Category Archives: Gender

Gender, Thoughtful

Gender Gap in Engineering: My Take (stop looking solely within the U.S. and do more active experiments instead of surveys)

Continuing the spate of blog posts, I’d like to write down my take on feminism, engineering, and the gender gap.

My overall thesis is that we should 1) stop looking solely within the U.S. and 2) do more active experiments instead of passive surveys to improve the current state of affairs, because rapid change is possible.

Countries with a Majority of Female Science Degrees and Other Surprising Statistics

Let’s start out with some surprising statistics from “What Gender is Science” (as a nicely laid-out pdf here) (I highly recommend read the entire article if any of the following statistics intrigue you):

in Indonesia, where 48 percent of engineering graduates are female (compared to a 49 percent share of all Indonesian college and university graduates). …
While American computer scientists are depicted as male hackers and geeks, computer science in Malaysia is deemed well-suited for women because it’s seen as theoretical (not physical) and it takes place almost exclusively in offices (thought to be woman-friendly spaces).

Of particular note, in several countries women earn the majority of science degrees! Tell that to anyone that tells you that the low percentage of STEM women in the U.S. indicates women are inferior at STEM.

source

One theory is that in developing countries, income matters more and there are fewer career choices, therefore women are drawn to engineering.

Next, note these historical graphs of women in computer science. Here’s one about the dismal state of affairs in CS:

source

Note in particular that in the 1970s in a single year there was a 4% increase in percentage of CS degrees awarded to women — rapid change is possible. But in CS in particular, the percentage of women in CS has steadily declined for the last three decades. 

source: page 33, Ch. 2, Gender Codes (here in PDF format if you have MIT certs) [1]

If you want to be enraged (or if you care about these issues at all), please listen to this riveting and passionate 8 minute talk which features the fact that in 1987 42% of programmers were women  [1] (or see first graph in picture above) and also features a bunch of really NOT classy ads.


Phoenix Perry – “Embodied play design and building a female developer community” – Open Hardware Summit 2013 from OSHWA on Vimeo.

Fun note, that is actually a page from the Cosompolitan Magazine! Oh how times have changed.

source 

That article is recommended reading too. 

Computer science has always been a male-dominated field, right? 

Wrong.

My main takeaway:
(A) Rapid change is possible.

(B) We should pay more attention to cross-cultural studies to understand what other countries / cultures have that the U.S. does not and attempt to replicate it in the U.S.). Many studies are focused solely on the U.S. or other developed countries (at least the ones covered in the SWE literature review I’ll talk about in a second), which seems shortsighted to me, although I can understand the reasoning (scientific rigor). Caveat: We have to be very careful that we don’t just draw broad conclusions (e.g. “Muslim culture encourages gender equality in math/science scores,” an analysis against here).

(C) It’s a shame that facts like the existence of countries with some measures of gender parity are not covered in engineering school — they’ll be covered in NarwhalEdu‘s intro to engineering course for sure. I’m going to make my own happy bubble on the internet free of some of the indignant ignorance you can find online.

SWE Lit Review

My reading of the Society for Women in Engineering’s Annual Literature Reviews 2011 and 2012 went along the lines of “look at all these contradictory studies we’re not really sure about anything.” I still highly recommend reading them, though, for upbeat attitudes like this:

These women (33 female Greek engineer-managers) also talked about their efforts to find ways to show why it’s actually _good_ to be a female engineer, how being female makes you a better engineer.

The lit reviews also force you to not just read studies that reinforce your existing theories. They’re available in some weird and annoying webapp here: 2011 and 2012, or as PDFs I uploaded to google docs here: 2011 and 2012.

I highly recommend reading them.

My complaint with all this studying is that much of it is so passive. Let’s send out these surveys and try to interpret the results. Oh oops guess what it’s really hard to interpret these results and these other people in this other part of the country get contradictory results. Maybe we should split the results by sex orientation or race or different categories of engineering or, wait everything is more complicated than we think.

Time’s a-wasting, friends. ^^ Let’s go out and try things in the world, and reserve analysis for plotting how we can radically change the status of affairs. That’s the plan, see you folks in two decades.

