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One man’s attempt to get more women in engineering
19 June 2012
SAN FRANCISCO–One of the story lines we've explored on the Drive for Innovation is the notion that women in electronics engineering are vastly underrepresented. 
This may be a problem or may not be a problem. The debate continues, as evidenced by the thoughtful comments we get on relevant stories. We've come across some really fascinating female engineers, with candid opinions on whether the industry needs more women to alter the dynamics of problem-solving teams.
- + Eliza Nelson, who remarked about how tenacious women have to be to stick with engineering;
- + Christina Richards, whose engineering inspiration was the movie "Top Gun;"
- + Heather Robertson of Avnet who's molded her career path to embrace renewable energy;
- + Katherine Kuchenbecker at the University of Pennsylvania who discussed ways to improve the 5 % female representation number.
Enter Marc Hedlund, lead engineer at the goods-trading site Etsy, where female engineers make up 3 percent of the department. According to a piece in the Wall Street Journal site All Things D, Hedlund has "advertised $5,000 in grants for women to attend a three-month program to turn people with a passion for programming into professional engineers. It’s called Hacker School, and it takes place in New York this summer."
We debate on these posts whether it matters that the percentage of women electronics engineers has increased over time. Readers make valid points on both sides of the "yes"/"no" divide. But the fact that we're talking about it and people like Hedlund are taking initiative without any evident incentives suggests the answer may be "yes."
What do you think?
Carl Spearow June 26, 2012 at 12:05 pm
Why would degreed engineers choose a non-engineering position in an engineering firm? Because they don’t want to do engineering, so they found something else. The real question is why they would study engineering in the first place.
Peter Desnoyers June 26, 2012 at 10:53 am
The gender gap is actually 9:1 for registered nurses in recent years – both national and the first state figures that came up on Google, for Texas – with the median male age significantly younger than female, indicating that the gap will continue to narrow. Unlike engineering, this gender gap has narrowed significantly in the last two decades. (and curiously, men still earn substantially more than women in female-dominated fields like nursing)What seems to have happened in most fields is that decreasing gender bias has resulted in more people following opportunities for money and career growth, even when it led into non-traditional fields for their gender. (this would explain the continuing gap in early childhood education, where a series of scandals have increased gender bias on the part of consumers – i.e. parents – even as bias has decreased in other areas)What is most curious is that even as the gender gap has narrowed at elite institutions (MIT EE is 37% women, CS is 30% as of 2008) the broader field has not followed – e.g. Northeastern CS (where I teach) is currently about 10%. Trends such as increased participation in management, marketing, law, etc. after graduation mean that the pipeline gender gap is a lower bound, and it only gets worse after graduation.The best explanation I’ve seen to date for the pipeline disparity is that we lose a lot more technically qualified women than men to high-end service industries like law and finance. (I’ve got a reference for that somewhere, if anyone is really interested) In which case the gender disparity in engineering is just another symptom of a broader problem in the US – that far too many of our best and brightest are diverted from careers where they could actually create something and add value to our country, and instead are lured into unproductive but high-paying and high-status jobs on the periphery. (and having spent 15 years in industry before I went back to academia, I’m not going to take the Dilbert attitude and paint engineering management with the same brush. A good manager can add a lot of value to a team of engineers.)
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Lou Covey June 26, 2012 at 9:51 am
I think we are looking at the problem far to closely. We can find gender gaps in almost every profession. Women outnumber men 10-1 in education and that disparity leaps to 1000-1 in early childhood education. It’s 19-1 in nursing. And right now, almost 60 percent of all university students are women. At the Design Automation Conference this year this conversation was prominent and I ran into a group of women engineers discussing it, so I listened for a bit. Then I asked each of them what they were doing at their companies. One was in marketing, another sales, one was a CEO. All were engineers but none were doing engineering. After their BS they got MBAs and went into management. So I asked all of these relatively young women (since I’m almost 60) why they were not doing engineering. They all stopped cold for a couple of beats until one said, “Better opportunities?” So if engineering is such a great profession, why do competent female engineers abandon it for management? Maybe the women in universities have decided to bypass a step on the ladder.