not a new subject - women in electronics and computing?

Maybe you can get the ball rolling by telling us how you got into this line of work and what your women friends think of your career choice.

Regards, Joe Legris

I think its hard to say, but there is women with electronic as an career, I'm not sure if its their hobby. I just graduated of Electronic Technician, and a close friend of mine is graduating too, she is the only girl in my year who got into the electronic career, I'm not sure about why she took that chance yet she didn't do it bad, she was the third top student in the electronic group. Also in our institution there have been three electronic female teachers, whose experiences about working as electronic wasn'y nice at all. They didn't suffer of direct exclusion by men, but it was hard for them to get used to that job, which they eventually quit.

Hi Joe,

Thanks for this.

I got into electronics as wanted a music synthesiser and could not afford to buy one (age 14), so I designed my own. My late father was interested in electronics so bits of radios etc would be lying around the house. He helped me until I was 18 then I left home for university so did my own stuff.

re your women friends think of your career choice, mostly disinterest. Good male friends are fascinated.

I've recently become single so guys I date, I don't really want to mention it, so I keep quiet about it. They think I'm a teacher!

Lyn

J.A. Legris wrote:

I've wondered this myself. I hosted a student tour, a Stanford student summer-camp thing, a couple of years ago, and I referred to my engineers as "the guys." One of the young women in the group took me to task for that, asking why we had no women design engineers. Well, none of the women in the group intended to be engineers, and I pointed out that I've never personally met a female electronics designer [1] but that didn't seem to be an acceptable response.

What I call "real" electronics, circuit design, involving voltmeters and oscilloscopes and soldering irons, seems to be almost exclusively the domain of geeky guys, and I assume there's an associated geek-gene somewhere. Women now make up about half of the students at a lot of engineering schools [2], so things may change, except that I fear that "EE" students (males and females) are learning more "computer science" than real engineering these days (is there really any "science" in "computer science"? C++ ain't science.) There are lots of female programmers.

I have noticed that, when the occasional female engineer or student shows up in s.e.d, a few specific guys do their crude best to be hostile and chase them away. I assume women engineers occasionally run into similar morons in real life.

John

PS- when you see Gordon next, thank him for me. The PDP-11 instruction set taught me how to think.

[1] I do now know one woman who is doing serious electronics design, albeit mostly programming FPGAs in VHDL. She is a brilliant PhD physical chemist by trade, an NMR expert, who got pregnant and didn't want to work around superconductive magnets for the duration. She wandered the halls to see what other people were doing and decided she could take a couple of Xilinx courses and hack logic design for a while. So now she basicly owns the system architecture of all the instruments these people make. Nobody messes with D.

Interestingly, she is certain that the stuff that she's doing in VHDL would be impossible to do with schematic entry. She's wrong of course; I do just-as-complex stuff with schematics all the time. Hell, people did this sort of stuff long before FPGAs and HDLs were invented. But her approach to design is verbal, not visual.

[2] Geek meets geek is, sadly, apparently a recipe for kids with autism.

My wife tells me repeatedly why most women do not have careers in the sciences in general and electronics in particular. She says that most women are right-brained and most men are left-brained. Personally, I take this as a compliment.

Marc

The only gal I remember seeing with any regularity on Usenet is a Brit whom we don't see in this group except when things get cross-posted.

-- snip --

I think this route into electronics must be common - this is exactly how I got started!

I have only met a few woman in Electronics, more in the software side of course - and we do sometimes get CV's from women recently graduated, maybe one quarter of the total - not saying that is the ratio of graduates, maybe they pursue jobs more actively?

Regards Vic

exactly

In my experience, women schoolteachers do a lot of damage to women's careers. At the university I worked at, we had an "open day" where students from schools were invited to see what engineers do. I remember have an (almost heated) discussion with some women teachers who dissuaded their girls from even thinking about doing anything in the line of engineering, The girls were advised to do nursing, teaching etc. I have often wondered why women sabotage other women like this - is it jealousy or what? The female students that I had were great. They were very hard working, mature and came close to the top of the class. Many of them progressed to graduate school and became "high fliers".

The whole thing is still a mystery to me many years later.

By the way, hiding the fact that you are a female engineer in the dating game is gonna backfire on you. Be careful!

It's more of a complement.

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

--
"it\'s the network..."                          "The Journey is the reward"
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Complement indeed.

As the risk of drawing the ire of the OP, there are unignorable generalities that can be seen in male versus female behavior. The difference in behavior goes back to the nature/nurture argument. I think much of it is nature. I have had uncountable # of arguments about this with both Europeand and American friends. *EVERY* single friend who contested that men and women are more or less equal has come back, after having children, to concede that there seems to be, in fact, fundamental differences between their sons and daughters. What perplexes me is that this should have been obvious to anyone who has had a sibling of the opposite sex. We all start off as children.

