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I think there is a difference between what girls are being told (by entertainment, by teachers, by parents, etc.) happens in engineering schools and what actual

I think there is a difference between what girls are being told (by entertainment, by teachers, by parents, etc.) happens in engineering schools and what actually happens. The real point is that we can bend over backwards to fix whatever prejudices women encounter in engineering schools or as professional engineers and still accomplish nothing in terms of the disproportionate representation of women in our field. In other words, if the problem is the environment within an engineering school, we should expect the trend to be a sudden, sharp change in female representation at the end of the first semester of the first year of college. Instead, we see poor representation in applications to engineering programs. I think that suggests the problem is earlier, and my own experience in engineering schools has been exactly that (my undergrad EE class had no women at all; in grad school, the vast majority of women I met were foreign, which might suggest something about our own culture versus others).

dllthomas 13y ago
There is a difference, but there is also a relationship. Consider a world (and ignore, for the moment, whether it corresponds to reality) where professional technical environments just genuinely are really awful to female employees. In that case, the teachers and parents are probably doing what's best for the individual girls (though potentially with some long-term tragedy of the commons). Would you condemn, there, the honesty of the well-intentioned messengers? We should also consider an alternative fictional world, where women never have any issues in technical fields, and the cultural myth has arisen by whatever historical accident. In that case, I agree that it's quite legitimate to lay much of the blame at the feet of those perpetuating the incorrect myth. Reality, of course, looks absolutely nothing like either hypothetical. FWIW, my wife says she was turned off of technical studies after getting to Berkeley (having enjoyed physics in high school) by her impressions of the technical students on arrival.

dllthomas 13y ago

There is a difference, but there is also a relationship. Consider a world (and ignore, for the moment, whether it corresponds to reality) where professional technical environments just genuinely are really awful to female employees. In that case, the teachers and parents are probably doing what's best for the individual girls (though potentially with some long-term tragedy of the commons). Would you condemn, there, the honesty of the well-intentioned messengers? We should also consider an alternative fictional world, where women never have any issues in technical fields, and the cultural myth has arisen by whatever historical accident. In that case, I agree that it's quite legitimate to lay much of the blame at the feet of those perpetuating the incorrect myth. Reality, of course, looks absolutely nothing like either hypothetical. FWIW, my wife says she was turned off of technical studies after getting to Berkeley (having enjoyed physics in high school) by her impressions of the technical students on arrival.