Talk:Women in engineering in the United States

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Several issues were not discussed as why women may eschew engineering as a career choice.
*Education requirements: A typical engineering degree on average may take up to five years to complete (the lights rarely go off in the computer labs) and if there ever is a lapse along the way (childbirth, marriage, unemployment, etc.) recovery maybe difficult, especially in a fast changing field. Engineering schools and employers look at any interruptions or gaps in education as a negative.
*Work Environment: Engineering may require 80+ hours weeks (just like college) and telling the employer that you have to take a month or more off for children or leaving work to no less feed a child (or even having a child) will interfere with their dead lines. If there is a project and an engineering person leaves for several months, they would most likely be unusable on this same project resulting in a reassignment to another project. This flexibility requires larger companies with multiple projects and many of those employers are going overseas to do their engineering or cutting back.
*Unemployment, lower pay, and re-education: As engineering becomes more short term "contract" work, women may find themselves in a glutted engineering market with greater unemployment, lower paychecks than expected, or requiring more re-education because of gaps in employment caused by family obligations and unemployment. 
All in all, women (and men) who are smart enough to be an engineer are smart enough to see that engineering may not be a good career choice for anyone who wants a life that involves a family, or even a life. The high tech community is not family friendly and very unforgiving of those who have a family or are not driven to "own their job". This is an industry wide problem that is devoid of childcare facilities and increasingly less health care the further one gets away from the top companies. As more competition from overseas comes into play, wages and benefits will decrease, thus making an engineering career choice for women even more unattractive. Other, non-engineering professions are more forgiving of people taking sabbaticals and smart women are more likely to seek those choices. What needs to be done to attract more women into engineering is to improve equal pay, flexible work hours, childcare, career re-entry, re-education, maternal leave, and health benefits in all high tech companies. This would reassure women that engineering is a valid career choice and not just a horse race.Septagram (talk) 04:08, 27 September 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Alternative Reasons for Lack of Women in Engineering 

message: I looked at being an arbitrator for this discussion, but I have too much involvement to seriously consider it.  As such, I'll just provide by 2 cents.
I think the question of if biological differences impact WIE is a controversial issue and should simply be addressed as such.  Link to the papers as needed and acknowledge there is a debate and move along.  
Personally, as an educator in engineering and having a wife who is an outstanding engineer (4.0 student from major school etc.), I have no doubts that males and females tend to have different skill groups.  But what makes a good engineer isn't any one ability any more than one gene makes for a good engineer.  Rather it is the gestalt that is the person.  Passion, interest, and solid logical thinking will get you pretty far even if you lack many of the skills traditionally associated with engineers.  Heck, even solid math skills can be negotiable in certain disciplines of engineering.  Hobit (talk) 02:03, 8 May 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Some comments on the dispute. 

message: All content should meet the guidelines listed in WP:V as well as WP:OR and the citations should be formatted in accordance with WP:CITE. What I'm seeing is a lack of inline source reference, and only two sources for an article big enough to most likely need more.Kyleshome (talk) 17:36, 20 March 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: So I've made some majorly needed revisions concerning my citations on this page. As you can see, everything is now cited properly. Thus, I will remove any citation-related warnings that were previously on my page. Additionally, I've revised all the wording in my page so that it no longer sounds as inherently biased. Now I actually have to go back and put in whole chunks of information that would express a non-feminist POV. J hernan26 (talk) 06:12, 29 March 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Citations and source referencing  

message: This is to anybody in Professor Hoang's class who will potentially contribute to my page for next Monday's assignment. Here's a list of things that need to be done:
:#Add the counter argument to the "biologically unfit" argument, as stated above. You will find this in the "explanations" section, and I feel a couple of sentences or so will suffice.
:#Follow "option two" from the post above regarding the addition of information regarding foreign female engineers. Token mentions throughout the page will suffice-- just a few sentences in each of my sections should do.
:#Add a relevant picture or two (or three?) to my page. Everybody love's pictures, right?
:#Add my project to the wikiProject Discrimination. This is something that I've been getting around to doing, but just never quite did.
I planned on doing all this myself over the next couple of weeks before the final deadline, but these should make for decent tasks for any of you guys. And as always, please use proper citations and their corresponding references at the bottom of the page. And please mention in this talk box what exactly it was that you did.
J hernan26 (talk) 03:01, 4 April 2012 (UTC)
thread_title: To do's for potential editors

