Female voices are not being heard in engineering

Female voices are not being heard in engineering


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There have been many initiatives to try and attract females to STEM subjects. Opening up technical opportunities to 50% of the workforce is great for society, as it keeps well paying jobs at home. Having an educated workforce encourages companies to locate in the area, bringing more skilled jobs. Many new companies are also founded by skilled people in the workforce innovating on new ways to accomplish tasks. Now females have more or less an equal path to get involved in STEM subjects, shouldn’t we treat them like they belong there?

I thought that would be a no brainer, especially for those females who had already navigated the male heavy environment, gained a decent technical job and worked their way up the ranks. In an ideal world, they be welcomed and treated at least as well as males in the same company, especially given their unique experience of getting to that position. That includes listening to their advice. However, I came across a thread on Reddit where some female engineers were telling of their actual experiences in the workplace. The thread started when a female poster compared Tesla’s autonomous testing strategy with other manufacturers. The poster was actually a systems engineer for autonomous driving systems, so had an inside view of the industry. Another poster’s reply to her set off a longer conversation about female experiences in STEM jobs.

One poster chipped in with her own experience, “I work in science, and there are times I predict an issue a year or more in advance, with a plan to avoid the problem and it is ignored. Then we faceplant into the thing that could've been avoided and for some reason their refusal to be proactive is somehow my fault for not insisting harder!” She then detailed how she got around that problem, “Our male engineering lead repeats my feedback to the director at work and then magically, despite literally nothing of technical merit changing, it suddenly makes sense to investigate”. Even worse, she went on to detail why she still works in a company with such a culture, “this employer is way better on the sexism front than most I've worked for. My current boss doesn't expect me as a manager to get him his coffee or waste my time baking food for coffee breaks on my own dime, which happened at previous employers”.

One of the most damning comments came from the husband of female scientist telling of her experience, “My wife is a professor, and had to make a fake email account using my name to get companies to take her seriously. She'd email them laying out the shape of telescopes she wanted them to build, and if she emailed as herself, they'd come back asking, are you sure that's what you want? How about this other shape that's easier to make? As soon as she pretended to be male, their attitude changed to, we'd be honoured to work with you professor, and we'll figure out how to make your design. The only difference was the name on the email.”

These were only a couple of examples in a pretty large discussion. Of course, there are great women engineers and bad women engineers, just the same as males. I’m sure that any younger female reading a thread like that would think twice about looking at a career in STEM when they are treated in such a way. I’m sure all workplaces are not as discriminatory, but a change is really needed in the ones that are.

However, there is hope for the future, one woman in the discussion said she worked in IT over decades, where females have been established longer, and she had found over that time that things had changed and she now gets treated exactly the same as her co-workers. Let’s hope we don’t have to wait that long in engineering.

 


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