How To Help Female Engineers By Making Them Unemployable
Maani Truu writes at SBS News that the University of Technology Sydney is lowering the bar for women going into engineering:
Women applying to study engineering and information technology at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) next year will receive 10 more entry points than their male counterparts, in what the university believes is a first of its kind bid to remedy the under-enrollment of women in these fields.According to Engineers Australia, women represent approximately 18.9 per cent of engineering graduates, which appears to translate into an under-representation in the workforce, with women making up just 13 per cent of the industry.
"In order to step-change gender diversity in these professions, the gender mix at undergraduate entry-level needs to change," director of UTS Women in Engineering and IT Arti Agarwal said.
Civil engineer and Victorian general manager of Engineers Australia Alesha Printz, 40, told SBS News she believed the move would send a strong message to young women that they were welcome in the field.
"We desperately need to get the message out to our young female students that there is a good role for them in the profession, that it's appealing to women and not just about jobs for the boys," she said.
Reflecting on her time at university, Ms Printz said the hardest part of being a woman studying engineering was the lack of female role models.
Seriously? Your idea of a role model is, first and foremost, somebody with a vagina?
I have never, ever needed "female role models" to do what I wanted to do. I just jumped in. I look at people who are great at what they do and try to emulate what I see as smart and useful. (It's how I got more and more accomplished as a mediator.)
The reality is, if these women knew a little bit about the science on sex differences, they'd understand that women tend not to be innate "systems" thinkers like men. Women tend to prefer to work with people; men tend to prefer to work with things. There are, of course, individual differences. But here's a bit from my column:
Generally speaking, putting it in collegiate terms, the female mind majors in psychology; the male mind majors in physics -- though individual male and female minds vary, of course. Research by psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen finds that women tend to be the "empathizers" of the species, driven (from childhood on) to identify others' "emotions and thoughts, and to respond to these with an appropriate emotion." Men, on the other hand, tend to be "systematizers" -- driven to understand the inner workings of the blender.
In other words, there's a good chance there aren't more female engineers because women don't enjoy the thinking that goes into it as much as men do.
Here's a video of a woman who is an engineer -- and who's disgusted by the bar-lowering that this university is planning, rightly calling it "insulting."
She also rightly points out that this lowering the bar for women is unfair to men losing the university places to women with lesser qualifications.
She points out that male students will notice that women are struggling more with the course material -- the women allowed in because the bar was lowered.
She feels this is a net negative for women in the engineering sector in general, and I have to agree.
How, she asks, can employers be expected to see a woman's engineering degree the same as a man's if the employer knows the women got a break getting into the program?
She uses the term "positive discrimination" to describe the leg-up practices, and I really prefer that to "affirmative action" to describe it because the word "discrimination" is plain in it. And that's exactly what it is. Discrimination against qualified people that will ultimately harm women who are qualified.
As she puts it, the only way to ensure that a woman's qualifications mean as much as a man's is to have equal hurdles for women.
I'm completely with her.
Relax! We can presume the bar will be correspondingly lowered for men competing in the marketplace of education as well!
Crid at September 1, 2019 10:19 PM
So what does the research show? Does having same-sex role models tend to make people perform better? Has anyone tested it?
NicoleK at September 2, 2019 1:28 AM
Fun with Google as a procrastinate
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0306460394900531
NicoleK at September 2, 2019 1:29 AM
So UTS admits that these female applicants are just girls; can't expect them to be as as qualified or capable as male applicants. Way to go to foster "female empowerment." (Female empowerment=Girls need special treatment)
Jay at September 2, 2019 6:10 AM
Why can't they use the female engineers they already have as same-sex role models? Why do they have to lower the bar to create more? Will those lowered-bar female engineers really be role models to all those aspiring women engineers out there? Or would the woman who had to fight and prove herself every step of the way be a better role model?
If they can rationalize lowering the bar for admission, how long before they rationalize lowering the bar for graduation?
Some things should be difficult.
Conan the Grammarian at September 2, 2019 7:03 AM
Wait till Australia's bridges and buildings start collapsing.