I also noticed that, even in engineering, when I have taught class projects, women will often willingly discard engineering in favor of something else. Often times, if there is both an engineering aspect and social aspect to a problem, they will gravitate toward the social aspect. I can honestly say that no one ever forced them or encourage them to do this, not while I was running the class.

As far as the "I'm going to conquer the world with my XYZ" mentality (Shawn Fanning with Napster), that has been relatively rare in women, but very prominent in males. It's changing very slowly, but I think it is changing because there are gradual but fundamental changes in the physiological make up of women.

The only recent example I have of this is my brother's birthday: I emailed my family to ask what we should do for him this year. I suggested a 2-week cruise from Florida around the Carribean. All my sisters said we should get him a gift card, flowers, and manicure and pedicure (I am not making this up!). We argued for a while until I finally convinced them that my brother was a man, not a woman.

Naturally, after asking him of all the things he would have wanted, he said he would have wanted the cruise.

I should not be *too* much stretch of the imagination to see that there is a correlation between what appeases people in general. $25,000 oscilloscope (that could not be resold) or vacation in Paris with the man of your dreams?

Finally, I have met some really sharp women engineers over the years, but most of them jumped ship and went into engineering sales, engineernig marketing, etc. The one who stuck with it gave the most impression that she was really into Hidden Markov Models and coding theory turned out not to be a woman at all. Or a man. Or I am not sure. S/he had a sex change.

Of course, there are always exceptions: Madame Curie would hurt a man in the lab.

-Le Chaud Lapin-

Thank you for all your comments.

I'm sorry I did not make this clear, I'm not a teacher, just a new freind thought I was, so I didn't correct him. You are correct re women school teachers from the 1970's, I I'm not sure how they have changed now but I'm sure times must have changed for the best . I'm giving a talk in 2 weeks to some 16 year olds (girls/ boys) from local college and plan to inspire them positively with respect to computers, engineering etc. I'm a real engineer (design, schematics, soldering, scopes etc) but with a bit of software (PIC micro controllers etc). My job title now is Researcher, but I spent most of my time designing prototypes and "inventing". Thank you for reminding me about the dangers of pregnancy and electronics! My daughter is 12 years old now, and in "The Olden Days" we used lead solder, but now it is banned from men and women of child bearing age. All my engineering peers were of great support and treated me with great respect. I guess I was lucky and got found on the Internet (Slashdot) for my present employeer and made a good offer. I've never been ambitious in my career, never networked, and just sort of blended in. But I have always liked to design the most coolest,minimal, low cost, original bit of circuit e.g. using Z80's and sound samplers. By chance I was introduced to Gordon Bell (PDP-11) at my present company and rather liked his project, MyLifeBits. I could witter on more but it's on my web page, as below. I'm really interested (and so my post today)in helping the new generation of young people, and I guess communicating with like minded people such as here.

To be brief, electronic and software design is about, art, innovation, fun and useful gadgets and flashing lights!

Still the one puzzling post, I keep quiet (now) to my Dates about my work, they see the other side of me, a basic woman :-) - if they were that interested they could check me out on the web, so no need for me to mention it.

Lyn

JeffM wrote:

I suspect that part of the reason is a feedback effect: Female EE graduates can make a lot of money by going into sales, precisely because EE is a male-dominated field. From sales, the usual career path is into management rather than back into the lab. There are a fair number of female researchers where I work, but the ones I know are either chemists or computer scientists, with a sprinkling of physicists, and almost no EEs at all. On the other hand, three of my collaborators are female EE professors, so perhaps they aren't as rare in academia.

I love design work, but a factor of 2 in starting salary can be mighty persuasive.

Cheers,

Phil Hobbs

Hello Le Chaud Lapin- , I am the OP, and your post is fabulous!

I have never wanted to conquer the world, despite the reputation of the company I work for. I just love gadgets and inventing useful devices for customers .

The Paris question is brilliant... 5 years ago I would have chosen the oscilloscope - but now on my own (after 28 years of being with my now Ex) - a no Brainer - The Paris option!

WRT Florida, I would have both.

What do you know about Madame Currie that you would like to share? I have read her tragic Biography, many times.

I'm just a fairly standard woman, like new clothes, Chanel, new men, hate ironing and housework , but you do have very a good point re the social option of a career or the isolated (mostly) work of an engineer. I know which I would choose - it would be a balance of both, creativity needs both solitude and social appreciation.

Lyn

Le Chaud Lap> Spehro Pefhany wrote:

Hello Phil, Thank you for an interesting reply :-)

Sales - as in persuading people to part with their money, is something I have never thought of. Where is the art or creativity in that?

If you want more money in electronics, become a contractor or self employed if you love the work.

Lyn

Phil Hobbs wrote:

Hello John,

That's exactly the problem. One of my clients was looking for a new engineer. They went through three young ones (one woman, two men). Neither of them had the foggiest idea how my designs there worked after reading the module spec. For some reason the older guys always understood it all, even mechanical engineers and chemists.

