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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 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.