday April 29 2015, @05:12AM
This article makes me want to seek out heavily dominated women fields so I can join them in their quest to make society better. I'd much prefer to help society than squeeze another buck from some big corporation in the financial world. (To me, it seems to be the only place to make decent money.)
Unfortunately, even seeking out woman-traditional jobs isn't working out either. I know several teachers pretty well and their job is more about day care than imparting knowledge or teaching kids to think. (Has been for a while.) I don't know about the medical community in general, but the nursing industry is hurting for people because they abuse their workers so badly that most people wind up leaving. I wouldn't be a nurse no matter how much they paid. (Which, as I understand, they don't.) And having my best friend who had a very bad life-altering injury a couple of years ago, the people on the receiving end of those nurses have it pretty rough too. I've had a couple of friends in the IT world that dealt with hospitals and that is horrible also.
Actually, I'll be looking for a job in a few months. If anyone has any suggestions for a desktop, business-app (not web) programmer which can help make society better, let me know. (I live somewhere in Germany.) I'd appreciate knowing where to focus my energies. I'm kind of sick of doing financial stuff. I'd like to make some kind of positive societal impact.
(Score: 2, Offtopic) by mojo chan on Wednesday April 29 2015, @07:43AM
Ugh... Soylent used to have higher quality debates, but this one is worse than the Slashdot version. I've noticed that Soylent has been on a downward trajectory for a while now, or maybe it's internet discussion as a whole.
Unless maybe I fell victim to Poe's Law. Is your post a parody, or just stupid?
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Common Joe on Wednesday April 29 2015, @11:36AM
Just stupid. I was hoping to contribute to a comment marked insightful, but I suppose I failed. (Although I still think it's interesting my wife's classes had a very high percentage female in a field that I know is more balanced. I just didn't get into the reasonings behind it.) I feel ok with my stupid comment, though. I picked the name "Common Joe" because although I always try to have high quality stuff to say, I don't always succeed. Someone marked you insightful so I guess I'll endeavor to do better in the future.
I will say this, though: this conversation has been beaten to death at Slashdot over the years in various forms (including forms like Gamergate). Although many in the world are not properly aware of this issue, is there much left to say about it between us nerds and geeks other than a bit of idle chit chat?
I think most of us here are on board with equality between men and women, but we also know (statistically speaking, not with individuals) differences exist between the sexes and will lead to statistical differences when the genders are counted in their professions. We even know that the idea of gender is actually more of a sliding scale rather than a flipped bit. We also know there is inequality in the world that leads to sexism against both men and women and can lead to the discrepancies we are currently seeing. We know politicians and companies implement stupid responses to discrimination. We know discrimination is hard to prove on an individual level even if we can see it on a more general level.
You're implying that either Slashdot is getting better or we're going down to Slashdot's level. I, respectfully, disagree. I looked over at Slashdot's discussion. Yeah, there maybe a couple more interesting comments over there compared to here for this specific article (and more on topic than my original comment), but a lot of those +5 comments over there didn't deserve that kind of high ranking and are over rated. I also think, overall, we are much higher quality than Slashdot and Slashdot has different news material than we do despite the occasional overlap (like this article).
I do not see Soylent on a downward trajectory.
Feel free to call me out on any more stupid comments I make.
(Score: 2, Troll) by mojo chan on Wednesday April 29 2015, @11:57AM
I agree that Slashdot is generally quite bad, but on this one specific article it seems to have done better than Soylent this time.
Also, Gamergate isn't a forum for discussing anything, it's just organized trolling and criminality.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 29 2015, @04:52PM
You know the intentions of absolutely everyone in the 'movement'? Present your scientific evidence.
(Score: 2, Troll) by Hairyfeet on Wednesday April 29 2015, @05:56PM
You mean like the anti-GGers, who are so racist there is actually a game called SJW or Stormfront [youtube.com] because their shit is SO racist and SO hate filled its hard to tell the difference between their posts and your average white supremacist? Hell look at the SJW posts from the Hugo awards article, where one even called for the extermination of the white race and called anybody that didn't support (reverse) racism a Nazi, or try Gamerghazi, where DOXXing is SOP.