message: Juan, I think that the topic of this article is very interesting an incredibly important. A few thoughts/suggestions:
1) I think that, given the time constraints for this assignment, it would be better to somehow indicate that this article is focused on women engineers in the United States. While I think that, eventually, it would be incredibly beneficial to include the experiences of women engineers in other countries, I don't think that a few token mentions are really going to do the job. I fear that they may actually weaken the article if people believe these few mentions to be sufficient and then fail to expand upon them. I would either re-title the entire article or, as the above comments suggest, create a "United States" heading to indicate that the bulk of the information is U.S.-focused but also to indicate the need to go into more depth about the experiences of women engineers in other countries.
2) For the section "Explanations for low participation rates," where you talk about the lack of role models/mentors for women in engineering, you may want to look up studies on the black-sheep effect and the queen bee effect. I know there are psychology studies out there that have found that sometimes successful women in male-dominated fields are MORE likely to discriminate against other women who are trying to enter these fields.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1348/0144666042037999/abstract (this study was actually done in Italy, if you're going for a more international perspective)
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1348/014466610X525280/full?sms_ss=twitter&at_xt=4d91a653ee37ec04,0
3) In either the "Explanations for low participation rates" or the "Socialization and societal outcomes" sections, it might be beneficial to include a mention of stereotype threat. There are many studies showing that women and girls often experience stereotype threat when faced with tasks that are said to be diagnostic of math or science ability. This stereotype threat can lead women and girls to de-identify with STEM fields and may explain women's lower rates of participation in these areas.
http://cdp.sagepub.com/content/early/2010/09/29/0963721410383241.abstract
4) You may also want to look up works by Virginia Valian who discusses how small injustices add up, explaining the "leaky pipeline" in STEM fields.http://bc.barnard.columbia.edu/~schapman/thesis/women/Valian.pdf
5) A possible source for providing a counter argument to the "biologically-unfit" explanation: http://cdp.sagepub.com/content/early/2010/09/29/0963721410383241.abstract
6) Another source for the section on role models: http://spp.sagepub.com/content/2/6/656.abstract
Overall, great job!  This is an ambitious article to write, but one that is very necessary. Good luck with the revisions!  Naomi FK (talk) 01:03, 10 April 2012 (UTC)
thread_title: Potential Revisions

message: Thanks for the suggestions, Naomi. I will be sure to take most, if not all, of these tips into consideration. At this point, I think I will just rename the article "Women in Engineering in the United States" I was really hoping to expand upon that one area, but maybe I'll do so in the future when I'm no longer facing deadline pressures. I'm definitely familiar with the "black sheep effect" but not with the "queen bee". Nevertheless, it sounds interesting and I'll see if I could include a bit in my explanations area. Hopefully the "leaky pipeline" can be used in my upcoming section on workplace outcomes. I feel that when women do spend potentially decades working for an employer, such discrimination effects can certainly add up. And I'll be sure to take advantage of the " biologically unfit" counter-argument source you gave me. As I just needed perhaps a couple of sentences, this should be sufficient.
Thanks again,
J hernan26 (talk) 04:24, 10 April 2012 (UTC)
thread_title: Thanks

message: Juan, I felt that your article was very eye opening. As a science major here at Rice I have witnessed the discrepancies in enrollment of males and females in the engineering, mathematics and hard science tract. However, I was not as aware of the processes of socialization which deter women from such a career path. The portion of your article which discussed how women shied away from engineering because they believed that they were not good enough at math was very interesting. I think that you could reference specific programs or strategies that were successful at promoting women’s involvement in engineering and boosting their self-esteem. Do such agencies or programs exist? You could discuss a few and describe how their program made a difference. Your material kept my interest and it was presented very well. B4change1 (talk) 01:57, 11 April 2012 (UTC)
thread_title: Suggested Edits