Or will they allow these women flunk out when they get into the challenging portions of their education?
I R A Darth Aggie at September 2, 2019 8:18 AM
As Mark Perry points out, women already dominate many fields within STEM (and the field overall), such as 80% of veterinary, dominant in Pharmacy, nursing, biology, psych, med school. But they redraw the lines around STEM to not count those. If there is a single place in the world where men do better, it must be destroyed. Places where women do better...(shhhhh)
cc at September 2, 2019 8:46 AM
This won't have any effect on the graduation rate. At OU in the college of Electrical Engineering the sex ratio for the first year is ~50/50. The second year tilts slightly male, around 45/55 most of the time. It is the third year you see steep declines in the number of female students and by graduation you are looking at ~5/95. Changing admission rates won't have any effect. Especially when you are lowering qualifications to get started. Instead of helping they are wasting the money of less qualified female students.
Ben at September 2, 2019 8:47 AM
The one change I can think of that would actually lead to women becoming more successful as engineers would be more tutoring and/or mentoring by experienced people (mostly men) at STEM schools. But as long as the #MeToo epidemic of false accusations is going on, any man in his right mind will insist on following the Mike Pence rule.
jdgalt at September 2, 2019 9:10 AM
The goal is not to help - but to develop and perpetuate tensions and suspicions. This is basic Marxist divide-and-conquer.
We have a similar situation in Israel where lefties in charge of med schools and accreditation offices are "certifying" Arab nurses and doctors who have not passed on merit. Guess what this does to trust in Arab medical staff?
VERY VERY important to realize that this isn't an unanticipated glitch or the result of starry-eyed idealism. The Left is NOT interested in solving any problems. They are inventing racism and sexism where they do not really exist because it is their political oxygen.
Ben David at September 2, 2019 9:38 AM
When the whole foundation of your political philosophy is that the existing system, whatever that system is, is corrupt, taking it down becomes your main goal and any means necessary are to be used.
Solving problems by using that existing system only validates that system and invalidates your political philosophy. Compromising with anyone within that system also validates it, so is to be avoided.
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Tutoring girls in math and science while they're in elementary and middle school, STEM or not, is the way to go. You don't create qualified college STEM applicants in a post-secondary school environment, you do it in a primary school environment.
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If you're going from a 50/50 ratio to a 5/95 ratio, you're losing over half your student body. That's gotta have an effect on the number of engineers available in the work force.
How many men who were rejected from engineering school in order to fit a woman into the seat went to another engineering school? How many instead went into another major?
Even the old "look at the student on your right and at the one on your left" orientation shibboleth presupposed only a 33% reduction in class size.
Conan the Grammarian at September 2, 2019 10:13 AM
My wife and I (and one of our sons) are engineers. It's definitely not something that people can just be shoveled into, as those with the ability and the interest to succeed in engineering are a small minority at best. In fact, my wife, while quite successful as an engineer, would really rather be doing something else. She was pushed into the field by her mother back in the old country. Fortunately, her job involves a lot of working with people (contractors, project managers, etc.) as she freely admits she doesn't care for the hard technical side of engineering.
The major effect that this frankly stupid lowering of the bar will accomplish is that people will be skeptical of any engineer who isn't a white male - you can be at least reasonably sure the pale dudes didn't get any breaks and had to prove themselves. Admittedly I'm a bad, bad person, but already anytime I deal with a minority engineer, doctor, etc., I wonder if they got the job because they're good or because of affirmative action. If I was a female engineer who got into the school under the same standards and passed everything same as all the guys, I would be so pissed at them for cheapening my work and my degree...
Chuck at September 2, 2019 11:39 AM
Aside from everything else, has anyone seen any data that shows the number of female applicants that were denied entry because they were 10 or fewer entry points shy? This sounds like a nice way to stigmatize female engineering graduates while, at the same time, doing virtually (or perhaps literally) nothing to increase female participation in the field.
mike at September 2, 2019 12:02 PM
> She was pushed into the
> field by her mother back
> in the old country.