What follows is a small selection of the articles I have been reading as well as the sole footnote.

Wikipedia

For those craving some wikipedia, here are relevant articles (I have not read them all yet):

Feminine Engineer?

If you search from “feminine engineer”, the following blog posts pop up. I have excerpted a paragraph from each to entice you to click through and actually read them.

The Triplet State: Feminine, Female, and an Engineer

It’s almost as if society views being feminine, female, and an engineer as a forbidden quantum triplet state.  Even though quantum mechanics claims that a triplet state is impossible, it occurs.  In life there are always people to prove our preconceived notions wrong.  So maybe I am some sort of living dichotomy, a natural Frankenstein, of abstract-minded romantic and a systematic logician.  I am a Barbie-blonde cookie-cutter creation of femininity and a rebel fighting to fit in a male-dominant world.  So if I could chose two words to stereotype myself, I would chose female engineer.

Must a woman tone down her feminine side?

My 16 year old daughter adores math and engineering, and wants to be either a nuclear engineer, or a civil engineer. However, she is also a very, very girly girl who loves high heels, glitter, wearing pink, party dresses, and, well, just think Engineer Barbie, or Legally Blonde. She has been told that she will need to tone it down (a lot) if she plans to be taken seriously in engineering.

Female Engineering Student Stereotypes
An interview with MITERS‘s own Star Simpson!

On the subject of femininity, Star and I somehow got on the subject of shaving. As it turns out, neither of us shaves albeit for different reasons. To paraphrase Star, “it seems like a waste of time. Instead of shaving, I could be doing engineering – that’s what all of the guys are doing” 

… “A focus group of male engineering students told us that women in engineering were ‘nerdettes’ who are plain or ugly, despite visual evidence to the contrary [my emphasis]. Senior women engineers increasingly tried to look inconspicuous in order to avoid hostile or situationally-inappropriate attention from faculty and peers, or to avoid common accusations from faculty that they were flirting.  (National Academy of Engineering, 2006). 

… Or is the influx of women engineers changing engineering? It seems like everything is pointing towards women being changed by engineering but I so badly want it to be the other way around.

Why Being a Female Engineer is Awesome (Part 1)
(There is no part 2).

It’s actually kind of uncomfortable sometimes how much people love that I’m an engineer. One woman I met monolouged for a good 10 minutes about how she admired me for breaking down boundaries and making a difference. 

… Even less drunk people have the same reaction. I met a well respected author at a swanky awards ceremony once, and when she heard what my job was she said that engineering was “basically magic”  to her. Unfortunately it wasn’t J. K. Rowling,  because that quote would have been extra awesome. But as it stands, I’m pretty sure only engineers and magicians can claim that people think they have some super human powers. I mean,  just look at Iron Man.

True Child | Femininity & Science, Technology, Engineering, Math
A collection of some interesting research papers on this topic (complete with abstracts).

http://techcrunch.com/2013/10/10/how-harvey-mudd-transformed-its-computer-science-program-and-nearly-closed-its-gender-gap/
Dr. Maria Klawe is the lady who has achieved near-gender parity in Harvey Mudd’s CS program since becoming president in 2006 (less than a decade ago!).

Why female H.S. not study engineering
1) it’s boring
2) won’t be good at it
3) wouldn’t want to hang out with dorks and nerd

Footnote

[1] 42% number is from the book Gender Codes, page 32:

In 1987, computer systems analysts comprised 34% women, while computer software developers (e.g., programmers) comprised 42% women. Incidentally, computer systems analysts have also been better paid on average than computer software developers on average, between 1971 and 2006.

If you want to dig deeper and get the raw data, I was able to find the data for the bottom graph, % women with CS majors, in publicly available NSF data. The Gender Codes book looks at data from 1966-2006, the latest data is here (1966-2010). I believe the author used #33 “computer sciences” under “Field of Degree.” (PDF, XCL, image preview:

or in percentage form here).

I could not, however, find the relevant Bureau of Labor Statistics for the graph from which the 42% statistic is drawn. The citation in Gender Codes is a terse “13. Bureau of Labor Statistics Database, accessed May 2008, courtesy of Peter Meyer.” and I was not able to navigate the BLS site sufficiently well to find this data. BLS does have a nice beta dataviewer in-browser tool, but it only had 2010-2012 data.

