Progressives are not just obsessed with destroying competitors. They seem determined to pull down the pillars of civilization. Their destruction of the America health insurance system is a great example. There’s no reason to explain the mayhem they are causing, other than a desire to destroy. It is possible that it is just gross incompetence, but it sure looks deliberate. This piece in IBD the other day is a good example. All of these results were predicted and avoidable. Yet, here we are.
Another example is the continued assault on the STEM fields.
Tracy Van Houten has always been infatuated with space. Over the course of two decades and two degrees, that love took Houten from a pre-engineering class in high school to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where she works as an aerospace systems engineer on groundbreaking projects like the Mars Curiosity Rover.
Like many female engineers, though, the 32-year-old mother of two has encountered challenges one might expect in a field where nearly 90% of professionals are men. Colleagues have occasionally asked Van Houten — sometimes the only woman in the room — to take notes during meetings and plan work parties. At times she feels her ideas aren’t acknowledged or heard.
Van Houten must also make difficult choices in order to juggle work and family — a balance male engineers may not feel as compelled to achieve. When her second child was a year old, she turned down the opportunity to join a team operating Curiosity once it landed on Mars, because of the grueling schedule.
A common assertion from feminists is that women have to make choices that men do not face. There’s never a mention of the reverse. Men certainly face choices women do not face. Both are a product of biological reality, but determined to be a social construct, because, well, you go girl.
Yet, Van Houten remains a dedicated engineer, and that’s not always common according to a new survey. For the past several years, two researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee have surveyed 5,300 women with degrees in engineering. They found that females frequently leave the profession because there aren’t enough opportunities for career advancement, or because they need to fulfill parenting or caregiving responsibilities in the absence of family-friendly work practices and policies.
The research indicates that leaning in to an engineering career may not lead to leadership prospects or a lifelong vocation, as women may hope. Instead, these women find themselves working for unfriendly or even hostile supervisors who show little interest in helping them advance professionally or designing a flexible work schedule to accommodate family obligations. The survey respondents also reported being discouraged by antiquated attitudes expressed by male colleagues and feeling isolated in a “male-centric” workplace.
Notice how men are supposed to accommodate women by “helping them advance professionally.” Maybe that’s good business. Maybe it is something a smart business owner should do. Who knows. What this is, however, is a childish demand by girls unprepared for the real world. Suck it up toots.
Women, in fact, comprise about 20% of engineering school graduates, but only 11% of practicing engineers are female. In Fouad’s survey, a third of the women who left the field in the past five years did so to take care of children at home. Twelve percent reported a dearth of opportunities to advance in their career.
Engineering, for example, is not sales. The value of an engineer is cumulative. A woman who leaves her job for five years to raise kids is coming back to work, not just having missed five years of working. She is now behind the college grads in many cases. Her peers have advanced to supervisory positions. Odds are, the mom returning to work has better options outside of engineering.
To help both employees and their employers address these problems, SWE recently published a “playbook” that offers suggestions on how to better integrate work and personal commitments. Among the recommended policies are flexible scheduling practices, maternity and adoption leave, and on-site health and wellness resources.
Fouad, along with Bierman, believes that companies must start evaluating their policies for both sexes in order to effectively change attitudes in the workplace. As more men feel comfortable insisting on a sensible schedule, such requests will become the norm and not just the domain of female employees. Similarly, as more women view engineering as field that accommodates and encourages all of its professionals, they may increasingly join its ranks.
It’s not hard to see where this is going. The diversity rackets started the same way. First they sent out “helpful” play books. Then they sent out letters reading, “Nice company you have there. Too bad is something were to happen to it.” Not long after, the HR departments were flooded with women and minorities running diversity clinics. Jesse Jackson is out shaking down Silicon Valley. The more subtle types will be demanding engineering and technology firms start hiring girls – or else.
Put another way, it is convert, or else.
Yeah, I hate women bosses too. They manage like it’s a high school clique. It’s like they have never been in a situation where they have had to actually lead a group.
I left the current job because I had a woman boss that made me leave her a note, every day, that I’d locked and alarmed the place at night. I’d been doing it for years and never failed to do it. I went to Netflix for a year and found out she was gone. New maanager is a guy and I can’t say that I’ve had any issues with him.