Western Civ owes its existence to such domineering parents:
When the united States finally did get a serious atomic project started, it was helped through some skillful manipulation by impatient visitors from Britain. Mark Oliphant was another one of Rutherford's bright young men, and in the summer of 1941 he led a two-front assault. First he arrived in Washington, dangling the gift of the cavity magnetron--a key device for shrinking room-sized radar sets to a volume that could be crammed into an airplane, and also for greatly increasing accuracy. (This was when Oliphant discovered that Lyman J. Briggs, leader of the West's atomic research project, had locked the top-secret British results inside his safe.) Next, Oliphant traveled to Berkeley, where the physicist Ernest Lawrence worked.Lawrence was not especially bright as physicists go, but he loved machines, great big powerful machines, and his very simplicity--his directness of focus-- allowed him to get them built. For example Samuel Allison (working at the University of Chicago then) remembers that Briggs had "a tiny cube of uranium which he liked to keep in his desk and show to insiders... Briggs used to say 'I want a whole pound of this,' . . . Lawrence would have said he wanted forty tons and got it."
By the summer of 1941 Briggs was out, and group of more effective leaders including Lawrence was in, and by December--when Pearl Harbor brought the United States into the war--the project really took off. It came to be called the Manhattan Project, as part of the cover story that it was simply part of the Manhattan Engineering District.
The refugees Briggs had scorned were indispensable. Eugene Wigner, for example, was a remarkably quiet, unassuming young Hungarian, who came from an equally quiet and unassuming family. When World War I had broken out, Eugene's father had stayed away from political discussions, pointing out, quite sensibly, the he was pretty sure the emperor was not going to be swayed by the views of the Wigner family. But this caution meant that when Eugene, a superb student, was facing university choices, the father had him take a practical engineering degree, as the odds on a career in theoretical physics succeeding were very slight.
Wigner did succeed at physics, and after he was forced out of Europe in the 1930s, he ended up centrally involved in the American duplicate of Heisenberg's calculations, detailing how a reaction could begin. But his engineering training meant that he handled the subsequent steps far better than Heisenberg. What shape, for example, should the uranium be that would go inside a reactor? The most efficient possible design would be a sphere. That way the maximum number of neutrons would be deep in the center. Next best--if a sphere was too hard to cut accurately-- would be an oval shape. After that comes a cylinder, then a cube, and last, worst of all, would be to try building it with uranium stretched out in flat sheets.
For his Leipzig device, Heisenberg had chosen the flat sheets. The reason was simply that flat surfaces almost always have the easiest properties to compute, if you're advancing by pure theory. But engineers with enough practical experience are never restricted to pure theory. There are many informal tricks of the trade for how ovals and other shapes work. Wigner knew them, as did many other similarly cautious refugees, who'd also been advised by their families to take engineering degrees. Heisenberg did not. That was of central importance. Professors in general tend to be hierarchical, and pre-World War II German professors were at the of peak such confidence. As the war went on, a number of junior researchers in Germany found that Heisenberg had been mistaken in one engineering assumption or another. But Heisenberg almost always refused to listen; would angrily try to keep them from even daring to mention it.
Even so, nobody could be confident the United States was going to to win the race to make the bomb. America was just coming out of the Great Depression; much of its industrial base was still rusted and abandoned. When Heisenberg began his research for army ordnance, the Wehrmacht was the world's most powerful fighting force. It had entire army groups supplied with equipment that surpassed that of any other nation. The United States had an army that, if you included a lot of generation-old World War I artifacts, could just about supply two divisions, thus placing it below the tenth rank in the world, at about the level of Belgium.
Germany also had the world's best engineers, and a strong university system--despite having expelled so many Jews--and above all, they had that head start; two precious years when Heisenberg and his colleagues had been working full out, while Briggs had mostly been musing at his desk. These were the quirks of fate that would influence who ended up using the equation first, E=mc2 was far from the pure reaches of Einstein's inked symbols now. The Allied effort would have to go faster.