END FOOTNOTE.

….well, so much for building robots today.

Gender

cheap after-christmas makeup sales are great

hot on the tail of “to be feminine or not to be” (which remains unresolved although people have been emailing me interesting thoughts) i would like to announce that after-christmas makeup gift kit sales are the best! they’ll probably also give me skin cancer in 10 years but whatever I’m only wearing them at home anyway.

target had E.L.F. makeup which was pretty cheap ($1 to $3 items for things that usually cost in the $10 range, e.g. mascara or eyeshadow). HOWEVER! at Walgreens 50% off (for the most things, it was a bit tricky) Christmas Sale I found $1 for 24 colors of eyeshadow and $5 for 18 colors of nail polish!

upside-down for more brain flexibility!

 so great. all the nyan will soon be mine. mwahaha

after being home for a week i have also rapidly diminished the amount of time it takes me to apply eyeliner, and hopefully i will not be interested beyond the basics of makeup. so i think this phase of my life should be pretty short. maybe up-dos (hair) are next. MAYBE IN A YEAR I WILL LIKE SPORTS. ahhh fake identity crises are so much more fun than the real thing

anyway so i can spend 5 minutes and troll the world so great.

look i’m trying to be feminine in the safety of my house where guys I interact with won’t get the wrong idea (although my parents will get the wrong idea that I am doing it to find a boyfriend =__= NOT. I’m doing it to troll the engineering world*) and I won’t be harassed on the street. bring it on internet haters. in the picture but probably too grainy to tell: earrings, lip stain + lipstick, nail polish, eyeshadow, eyeliner.

*EDIT: Actually I feel the need to more explicitly state my feelings on this matter. (A) I’m an engineer from MIT working on my own company. Really, whoever I date had better not think that my appearance is more important than my other characteristics. (B) The whole idea of doing things because they “appeal to guys” is just plain insulting to me. I put on makeup to have fun with identity and appearances — that is, I do things for myself, not out of subservience to some abstract male opinion of me. (C) It also sucks that society devalues being single, as if we are somehow broken or less happy if we decide to focus on work instead of relationships. My friends and I are not daunted by the prospect of never finding a partner, because we are happy by ourselves, and I think we are better off for it. END EDIT.

Although I must admit that when I had rainbow hair

thanks Annie!

(but was dressed in my normal no-makeup, free [male] tshirt, jeans) in Cambridge, MA, and MIT the only comments I ever got to my face were very positive (“your hair is awesome!” along those lines). so maybe the world is great so long as I don’t wear a skirt! WE’LL SEE system identification on the real world for the win. let’s give it some feminine input and see the output.

Judy taught me this trick: put a base coat on and then after the first coat dries put on a coat of glitter!

some day soon i will write a longer story about how awesome feminine people like Jordan and Maja and Judy broke the stereotype in my head that feminine = incompetent / ditzy. because they are some really fantastically competent people. and then i was like WHOA FASCINATING NEW WORLD and then here i am.

also people spend so much time on sports / games, why is spending time on makeup considered for “non-engineers”? yea, stop and think about that. the only plausible reason is because it’s associated with being feminine and therefore stereotypically inferior.

…i never thought i’d be a makeup person either.

the current plan is to be feminine half the time and a male hipster the other half of the time in the course videos

😛 okay just kidding I have no idea what I’ll end up doing, probably whatever I feel like when I wake up the day we film. We might even design the course so that there’s no facetime and it’s all handwriting.

ALSO EGADS I posted a selfie I don’t know how I feel about myself anymore

Happy holidays all!

Gender, Thoughtful

To be feminine or not to be (as an engineer)

This is an email I sent out to poll my friends, but as it also serves as a useful summary of my recent readings, I will post it here in all its messed-up footnotes glory:
How much should i emphasize that I am female in my life if the goal is to have the most impact on female representation in STEM I can as one person?

But actually i would really appreciate thoughts or research or statistics on this.

