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posted by CoolHand on Wednesday April 29 2015, @12:46AM   Printer-friendly
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."

 
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 29 2015, @03:45AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 29 2015, @03:45AM (#176455)

    The utilitarian: Because diversity of perspective makes the work output better. For example, at least half of facebook's customers are female. But with such a tiny fraction of female developers they have difficulty conceiving of product features that females want. A competitor that better understood the female perspective could one-up facebook.

    I was taught that in a couple classes at university. One point I always raised and never got an answer to: What happens if your customers aren't diverse?

    You can't claim that diversity improves business because people that are alike can understand each other better in one breath and say in the next that you shouldn't match your customer demographics if they are homogenous.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 29 2015, @04:10AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 29 2015, @04:10AM (#176463)

    > One point I always raised and never got an answer to: What happens if your customers aren't diverse?

    You are absolutely right. As long as you don't care about ever attracting new customers, then there is no point in caring about anybody else.
    And as we all know, stagnation is the ideal american business model which the majority of businesses strive for.

    In case that's not clear, you have an answer now. I find it hard to believe you never got that answer before. I find it easier to believe you simply chose not to hear it and will do so again.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 29 2015, @10:25AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 29 2015, @10:25AM (#176535)

      I'd imagine if you sold NASCAR paraphernalia and decided to have a perfectly diverse workforce, your sales numbers wound change, but not up.

      That does not mean that such a situation or outcome is right, merely that putting the blinders on and stating in ever more elaborate ways that diversity is always unequivocally an economic benefit is itself wrong. Diversity has plenty of things going for it, but the hardcore capitalist claim does not hold up.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 29 2015, @11:57AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 29 2015, @11:57AM (#176556)

        I see subtlety is lost on you.
        Your NASCAR example is an outlier, not the common case.
        Drawing conclusions from outliers is the sign of someone looking to push an agenda.

    • (Score: 2) by kaszz on Wednesday April 29 2015, @09:06PM

      by kaszz (4211) on Wednesday April 29 2015, @09:06PM (#176833) Journal

      Large corporation with cubicles and pointy haired boss (PHB) seems to fit the model ;-)

  • (Score: 2) by kaszz on Wednesday April 29 2015, @09:08PM

    by kaszz (4211) on Wednesday April 29 2015, @09:08PM (#176835) Journal

    Perhaps it's not certain that matched demographics is the best solution? A different demographics may have a different viewpoint?