The German effort would have to be sabotaged.
Crid at September 2, 2019 12:27 PM
My father and sister were engineers. Sister still is. When she told him she wanted to do something else, that she was tired of engineering, he remarked that he'd never yet met an engineer who, at some point, wasn't tired of engineering. It's not a profession for the faint of heart.
Conan the Grammarian at September 2, 2019 1:54 PM
Thanks for the book recommendation, Crid.
By the end of the war, it still was. The German army had better-equipment and better-training in its top line units than any other. It was still one of the world's premier professional fighting forces. It was beaten up, to be sure, but by superior numbers, not superior soldiery.
Its bottom line units were, like the US Army at the beginning of the war, equipped with World War I cast-offs. Those units were never expected to see any combat, but high casualties in the Eastern Front forced the Germans to activate ill-equipped and under-trained reserve units.
A German general interviewed for a book on the Red Ball Express commented that the American soldier was not superior to the German solders, quite the opposite. Same for equipment. The US Army relied on the flammable Sherman medium tank, whereas the Germans had a world-beating heavy tank, the Tiger, just not enough of them.
The general further commented that the genius of the US Army was logistics; the US Army could get what it need, to where it needed it, when it needed it. It didn't run out of bullets, gasoline, medical supplies, or food.
While we did actually run out of things, our supply lines were truck-based and moved quickly, so we weren't out for long. The US Army was entirely mechanized while the vaunted Wermacht was actually highly dependent upon horses and wagons for logistics. Driving an automobile, the general went on, was a universal skill in the US Army and a specialized skill in the German.
Now, that German general is a bit biased, but he has a point. Patton's dictum that "a good plan, violently executed now, is better than a perfect plan next week" is at the heart of the general's observation. The Americans could execute now, the Germans had to wait - because, in a pinch, we could load up some trucks and drive supplies to the front; they couldn't.
I guess we can thank Henry Ford and the Model T for our World War II dominance. Mechanizing the country is what Adolf Hitler had in mind when he asked Ferdinand Porsche to design and build a "people's car" (a "volks wagen" in German).
The US Army still leads the world in combat logistics. But, this time, we have the better equipment, too.
It was the secret of overwhelming the German army, too.
Conan the Grammarian at September 2, 2019 2:26 PM
"How many men who were rejected from engineering school in order to fit a woman into the seat went to another engineering school?"
My honest opinion, none. OU liked to pack them in and then filter. You lost a lot of both genders. It is just you lost a much higher percentage of the women after you started actual EE classes.
In a similar vein women at OU in electrical engineering got roughly a letter grade bump up from a lot of professors. Most profs were desperate to keep any and all women in their classes because there were credible threats against them due to the gender imbalance. Does that cause me to feel the women who graduated were less qualified? Not at all. Lower GPAs weren't what caused women to drop out of the field. They just didn't like the work. So getting somewhat unfair grades didn't have much effect one way or the other. As with a lot of degrees once you get your first job no one really cares what your GPA was. Any imbalance is swiftly corrected.
So as I said above, I've seen this trick tried and it doesn't matter. Lack of qualifications, lack or role models, these aren't the problem. Dickering with them doesn't change the outcome. What it does do is waste people's time who would be better served picking a different degree to start with.
Ben at September 2, 2019 6:37 PM
> the secret of overwhelming
> the German army, too.
Man, I cannot remember the podcast I listened to about three months ago that used this as a metaphor. But some guy made that precise point about our tanks. They were shitty and unreliable, but we had a bunch of them and all the gasoline their drivers could ask for, so the little fuckers could go as far as they needed to as many times as necessary to get a clear shot at the German tanks' hindquarters.
Lotta desks in the Pentagon. Despite my reflexive loathing, it ain't all featherbedding.
Crid at September 2, 2019 8:07 PM
I know two women who started out as programmers and switched to sales (of complicated technical products and services) and sales management. Is that a *bad* thing?...A company needs people to sell its products as much as it needs people to create them, and the same is true of the overall economy.
