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