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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: 2, Offtopic) by mojo chan on Wednesday April 29 2015, @07:43AM

    by mojo chan (266) on Wednesday April 29 2015, @07:43AM (#176504)

    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?

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  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by Common Joe on Wednesday April 29 2015, @11:36AM

    by Common Joe (33) <{common.joe.0101} {at} {gmail.com}> on Wednesday April 29 2015, @11:36AM (#176550) Journal

    Unless maybe I fell victim to Poe's Law. Is your post a parody, or just stupid?

    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.

    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

    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

      by mojo chan (266) on Wednesday April 29 2015, @11:57AM (#176555)

      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.

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      const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 29 2015, @04:52PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 29 2015, @04:52PM (#176718)

        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

        by Hairyfeet (75) <{bassbeast1968} {at} {gmail.com}> on Wednesday April 29 2015, @05:56PM (#176755) Journal

        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

          by mojo chan (266) on Thursday April 30 2015, @12:07PM (#177043)

          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.

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          const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
          • (Score: 0, Troll) by Hairyfeet on Thursday April 30 2015, @04:58PM

            by Hairyfeet (75) <{bassbeast1968} {at} {gmail.com}> on Thursday April 30 2015, @04:58PM (#177161) Journal

            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.