…but (from real life) the EEO folks are pretty stupid: they count boxes on the org chart… Once there came a day when all the org charts showed team leads in boxes…
And the EEO folks went away!
@GOBSMACKER
An astute observation. When the woman boss moves on and is replaced by a man, the gals become calm and happy once again. Funny old world.
The worst challenge a woman faces in the workplace is a female boss. Women are their own worst enemies. That’s a fact. But blaming other women gets them no sympathy. Blaming men does. Because, victimhood.
“A woman who leaves her job for five years to raise kids is coming back to work not just having missed five years of working. She is now behind the college grads in many cases.”
It’s now what you remove yourself from design for, it’s that you’ve removed yourself.
Had a guy I worked with in a design group. Married to a nice Filipino girl. The company offered him a position over there as a manufacturing manager. 6 years later I bumped into him; he was still there and had moved up the management food chain, but he admitted that he couldn’t possibly step into his old job – >50% of his knowledge was obsolete.
Math, hell! Best advice I got was from a network admin. I asked him what skills would be useful and the first thing he said was psychology!
I knew some women chemical engineers and chemists who were great, knew their stuff, and were very valuable in a project team.
I also knew some that were ignorant, and worse, were determined to remain ignorant. Refused to learn how to do their jobs. A lot of chemical jobs are OJT, you know. Not stuff you get from college, even to the PhD level.
Problem is, both types of women got promoted and put in charge of stuff. The good ones, and the ignorant ones. So what’s the point of being a good one?
I do tech support for an ISP. I’ve done it for years now, am good at it and the guys I work with take me seriously. And yet I get calls, mostly from women, that hear my voice and say “oh, I wanted technical support!” It’s 2014. You’d think that they would know that there are women doing tech support, but I guess they think we all do billing.
Come now Teri, we all know girls are not good at math.
I like the bit where she’s upset about having to plan parties. I’ve been in software teams for almost 20 years, and one thing I’ve noticed is that nearly all women want office parties, and men in technical fields never do. So my informed guess would be that she demanded parties, they humored her by wasting their time standing around eating shitty Crisco-frosting sheet cake, and then she got upset because she had to do all the work for something that she wanted and everybody else hated.
We had a middle aged DBA lady who started demanding birthday parties. Inevitably, management decided to humor her. So we just didn’t tell her when our birthdays were. A few months later she left anyway, for family reasons. She hasn’t been replaced. It turned out that her responsibilities only amounted to a few hours a week, so three of the guys divvied it up. Nice lady, though, even if she wasn’t a real tiger technically. I really liked her.
The promotion thing is funny too. They expect to be given authority as a reward for showing up and fulfilling expectations. Sticking their neck out taking responsibility and showing leadership (or, in larger shops, engaging in really aggressive bullshittery, blame shifting, and ass kissing) is too hard and risky for the poor little dears.
In time, they’ll demand that technical management be reserved entirely for the girls, to give them a career path that doesn’t involve actual engineering, which very few of them enjoy or excel at.
I think we’re already see a soft management path developing. I know a gal who is a software manager for a global firm. She can’t count to ten, but she manages the software budgets for the whole company. She gets to participate in project management, which mostly means going to meetings and enforcing company policy. From the outside, I think her job is entirely made up just to have a female executive on the technical side.
Friends tell me this becoming more common. The real work is done by project managers who are saddled with some gal with an MBA and zero technical ability. She produces progress reports and does budgeting. It reminds me of what happened to the personnel departments in the 80’s. They rebranded them Human Resources and staffed them with women to solve that problem.
As always, my attitude is “Or else…WHAT?”
Of course, I’ve cultured a history of being a swell guy. A freakin’ sweetheart. But you won’t like me when I’m angry.
“Sorry, not interested”, followed by “Return to sender”, is the polite way. Any hounding after that is simply a matter of “Mmmm…I see, OK, let me have a few days to think about that…”(while I decide just how much of a message I want to send to your new found “allies”, and THEIR “underpinnings”). MOST of the time, “I can’t be bothered” works out best, for a variety of reasons.