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: 2) by mojo chan on Thursday April 30 2015, @12:07PM
Check out the IRC logs that GamerGate themselves published, confirmed authentic by a separate publishing of the same logs collected by Quinn. They openly talk about setting up the false flag operations that are the subject of that video. They even mention some of the puppet accounts by name.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
(Score: 0, Troll) by Hairyfeet on Thursday April 30 2015, @04:58PM
Hell you think THAT is bad? Go look at some of the posts on the Stop Webhate site (which boy are the SJWs mad their little "boo hoo we are being persecuted" blew right back in their faces with the thing being filled with their racist and misandrist shit) where they have tweets from fricking Zoe Quinn herself advocating DOXXing and pointing others to Helldump which is a site dedicated to DOXXing.
You want to know what is hilarious Mojo Chan? Despite my little modbombing SJW stalkers here (look at my posting history sometime, you can watch posts yo-yo from +5 to -1 and back sometimes 6 or 7 times in the course of a couple days, sometimes even within hours) while calling me a Nazi (while he called for the extermination of the white race, dafuq?) I'm actually a fourth generation socialist, going back all the way to my great grandfather who was a card carrying socialist during the depression. I had never heard the name SJW or had a clue until my gay son was attacked, threatened, even had to make a new FB account as they kept trying to break into his causing it to get locked repeatedly for daring to say "having reporters be ethical and not have conflicts of interest is good no matter what subject they report on" so I thought "surely this is a misunderstanding, they are supposedly left wing, I'm a socialist, so it should be easy to talk to these people and clear this all up".
OH FUCK NO, I see now why they play "SJW or Stormfront" because frankly they have more in common with the Aryan Brotherhood than any other group I've ever seen! I have NEVER in the nearly 30 years I've been on the net seen a group soooo racist and hate filled in my entire life, I've seen them tell a disabled man he was a fat fuck who should die of cancer for simply saying that throwing threats and names is never productive, I myself has had to deal with a cyberstalker across multiple sites (as well as modbombing constantly here) for saying that calling everyone racist and every man rape apologists is trivializing both real racism and rape. The SJWs have to be the most nasty vile group I have ever had the misfortune to come across and now understand completely why Gamergate exists, its because these nasty hate filled narcissists will pick a target and try to wreck it by bringing all their ultra radical racist sexist bullshit into it!
This is why I'm happy to point this out at every opportunity so that their MSM lies can be exposed for the propaganda that it is and theycan be exposed as what they are, vile, spoiled upper middle class white people that have taken the "white man's burden" of speaking for every non white race and every female white or not on the planet. Are you a part of those groups and don't support them? Well fuck you you are an "unperson" that is either an "uncle tom" that is "cooning" or you literally do not exist and are merely a sock puppet or a CIS white male.....which is funny as hell because more than 70% of the SJWs are self hating CIS white males!
But you should be warned Mojo Chan that this site does exactly jack and squat when it comes to modbombing and cyberstalking so if you speak out against them expect to be modbombed and/or cyberstalked by them, since my grandfather and great uncle both suffered their entire lives from wounds they got fighting fascists in WWII I will NEVER back down nor be silenced, but be aware you are painting a target on your back if you speak anything but the political narrative here.
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Wednesday April 29 2015, @12:30PM
My mother used to be a nurse before she retired, and she didn't like it much either as a hospital nurse. I wouldn't recommend that line of work. It actually does pay decently well (not fantastic), but the treatment is bad.
The ticket is to not be a hospital nurse; do something else instead, such as working in a small doctor's office, or what my mom did, home health care. Basically she just drove around to elderly peoples' homes and checked up on them. It paid well, had good hours, was low-stress, didn't have horrible supervisors yelling at her (since you're on your own during these visits), etc.
Working as a surgery nurse is probably a good job too.
But the regular hospital nurse where you work on a floor and check on patients all day long and deal with doctors and mean, nasty patients, no way.
Oh, one other suggestion: she also found that being a hospital nurse worked out OK if she took 3rd shift. At that time of night, the patients are all asleep, the doctors are at home asleep, and there isn't much to do unless someone codes. And you get a pay differential.
(Score: 5, Informative) by aristarchus on Wednesday April 29 2015, @07:32AM
I just wanna say, in regards to this;
Women make better cops, translators, negotiators, hell women make better fighter pilots as the female body handles G-Forces better, so as long as there is not any discrimination going on?
That yes, when I go in to have my PC cleansed of all the venereal diseases it has some how (could not be a fundamentally flawed operating system, could it?) become infected with, I would prefer a female Hairyfeet. Not everyone's cup of tea. But women make better Hairyfeet.