If we accept the premise that stereotypes play a role in all this, [6]
in my mind there are two approaches to being a female entrepreneur:
1) be a diva (combat “1337 male hacker” with “1337 female hacker”)
2) be an everyday person (“all types can be female programmer”)
For 1), I look up to people like ladyada (on the cover of WIRED) and debbie sterling (goldieblox). When I talked to ladayada / ptorrone they said they explicitly grew the company so that ladyada (a) gets to do as much technical work as possible and (b) remains as the publicly visible front of the company. And it’s sort of nice in an aggressive way to be in-your-face feminine and competent, to try to break the link between feminine and competency. Also people have told me that female role models are very important.

For 2), there’s a reactionary sentiment against over-sensationalizing that you’re female [3] and  instead emphasizing being a human being [7], but I don’t know if this is just “be humble” “be quiet and skinny and take up less space.”  [5] In this case, I’ll should just be my normal not particularly feminine self.
In particular, I would appreciate help finding science about either of these approaches instead of just gut instincts / blog posts. I can’t seem to word my question appropriately for google scholar though.

To some extent it doesn’t matter immediately since i know which approach i prefer (#2) and it’s better to act than philosophize all the time, but I am struggling to find research that isn’t just a bunch of academics being confused as to why progress is stalled [1] [2] (maybe it is a reflection of conditions 10 years ago?). But in media production for the course, I can easily play up being feminine (nail polish, makeup, clothing) or not. I wouldn’t mind this at all, and it sort of plays out haphazardly right now depending on how I feel.

Footnotes
[1] ” Moreover, as we will elaborate further, we have noticed a sense of alarm concerning trend in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines in general, and engineering in particular. It was possible in the recent past to point to gradual increases in the numbers of women in engineering and to define those increases as positive indicators. Any confidence that it was just a matter of time before gender equality in engineering would be achieved has, instead, been undermined by the reality that those increases have either slowed or stopped altogether.”
http://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/swe/litreview2012/#/226 SWE 2012 compendium. I uploaded the relevant portion as a PDF here.

[2] “Women Gain in Some STEM Fields, but Not Computer Science”
“Computer science actually is more male-dominated today than it was two decades ago: Women received 29.6 percent of computer science B.A.’s in 1991, compared with 18.2 percent in 2010.” http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/11/15/women-gain-in-some-stem-fields-but-not-computer-science/

[3] ” I don’t see any solution other than time and perseverance.  Meanwhile I’m sick of writing about it; I’m bored silly with it.  So I’m going to cut to the chase, close my eyes, and pretend the problem is solved; we’ve made a great cultural leap forward and the whole issue is over with. And I’m going to write the profile of an impressive astronomer and not once mention that she’s a woman.”
http://www.lastwordonnothing.com/2013/01/17/5266/

[4] http://miters.mit.edu/blog/2012/11/02/what-is-a-miters-2/ or for more commentary, skim through http://orangenarwhals.blogspot.com/2013/12/my-reply-to-charless-on-200gokart-us.html
In response to whether people were intimidated by MITERS’s reputation or not sent to all MIT undergraduate dorms via email:
 

[5] I also remember reading somewhere how this one programmer felt strongly that she was a “normal female” who left work at 5 and went out to shop for shoes and didn’t do hackathons during the weekends, and so she doesn’t really have role models she relates to. I also feel this way strongly due to my experience with MITERS where both M and F were “intimidated” by the hacker stereotype (although F more so statistically [4]).

[6] “But even when fields are defined more precisely, countries differ in some unexpected ways. A case in point is computer science in Malaysia and the U.S. While American computer scientists are depicted as male hackers and geeks, computer science in Malaysia is deemed well-suited for women because it’s seen as theoretical (not physical) and it takes place almost exclusively in offices (thought to be woman-friendly spaces). About half of Malaysian computer science degrees go to women.” http://contexts.org/articles/spring-2011/what-gender-is-science/

Look at all these countries with >50% of science degrees going to females! (it sounds like the post-graduation opportunities are still lacking though)

[7] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finkbeiner_test

. To pass the test, an article about a female scientist must not mention:

  • The fact that she’s a woman
  • Her husband’s job
  • …

END.