It sure ain't. Now don't tell my sister I wrote that.

OTOH most of what we electronics guys do isn't science either. Can't remember the last time I had to dive down into Maxwell's or Planck's stuff. Well, it seems I now have to (Lasers).

--
Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com

I know what you mean. I once dated a girl who started off as a linguist but decided to become a computational linguist after taking classes in electronics and programming at a local engineering school. Her marketability improved drammatically after that, as she was one of few engineers in the building who spoke 8 languages and wrote her own speech recognition software. This turned out to be a real problem after we broke up. At 181cm, her height was already a bit intimidating, and while having drinks in a club, a guy would approach her, talk small talk for a bit, then ask what she did for a living. Most of them just assumed that she was somebody's admin assistant, which didn't matter to them, and when see said she did research in speech recognition, thus began the stutterering and babbling, as they were often engineers themselves.

But the reverse happened recently. I was jogging through the woods behind my place one morning and saw a young attractive woman from the neighborhood whom I had met while taking out the trash a few months prior. She's a graduate of a reputable school and works with CPU optimization. She was crouching in the bushes with a pet locator, the kind with huge bulky loop antenna's. I thought, "Ok, it's 8:30 in the morning, here she is out behind my place, in the bushes, with the bulkiest radio locator I have ever seen. She has to be an engineer or scientist of some kind... I can't believe she's using that thing. It's huge!...certainly she knows it could be designed to be a lot more compact!...." so I approached her. It turned out that she had hand-selected the device off the Web. I immediately wanted to start talking shop, MHz, range, RSSI, digital reflection algorithms, PC-compatibility, but I reasoned that if she were indeed an engineer, that might put her off, so I asked instead, "So what is that anyway? ...It beeps? It runs on batteries? What are those big round things for? You mind if I try?" We became friends a few weeks later, but I learned that if I had mentioned anything too technical, not only would she have not been impressed, she would have not been nearly as friendly. ;)

-Le Chaud Lapin-

I think it's not simply one reason; there are at least 3 I can think of, and in no particular order of importance. Other reasons abound, no doubt.

1. The female 'role' feedback. This is not negative, simply a pragmatic view. Women simply aren't 'expected' to be engineers in many societies. That's not saying it's right (one of the best software engineers I know is a woman), but it does exist.
2. There's some evidence that women tend (note that word) toward subjective types of work, such as sales, as Phil noted, and into positions where people are the target, rather than facts [target used in a non-threatening way ;)] as tends to be the case in design work. I remember one event at a company that shall be nameless where we (the design team) got a new group email alias that management could not access after one senior manager thought we had all said the product wouldn't work when all that happened was an 'energetic engineering discussion'. In the MBTI sense, designers tend to be NT, sales tends to be SJ / NF, at least in my experience.
3. [Note: no flames please, same disclaimer as (1) applies]. Women are often told in some societies (I'll leave others to guess) that even if they train as [engineer/scientist] they won't be offered positions as those are considered 'male' jobs and if they are it will be for less money. Almost the same as (1), but with the added issue of overt and covert discrimination. It *does* occur (I saw it for myself in the US south many years ago), although not quite as regularly as it used to. The fact that discrimination exists tends to reduce the inclination for women to train into such jobs, which I consider a shame. (For the record, I promoted a woman in a company in Florida and had a flaming row with a director who insisted that a woman could not possibly do the task. I won). I will also note this is not a slap at the USA - it exists just as much in Europe as there, far more in the East.

Note I was in the service, and no secrecy laws I know of prevent someone stating they are actually an engineer - unless perhaps they are engineers on a top secret project because no-one expects them to be engineers and therefore won't be watched by foreign intelligence!

Incidentally, my company is near Cambridge (UK) and we'll be looking for an EE graduate in the middle of next year. [We better be, I have too many jobs to do ;)]

Interesting discussion though.

Cheers

PeteS

To reiterate, one must not underestimate our hard-wired, primal predispositions.

Tell a young boy of 10 that his job in life will one day be to make devices propelled by an ignitied chemical that will kill minimum of

30,000 people at a time, and he is to spend the next 20 years of his life trying to figure out how to get that number as high as possible, say, 100,000, and he might say, "Cool. I can't wait to get started!!! Kill the enemy!!!"

Tell a young girl of 10 the same thing, and she might say..."Okay...and...why would I want to do that?"

Of course, these are generalities, to which there are always exceptions, but I remember very early in life that the disparity between boys and girls being quite apparent. There were things that boys liked doing and girls were simply not interested in, and vice-versa. There was no "school" for what you should like and dislike. Most of us (me and my siblings and all the kids I knew) were more or less on auto-pilot. We knew what we wanted, and we knew what we liked, and there was much pouting and crying if we did not get that.

-Le Chaud Lapin-

I think that is the answer to why there are not many women in electronics - most women just aren't interested.

Gareth.

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