How Women Mentors Make a Difference in Engineering
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
The same is true with medicine.
Is CS under the same ?
http://engineering.illinois.edu/academics/rankings.html
My EE profs at Illinois were capable to run studies and they understand the rigors of the domain which a psychologist would not understand.
The study is in a very emotional area and the findings get lots of publicity advancing careers but making it more likely the results are biased.
I have also worked in CS and studied it so I can say it is not engineering.
"It’s no wonder women in the U.S. hold just 13 to 22 percent of the doctorates in engineering, compared to an already-low 33 percent in the sciences as a whole."
The info cited is in an Excel spreadsheet with this footnote:
"Degrees in engineering include degrees in all areas of engineering--for example, chemical, civil, electrical, and mechanical engineering--as well as degrees in general engineering."
> My EE profs at Illinois were capable to run studies and they understand the rigors of the domain which a psychologist would not understand.
This is silly. Switch EE and Psychology and you can say the same thing. "EE faculty on average don't understand the human elements and how to control for them well enough to run the study."
> The study is in a very emotional area and the findings get lots of publicity advancing careers but making it more likely the results are biased.
All of academia.
Let's break out of the "STEM faculty can do everyone else's jobs better than them" mentality. It is hurting our field.
This is an unfortunate choice of words in the age of p-hacking and publication bias.
I believe that this system really helps push people to focus on helping others in the organization and really making them focus on how others can be successful even if their path wouldn't be the same as theirs. Another aspect of the current system is the advisees can request to have different advisors if they feel others are better suited to understanding their background and goals.
I like to naively think that this system benefits both the advisor and advisee and both can get a tremendous benefit from the relationship. Overall having a mentor and mentoring others is a great tool for personal and professional growth. On several occasions I have had to really think about how to discuss options with my advisees who have different cultural backgrounds from myself.
They all cite some sort of attitude where the boss had to gut it out in an unfair sexist world, and don't have much sympathy.
Anecdotal of course, but if true to any significant measure, would make mentors even more important.
I've met ex-poor people who attribute their success to simple 'trying harder' than other poor people. I've met socially successful people who attribute it to learning 'a few simple tricks' and 'getting out of the comfort zone'. I've met ex-depressed people proclaim that if only others would meditate and/or believe in themselves it would solve all their negative feelings. I've met gays who argued that if only these sexually-confused individuals would let themselves be themselves, and move somewhere more free if need be, their struggle would be over. I've met Christians who attribute their new-found wholesomeness to simple being more repentant than everyone else in church.
In each of these cases, the conclusion was that 'these people', whether poor, socially anxious, depressed, gay or in existential crises, are just not trying hard enough (lazy).
In fact, I'd go as far as claiming that, considering myself someone who has had a decent breadth and depth of experience with these groups, easily more than 50% of the ex-somethings I've met are more on the side of judging their ex-peers instead of supporting them.
I'm sure there's fascinating research in this area. I catch myself doing similar things and while I have some theories I can't fully explain why I do it. Protecting/polishing my ego? Keeping some clean narrative and sense of progression in my head?
This means, if you have a standard for defining someone is not compliant or aligned with the company, it should be the same for everyone.
Downvoting isn't helpful, it's a dirty little feature implemented to police certain opinions, usually via chilling effect. I upvoted GP.
(Not that I am in a position to use it personally at the moment, but I would be happy to post it on my blog on the theory that someday I might use it, and, in the mean time, others might find it of interest.)
It is now listed down below "Useful HN-related tools."
I think at that level (education) intervention is fine. However at the workplace, recruiting processes should have an equality of opportunity. People with the same qualifications, skills, etc. should have equal opportunity. And actually that's the law (EEO).
The problem with diversity starts very early in the process. By the time graduates apply for jobs there is already a significant lack of diversity. This is why I think it makes sense to focus the diversification effort earlier in the process, in education.
If women succeed more when they have someone to emulate this should be encouraged. If men succeed more on their own leave them alone. The last thing we need is the notion that to be fair everyone needs a mentor or no one can have one.
An integer not the same as a boolean even if they both have the value of one.
Let's say you have a team that is majority women, and you have 2 candidates for promotion: a man and a woman. The EEO law says sex should not be a criteria for promotion.
However if you promote the women based on sex (e.g: following your idea that women work better with women mentors) this could be considered an EEO violation (sex discrimination).
So if you want to abide by the law, you need a promotion criteria that's better than "women work better with women".
The sharp edge raises the question are women more valuable or less than men? Does this change the value.
On one hand men don't need mentors to succeed that provides more value. On the other hand women who can act as mentors to other women are more valuable than men.
In the end it doesn't matter to the business because both cases provide value in different ways. But it could make a big difference to the individual. Treat everyone differently because everyone has different needs and they learn in different ways.
And yes, I know I'm perma-banned for not being feminist enough for you. I just wanted to point out your systematic pushing of a political agenda to those who dare browse with show dead.
I still believe that silent down votes do not contribute to intelligent discussions either. If someone can take a minute to read an article, its comments, and down vote, they should also be able to politely explain to the commenter in question how and why that comment may be detracting from the discussion. That way the commenter may defend his position or adapt his behavior to better contribute within the community.
Current job metrics have a tendency to assume that a privileged man with a stay-at-home wife is doing the job. The assumption is that she will take care of things like grocery shopping, cooking, cleaning, etc and he will only take time off in a dire emergency, not for any kind of routine maintenance of his health or life.
Women fall behind in part because we typically lack our own wife taking care of the women's work for us. But job standards don't change to accommodate the fact that the work force is no longer dominated by married men with full time wives taking care of the home fires. This causes everyone to suffer, not just women with jobs, but it tends to disproportionately hurt women. There is enormous precedent and social pressure such that women tend to still do the lion's share of the housework, etc, even if they also work full time.
So "treat everyone the same" can work, but only if we start reassessing job expectations that are rooted in an assumption that "Well, you have a wife at home taking care of certain things, so you don't need time and energy for those things."
When I had a corporate job, I successfully got my teen/young adult sons to take over the women's work so I could give more to my job. I felt it benefited all of us more than them getting crappy entry level jobs that didn't serve their goals in any way. They agreed with my conclusion.
Also, your comment seems awfully close to an ad hominem. It is dismissive of me personally and does not really bring substantial argument to bear.
However, not all men take the a passive role when it comes to parenthood and contributing in house tasks. In my family, we split effort and expenses evenly, but unfortunately this is not the case for everyone.
I think employers and society at a large should be supportive of women when it comes to motherhood, but other than that, it becomes very culture specific.
For example, bro culture. Not all females can navigate through this easily. Few girls choose the engineering field, and fewer still actually become engineers. This suggests that something not right is going on.
When the issue of gender equality pops up, often the assumption is that women are asking to be treated differently - which translates to special treatment. This is far from the case (and too many women do not stand up for themselves for fear of being seen this way.) Instead, the default culture needs to be more open and considerate about diversity. That obviously means it's not going to happen overnight - the minority group needs to be normalised first, and a big part of this is to have a large presence - aha, catch 22!
However, an empowered minority group can accelerate this and even encourage more to join in, thereby resulting a stronger presence and support network - hopefully leading to the normalisation of women in engineering, and greater equality.
Women mentorships can very well be the key to such empowerment.