Women in Engineering

Hi, I’m Mella, and I’m a Female Engineer.

And it would take me hours to explain the extent to which this is not a big deal.

Yes, engineering is one of those traditionally male-dominated professions, and even the newly degreed members of the field are much more likely to be male than female (making it different from, say, medicine, where the numbers have largely flipped in recent decades). The exact ratio depends on the particular engineering discipline – ten-ish years ago, when I was an engineering undergrad, my chemical engineering class was about 1/3 female, and I think mechanical and civil engineers saw similar numbers, but in fields like electrical engineering and computer science, the ratio was closer to 10:1.

For some reason, nobody is ever willing to believe that this was a complete non-issue for everyone personally involved.

There was a common exchange that occurred on campus that became something of a joke among us:

Individual X: So, what’s your major?

Girl Engineering Student: [Some type of] Engineering.

Individual X: Oh, wow, you must have to deal with, like, a lot of sexism.

Two ironic things about this. First, it was taken for granted by all engineering students that nobody had time to think or care about the gender ratio. Second, and rather more interesting, Individual X was almost always (in my personal experience, 100% of the time) another female student, studying in some overwhelmingly-female field like child development, education, nutrition or social work. The conversation was also commonly heard in all-women’s dorms*.

[*If you haven’t been in college in a while, you might not know that single-sex dorms are increasingly uncommon, even extinct at some schools. One effect of this is that the few women’s residences that remain are often populated exclusively by women who are either traditional enough or radical enough to prefer not to share their living space with men. Yes, the result of that dichotomy is as weird as you think.]

Frankly, this all tells me a lot more about homogenized modern feminism than it does about men in my profession.

I won’t pretend than any of this is other than anecdotal and extremely recent. I also won’t pretend to be qualified to discuss the issue or its history from a more rigorous position. I also won’t pretend to care.

(Though, while we’re talking about anecdotal evidence, by all casual indications, the place to find the chauvinistic action at the modern university is in the pure sciences, especially chemistry, which has had significant female participation for at least 200 years.)

Anyhow, as I’ve implied before, engineers worship at the altar of functionality, and being hamstrung by ideological scat is anything but functional. It also distracts the mind from more interesting pursuits, like playing games with prime numbers.

That’s a flippant place to stop, but there will be more on this tomorrow.

P.S. - Picture is needlework I did a few years ago. It's an industrial wastewater treatment process.