New Zealand Engineering 1999 September

Essay

Where Have All the Girls Gone

By Baljinder Devgun and Peter King

One of the most significant changes to the labour force in the last quarter of the twentieth century has been the rising number of women in management and professional occupations. It no longer surprises anyone that a woman will be prime minister regardless of the next election’s results. As of September 1997, 57 percent of working age women were in the paid workforce: 62 percent in full-time paid employment and 38 percent in part-time paid employment. Between 1991 and 1996 women’s self employment grew 31.5 percent. Women in high places in government, law, medicine and management are no longer the exception they might have been twenty-five years ago.

There is one occupational area, however, where this is not the case: science and engineering.

Census figures for 1991 and 1996 demonstrate clearly that while the total numbers of accountants and professional engineers in New Zealand’s population are comparable the ratio of male to female professionals in their respective fields shows accountants are well ahead of engineers in achieving gender neutrality. Indeed, even though the number of female professional engineers almost doubled from 1991 to 1996 (339 to 615) women still represent only three to four percent of the total number of engineers in the profession.

Click Here to view the graph showing the 1996 Gender Proportion within Professional Occupational Groups

Moreover, the statistics also show that the number of women engineers employed in New Zealand has not increased significantly from immigration. Since 1997 only one female engineer with a job offer was approved for residence in New Zealand. Almost all the growth is coming from young women leaving the engineering schools. Statistics for women enrolled in second year, Bachelor of Engineering at the University of Auckland, show the number of women has continued to rise from 12 percent in 1982 to 21 percent in 1997. The total number of women enrolled in second year courses at Auckland for 1999 is 88 out of the 402 enrolments, ie. 22 percent.

Of those women already working in engineering we find they tend to gravitate towards chemical and civil/environmental engineering.

Click Here to view the graph showing the Occupational Distribution of Professional Female Engineers

So why is engineering so female unfriendly? There has been consistent evidence that at secondary school girls are outperforming boys at the core engineering skills of mathematics and science so there cannot be any underlying lack of talent. If the problem is that engineering is not attractive to young women then one must ask, why? Are there social pressures against women working in "nerdy" or "unglamorous" occupations? Are men consciously or unconsciously making engineering unattractive to women? Or is engineering the last bastion of male chauvinism resisting as far as possible any female intrusion into that sacred male domain, the "shed" of invention? Perhaps we must consider the possibility that all of these things are true.

But does it matter? Does it matter if women leave men to their concrete, and trucks, and their electrical what-nots, and get on with the really important issues of human relationships in politics, business and in the family? The short answer is "yes". Women and men do think differently. It is a subtle difference of style some women engineers believe is quite well captured in John Gray’s bestseller Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus. So by excluding women, engineering misses out on a thinking style quite apart from missing out on a fair proportion of the best brains potentially available to the profession. In short, the virtual exclusion of women from the engineering workforce loses the vital contribution of a voice at the practical end of shaping our environment from more than half the population of the planet.

At the recent Women in Science Conference (30 June - 2 July 1999) Anita Borg of the famed Xerox Palo Alto Research Centre gave the example of how a completely untechnical person (her mother) could help define the future. Ms Borg was interested to see what would happen when a women-only focus group was asked to imagine future technologies. After initial hesitation her mother came up with the concept of a "virtual reality wall". What she wanted to be able to do was close the distance between two households, continents apart, by having a video wall in both households which make the two houses appear to be joined. Obviously to make such a dream a reality would involve years of research into large display, microcameras, microphone and compression technologies, but the emotional purpose of the technology and its consequent technical specifications could give meaning to the research effort and define a potential market.

Ms Borg also pointed out that women’s perceptions of the important features of a technology can differ markedly from those of men. She used the example of the design evolution of the stove. "It’s very useful and practical, but it’s not one of the easiest things to clean."

While in New Zealand our engineering culture does not reflect this American emphasis on manufacturing, the analogy holds when applied to infrastructural engineering as well. Women are vitally concerned with safe and efficient transportation. They are concerned about the environment. Women have power bills to pay and use telecommunications. Their money and votes are just the same as those of men but the things they emphasise are different. As politicians, as objectors to planning proposals, or as consumers of services, women cannot be ignored.

So why is it that our engineering schools in particular seem to be doing precisely that? Or worse demeaning women, as when lecturers feel confident enough to make comments like "you’ll have no problems doing engineering, all you have to do is flutter your eyelids".

