Re: 'Geek' image scares women away from tech industry ? The Register

[Yoav Nir <[e-mail]>]

On May 1, 2012, at 8:44 PM, Janet P Gunn wrote:

This is VERY narrow minded, and, to be honest, somewhat insulting.

You suggest that "time at work" and "family" are the only important things to women.

I'm suggesting no such thing. This authors of this survey say that women who left engineering did not do so to take care of their families, although their own data says that 25% of them did. They mention long hours and travel, but they offer no explanation why these would be different between men and women.

The one issue that would seem to be different between men and women is the attitude of co-workers and superiors towards women, and workplace climate issues, yet only one in three give that as the reason for leaving. So if women go from 20% when they graduate to 11% at the workplace, only about 3 of those percent are explained by workplace climate. I still don't see how those other things are different for women.

It should also be noted, that this study is not about the kind of engineering we do at the IETF. The women interviewed are mechanical, industrial, and chemical engineers. In fact in a couple of places computer programming is mentioned as one of those alternative careers women can take when they leave engineering:
"...I got to a certain point in my engineering career when I NO LONGER ADVANCED. I felt I needed additional education to move forward, but no topics interested me as much as computer programming, so I changed my career to that. It was a good change. I have been more successful in the computer field than I was in the engineering field.”

I don't know the figures for the IT industry, but I would guess that they're not as lopsided as those for those so-called real engineering.

Yoav