message: Thanks for the suggestion and compliments. And yes, socialization is everything when it comes to the lack of women in Science, Mathematics, and Engineering. Regarding the disproportionate number of women in Humanities courses, saying that they chose to be in such courses doesn't really say a whole lot in light of these facts. In fact, saying that people have free choices period means almost nothing unless the factors which influenced those choices are investigated first. There are several programs that aim to promote women's involvement in the S/E courses that I have listed in my "Organizations" tab. Maybe I could expand on each one for a couple of sentence , but I don't want to get too in depth there since that section was just supposed to read more like a list rather than prose. Nevertheless, all suggestions are welcome and I'll try to implement as many as I can between now and Friday. Thanks.
J hernan26 (talk) 02:15, 11 April 2012 (UTC)
thread_title: Response

message: Wrong info: "The percentage increase in the computer science industry displayed was larger, increasing from approximately 10% in 1989 to 21% in 2008."
There has been a SIGNIFICANT decline in the percentage of women obtaining computer science bachelor's degrees. The percentage of women in Computer Science peaked around ~37% in 1984 and has been declining ever since.https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-women-stopped-coding
https://research.swe.org/2016/08/degree-attainment/
K00kykelly (talk) 18:36, 28 May 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Statistics and relevant data - Wrong Info on computer science and not sourced 

message: Retention of Women in Engineering is a major issue when looking at the low rates of women in engineering and it's got half a sentence in the current article. Women leave engineering at twice the rate of men.https://research.swe.org/2016/08/retention/ https://www.asee.org/public/conferences/56/papers/13769/download 
It’s estimated that 40 percent of women who study engineering either leave the field or never enter it at all, and women quit jobs in tech at twice the rate that men do. ... But what if the pipeline isn’t the problem? What if, after arriving, it’s just too unbearable for women to stay in the water? http://theeverygirl.com/why-women-are-leaving-stem-and-how-we-can-change-it/
Women’s Reasons for Leaving the Engineering Fieldhttps://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5491652/
In order to curb the high rates of women leaving the field, engineering programs need to address gendered tasking and expectations among teams, in class and at internship work sites. The culture has to learn to take women seriously.https://hbr.org/2016/08/why-do-so-many-women-who-study-engineering-leave-the-field
Overall, about 20 percent of undergraduate engineering degrees are awarded to women, but only 13 percent of the engineering workforce is female. Numerous explanations have been offered for this discrepancy, including a lack of mentorship for women in the field; a variety of factors that produce less confidence for female engineers; and the demands for women of maintaining a balance between work and family life.http://news.mit.edu/2016/why-do-women-leave-engineering-0615
K00kykelly (talk) 18:59, 28 May 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Proposed new section:  Retaining Women Engineers 

message: Hello, I was thinking on adding some information to this page regarding other reasons why there is a lack of participation among women in this field.  I recently worked on a research paper about the underrepresentation of women in the engineering field and reasons behind it and I found a lot of the information that I had found to be useful.  Some of these reasons included the lack of professional role confidence among women and more specifics about gender stereotypes that could be added to what is already written.   I was thinking on just continuing the information under the heading "Explanations for low participation rates." I wanted to get your thoughts on if this information would be beneficial to add to this article or if it would even be a good idea to add in the first place.Mlewi13 (talk) 19:17, 3 December 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  New Reasons for Lack of Participation 

message: Article omits in entirety that in the United States, most universities did not admit women in engineering until the 1970s. Article claims women did not choose to enter the field and that "no formal discrimination occurred" which is factually incorrect - women were legally disallowed from applying and being admitted to all US engineering schools for the entire history of the United States until, at the earliest, the 1950s at a couple institutions and in the 1970s in most institutions. This entire article needs attention. 46.248.134.29 (talk) 08:22, 30 November 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Intentionally misleading description of barriers to entry