There is no doubt that engineering schools in general have a long way to go before they might be considered "grown up" places for young adults to study the complex, team-based and consultative business engineering is today. Investigations by McLean,Lewis, Copeland,Lintern and O’Neill in Australia and Godfrey and Parker in New Zealand share common findings. The picture one gets is of a rather immature boys culture pervading the institution of the engineering school. In her 1999 presidential address IPENZ past-president Gretchen Kivell drew attention to the culture of "mucking around" in class. McLean et al point to binge drinking, sexist jokes, and rituals designed to test whether a person is part of, or excluded from, their peers. It doesn’t help that women are still rare in class.

"When you’re one in sixty you stand out - the guys can hide", one conference attendee pointed out.

All these behaviours, of course, are brought out in the context of the ‘pressure cooker’ which is the engineering degree. Students are subjected to a relentless barrage of high pressure demands assessed on an individual rather than team basis. The teaching philosophy, if it can be called that, is to load students down until they either sink or swim. The question that has to be asked is, is this philosophy valid in today’s engineering workplace with its focus on community consultation, teamwork and systems conformance than the ability to solve complex mathematics. Does "sink or swim" have a distorting effect on the mentality of a profession and the demographics of the people in it?

Certainly women, often in a minority, have a difficult time with the added burden of a testosterone-charged culture, on top of an already demanding course workload. McLean et al cites an anonymous letter to a student newspaper as eloquently summing up the feelings of some women students.

"Survival depends on their ability to squeeze into the cracks, and that advocating women’s issues cannot be on the agenda without the risk of destroying their career objectives. The path followed by women in engineering is strewn with well hidden dead bodies, decaying ideas and rotting attitudes."

The same researchers went on to identify the three main ways female students responded to their environment. Some blended in completely as "just one of the boys"; others went the other way by emphasising their femininity; still others became politicised and strongly feminist.

Is it any wonder, having passed through this filter, that the workplace, in many ways, takes on the heritage of the engineering school culture?

At the conference women working in science and engineering reported that they frequently felt isolated or misunderstood by their male colleagues. The difference of style often led to a loss of confidence as women asked themselves "what’s wrong with me, why don’t I fit in?". But asked if there was any other career she would rather pursue one young engineer replied,

"There’s nothing else I’d want to do or enjoy doing. I like engineering. I just don’t always enjoy being the only woman."

Another senior scientist/engineer recalled the difficulties she had had with one of her superiors.

"..the change occurred when his wife bought him a book to read. Now, whenever we start to see things differently, I just say to him Mars and Venus. We’ve developed a real respect for each other, and we both recognise that each of our ways of doing things is just as OK as the other’s, only different and different is OK, it doesn’t have to be criticised."

Thinking styles are one thing that can be addressed with a certain presence of mind by individual men but when it comes to reproduction, the inalienable fact is women bear and nurse children and children are important to human beings. The problem is that many engineering companies seem to prefer the notion that their staff become robots to be kept operational as long as possible and with as little down-time wasted on maintenance as can be got away with. This intensely competitive, inhuman culture, is naturally completely inimical to families and children (of both men and women) and basically presents women engineers with very few options should they wish to have children.

One example of a knowledge-based firm which has adopted policies to retain female expertise in particular is HortResearch. This firm acknowledges the family by allowing for flexible work hours, jobsharing, home work, childcare centres, dependant care allowances, a nanny network and realistic parental leave. If the input of women is truly respected these arrangements will not reduce opportunities for promotion. For in an industry as gender biased as engineering it will always be difficult to argue that there is no glass ceiling.

As one might expect there is statistical evidence that women engineers are at a disadvantage given that 73 percent are under the age of 34. Census figures show 65 percent of male engineers earned between $30 and $70,000 while 56 percent of female engineers earned between $20 and $40,000. Between two and nine (the statistics are deliberately "fuzzed" at this level) women earned over $100,000 for engineering, compared to 500 men earning over $100,000.

Click Here to view the graph showing the Pay Disparity between Male & Female Engineering Occupations

But as more and more young women, such as Mpule Kwelagobe, the Botswanan software engineering student who also happens to be Miss Universe 1999, enter the engineering profession, worldwide the profession will change. Firms and institutions within the profession can either do what they have always done or they can anticipate those changes and reap the rewards. Some will do it better than others. If managers and principals believe there is any merit in the argument for more women engineers they will need to rethink their entire ethos of work as an engineer.

Compared to other professions engineering in New Zealand is a long way behind on the road to gender neutrality. The Chinese and Russian experience demonstrates there is no innate reason why this should be so but the fact that it is not reflects badly on the profession and the people within it. In many ways it robs a profession of its credibility to be so under-represented by such a pervasive and important constituent part of the community. Involving women in the profession is not a matter of loosening standards or in any way suggesting women engineers are not as capable as men, but it is a matter of changing mindsets about "the way we do things around here". So far engineers have proved themselves comparatively reluctant or slow-witted about doing this. The results of the 2000 census will be interesting indeed.