As a general matter, there are a lot of job type which require *both* empathizer and systematizer skills. A manager of a large engineering group, for example, had better have both. Ditto for many flavors of venture capitalist.
David Foster at September 3, 2019 6:28 AM
"Is that a *bad* thing?"
It's only a bad thing if one believes that women must constitute at least half of all of the employees in every single discipline. (Of course, nobody worries about the disciplines where women constitute a lot more than half.)
Cousin Dave at September 3, 2019 7:15 AM
Many men are quite able to work for hours and hours on solitary tasks with intense focus--absolutely needed in engineering or software. We get in the zone and it is a zen zone. No random thoughts intrude. Guys will think about code or AI or circuits while cutting the grass or in the shower. This is NOT how women operate. I think it originates in the human history of a million years of spending hours chipping stone tools or tracking game. Absolute focus was required for every man --life or death depended on it.
cc at September 3, 2019 9:00 AM
Ah, here's the podcast (speech) with the Panzer allusion.
Wait for the slip of the tongue.
Crid at September 3, 2019 10:11 AM
"Is that a *bad* thing?"
For electrical engineers it is a normal thing. Sales guys who don't really understand the products are always selling things that can't exist. So a lot of electrical services and products only use people with an engineering degree for sales.
Ben at September 3, 2019 10:12 AM
Very interesting podcast. Thanks.
Which one? There was no Bradley tank in World War II. there is a Bradley Armored Fighting Vehicle today. It's a troop carrier and was named after World War II general, Omar Bradley.
Conan the Grammarian at September 3, 2019 11:41 AM
Bah-dum-PUM! I love that.
I love Galloway too, but if he ever comes to speak in your town, you should interrupt the speech when he gets to that part, because it would be fun to watch him dance.
(I'm assuming the soon-to-be Five Star wasn't commanding the American tank units.)
Crid at September 3, 2019 12:09 PM
Early in the war he had direct command of tank and infantry units in combat. Later, his job was less tactical and more strategic.
Bradley started out as Patton's subordinate when Georgie was in temporary command of II Corps in North Africa. He learned quickly and succeeded Patton to command II Corps under Patton in the Sicily invasion.
While Patton was in the dog house for slapping two soldiers and put in command of a fake army group in order to fool the Germans about Normandy, Bradley rose in the ranks.
Bradley was assigned command of the First US Army in the Normandy invasion and later promoted to commander of the Twelfth US Army Group, a formation that included First Army, now under Courtney Hodges, and Third Army under George Patton. Later, the Ninth US Army and the Fifteenth US Army were added to the formation. With those armies, the Twelfth Army Group was the largest US Army formation ever created.
He lost the First Army and elements of the Ninth to Montgomery during the Battle of the Bulge, getting most of them back after the German advance had been repulsed (mostly by units under Patton and Hodges).
Bradley was blindsided by the German Ardennes offensive. Like many military commanders of his generation, Bradley struggled to integrate newly developed non-combat capabilities - like better Intelligence gathering. In prior wars, G-2 officers depended almost entirely on captured plans and rumors. They mostly guessed at what the enemy would do.
With better information gathering tools, newer intelligence officers had greater insight to offer. Chester Nimitz, listening to his code breakers, was able to anticipate the Japanese attack on Midway and, overriding the objections of his staff, pre-positioned his forces and inflicted a decisive defeat on the enemy less than a year after the US Pacific fleet was crippled at Pearl Harbor.
Patton, on the advice of his G-2 officer (Oscar Koch - whom Patton considered the best G-2 officer in the US Army), was able to anticipate the German attack on the Ardennes bulge and was able to respond in what many historians consider his finest hour.
Bradley's training in the US Army was mostly infantry tactics. He commanded the Fort Benning Infantry School for a time before the war. He never directly commanded a tank unit, his only combat unit-level command being the 82nd Infantry Division - before it became the 82nd Airborne.
Conan the Grammarian at September 3, 2019 12:55 PM
Mostly I was wondering, without checking the clip again, whether Galloway might have been saying "Bradley's tanks" in some informal phrasing.