(Score: 1, Troll) by Hairyfeet on Wednesday April 29 2015, @11:12AM
For those that do not know this is a SJW that believes the extermination of his own race is a great idea [soylentnews.org] and calls everyone who doesn't believe in reverse racism a "Nazi". Please keep this in mind when dealing with this obviously sick individual.
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Wednesday April 29 2015, @09:50PM
I used to just think I would prefer a female Hairyfoot; now I am sure I do.
(Score: 2) by Nuke on Wednesday April 29 2015, @12:59PM
Hairyfeet wrote :- "the female body handles G-Forces better"
Where do you get that from? It would depend how well stacked they are for a start - my wife has to take care stepping out of a car :-) Perhaps a petite woman might be OK.
(Score: 2) by Hairyfeet on Thursday April 30 2015, @06:21AM
I got it from a documentary on the battles of desert storm, sorry I can't remember offhand the exact name and I tried looking for it and there is apparently a billion desert storm vids on YouTube. Anyway it was pointed out in the video that a lot of the close air support for the troops, or CAS, was being done by female pilots because in that mission one will often have to do quick pull offs or jinking to keep from being hit by SAMs or man portables and because of the way the female body handled G-Force they were chosen for this task.
Naturally if you look at the pilots they were very slender and looked to be small breasted, I'm sure somebody with large c-cups like my wife? Probably wouldn't handle the G-Forces anymore than we would.
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 30 2015, @10:08PM
Maybe it has to do with the ease of which blood flows from a man's brain towards his dick ;).
(Score: 3, Informative) by darkfeline on Wednesday April 29 2015, @02:24AM
>Girls are better at math and school in general.
Sexism! This problem must be rectified at once! We should promote male advancement in math during primary school!
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Grishnakh on Wednesday April 29 2015, @12:22PM
Girls are better at math and school in general while they're young but once they hit high school that advantage typically disappears particularly for math. I'm not sure if it is puberty or social pressure, or both.
It seems completely obvious to me that it's social pressure (both from other girls, from boys, and from parents and teachers). Older generations and conservatives don't want girls to be good at math or pursue "hard" disciplines; society in general is anti-intellectual in this country; "nerdy" professions are seen as men-only and not as prestigious as medicine or law (so really smart girls go there instead); girls form social cliques which keep them down (like pushing cheerleading); I could go on and on.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Nuke on Wednesday April 29 2015, @01:07PM
Perhaps I'm slow because it is not at all obvious to me.
Hormonal changes at that time of life can cause visible and often drastic changes in personality, outlook and lifestyle, in different ways for everyone. Someone previously confident can become withdrawn, or someone previously dull can become outgoing. I don't see why academic direction and motivation could not be affected too.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by LoRdTAW on Wednesday April 29 2015, @01:16PM
I'd say it all begins at birth. We have social "norms" which are deeply ingrained in society. For birthdays and holidays we gift boys toy trucks, Legos, science/craft kits and video games. Girls get dolls/doll houses, ez-bake ovens and stuffed animals. We inadvertently tell girls that they are caretakers, house wives and mothers before they reach puberty. Boys are taught to be men. They get to play with chemistry sets, bb guns, tools and other gadgets. Girls don't get gadgets or tools. They get silly stay at home wife crap like barbie dolls, ez-bake ovens and fake kitchen sets. What better way to reinforce a womans place than giving her a fake kitchen when she is just a few years old. They have to wear pretty pink dresses and dont get dirty. Meanwhile boys get to play in the mud and wear jeans. Girls who play and dress like/with boys are tomboys and frowned upon.They aren't "feminine" enough. I'm also pretty sure there are plenty of people who believe that this will turn them into a pants wearing lesbian. A woman who can turn a wrench, drive a semi or wield a soldering iron is intimidating to men who were brought up with this way of thinking (the so-called patriarchy). This is a culture problem.
We don't have more women in engineering because mom and dad bought little suzie dolls and play kitchen sets while her brother(s) got legos, chemistry sets and helps dad work on the car.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 29 2015, @05:03PM
Girls are better at math and school in general while they're young
What do you mean by "better"? All schools want is rote memorization, so that's not saying much. Being 'good' at math is being able to memorize equations and spewing them forth on a standardized test for a lot of people. Same for other subjects in school. The males just develop and catch up eventually, becoming better at rote memorization garbage themselves. Furthermore, people good at following the orders of arbitrary (and possibly illogical, as many of the rules are, such as zero tolerance) authority figures will do "better" as well.
Schooling is largely poisonous for the brain.