Did Bradley ever say anything interesting about Patton? He outlived him (and a lot of others), IIRC.
And did the fifth star go to his head? An aunt, a WAC (in more ways than one, it would prove), once said he was given it to reclaim a land-grab of leadership seniority by the Brits or someone.
Spa-Francorchamps hosted the F1 race over the weekend. (There was—ahem—a bad outcome in a support race.) From both the ground shots and aerial views, the place looks like an arboreal paradise. Then the (Brit) announcers say something about the dappled beauty of the Ardenne, and a little voice from 5th grade sort of coughs in my head.
Crid at September 3, 2019 2:14 PM
Bradley and Patton had a love-hate relationship. Patton died before his memoirs could be assembled, edited, and published. So, his wartime diaries were published instead. In them, he had written some less-than-complimentary stuff in anger about Bradley. As a result, Bradley had nothing nice to say about Patton in his own memoirs.
The US Army later named an armored infantry troop carrier after Bradley and a series of tanks after Patton - illustrating each man's legacy and impact on their branches of the Army.
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The British had a fifth star rank, Field Marshall, and Montgomery was awarded that fifth star in September 1944. A flurry of British officers had been elevated to Field Marshall in 1944, leaving their American counterparts outranked.
The Germans had promoted several generals to Generalfeldmarschall in 1942 and 1943, so the British had to catch up.
It was an especially touchy situation for Eisenhower who was Monty's superior in the Allied hierarchy, but was now outranked by him. The US military did not have a five-star rank at that time, so Congress created one in 1944. With that, George Marshall, Dwight Eisenhower, Omar Bradley, Douglas MacArthur, and Henry Arnold were awarded a fifth star. Congress also elevated the US Navy's senior officers to five-star rank so they would not be outranked by their Royal Navy counterparts. The US Army's five-star rank was titled General of the Army. Later, Arnold's would be retitled General of the Air Force when that US Army Air Force was made a separate branch in 1947.
George Washington was retroactively awarded a fifth star in 1976 and it was declared that he was to have "rank and precedence over all other grades of the Army, past or present."
The fifth star rank was retired in 1981 when Bradley died. Retirement had to wait until his death because five-star holders never retire. They draw full pay and benefits until death. It is reserved for wartime use today, in order that a US general cannot be outranked by an allied general.
Patton, although ostensibly Monty's rival, was actually at a lower level in the Allied command hierarchy. He commanded an army while Monty commanded an entire Army Group, as did Bradley. As such, Patton had to content himself with four stars.
Conan the Grammarian at September 3, 2019 3:18 PM
Stars aren't counted by some international agency in Switzerland or anything, right? Why is it like the price of gold? Couldn't the United States, or Botswana, simply announce that an America sergeant outranked a German general and be done with it?
Is is the universal human impulse to regard five as bigger and better than four presumed to be immutable?
Crid at September 3, 2019 8:29 PM
Or as PJ once put it, "I'd rather be a junkie in a New York City jail...."
Crid at September 3, 2019 8:32 PM
No, five stars is not an international convention. Five stars is a generally accepted insignia in the Anglo-Saxon countries. The US General of the Army rank is an OF-10 rank in the NATO hierarchy. The French military's corresponding OF-10 rank, the maréchal de France, has, I believe, seven stars.
There can be as many individual ranks in your own military hierarchy as you want. NATO has chosen to align its member nations' military ranks in a structural hierarchy to simplify command. So, if you're a NATO member country, you'll have to align your rank structure to its. Absent an established command staff that alignment is a quick way to determine who will be giving the orders in an emergency.
Conan the Grammarian at September 4, 2019 2:07 PM
So the creation of the fifth star in '44 was a practical & proportional response to the British medals, rather than counter-snot posturing, right?
Crid at September 4, 2019 7:39 PM
Perhaps a little of both, Crid. Certainly no one in the US wanted that pompous ass, Monty, to outrank our humble Ike.
Conan the Grammarian at September 5, 2019 7:01 AM
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