I have several women ex-engineers among my friends. The things they all have in common are:
a) The standard of engineering teaching was so poor during their formative years that they didn't stand a chance unless they had friendly help at home.
b) Those who actually became competent despite a), soon saw that there was no future in it (in the UK) and they were better-off in management/secretarial/retail employment.
Of course, both these factors apply equally to men, but there is one big difference at a key point. Most women still don't get the friendly help they need at that critical point where they are trying to learn the real basics and have to fly in the face of the curriculum-bound exam coaches who pass for teachers (with a few outstanding exceptions).
You were obviously lucky, most are not.
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I've spend a lot of time in Paris - I'll take the scope. BTW, I suspect your original question could be generalised to 'why do far more men than women play games?'. By games, I mean stuff like chess, sudoku etc.
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It's the art of persuading people to buy stuff that they may or may not really need, and fork over the maximum amount of money :-)
Ok, here's from a guy who did that for more than a decade and currently does it: You have to be really, really good at sales and marketing. You will be selling and marketing yourself all the time and can't even stop when you are working on a design. Because you have to make sure that the next design is lining up. Oh, and you'll also have to do some accounting, book keeping, purchasing, IT repairs, etc.
I don't know much. I only read bits and pieces about her whenever a winner of Nobel Prize in Chemistry is announced. But she seemed to possess an extremely rare quality not often found in women: she could stay on task for endless hours completely devoid of social interaction in quest of revelation. Great men have done this historically, also with tragic consequences, but nevertheless, with great "success". I think it is a price that great thinkers must pay. Science really is a lonely mistress. Madame Curie seemed to be one of the few women, who, if the entire world were destroyed in a Day of Total Annihilation, would still get up each day, go to her lab, and get work done. As mentioned, men have done this, but to see it done by a woman, at that level, was just so impressive.
Ten years ago, I really believed in the man/woman/everything-equal thing, but now I don't. I believe everyone should have equal freedom and equal opportunity, but I don't think there should be proactive encouragement to get people to stop doing things that they have a natural proclivity to do (choking rabbits notwithstanding).
I think if I were ever fortunate to have children, I would treat them differently.
If I had a son, I would do what my own father did - have him come to the workshop to help me, sit on the bench, help hold things down, dial
911 in case I get shocked and fall down and can't get up.
If I had a daughter, I would let her do whatever she wanted. ;)
The company I work for does commercial and military work in the areas of electronic sensors and communications. In my opinion ( I haven't done a survey) there are a lot more women in the commercial side than the military side. There also seem to be very few women working on RF and hardware compared to computers/software.
People working on military projects are often only bound to secrecy on the applications and details of the projects - they would not be prevented from giving general career advice.
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I got into electronics initially by a similar path - learning by necessity how to design and build my own electronic music synthesizers. I hadn't thought about it until I read your post, but I haven't run across many women synthesists either. I would have thought that electronic music with it's Art - Science confluence would be a natural for a technically inclined woman - and may indeed be - I just haven't run across any myself.
And how much of that is that traditionally, people went into the field because they enjoyed it as a hobby when kids. That brought them enthusiasm, and practical background. When people pursue something because it's a good "career choice", they lose that. Witness the homework questions we see here; surely they reflect someone who's only concerned with passing the class rather than true understanding.
FOr whatever reasons, that may be disappearing for men.
And women for whatever reasons, never really got into that. Yes, they are/were exceptions, but technical hobbies like astronomy and electronics and home chemistry have been mostly the realm of men.
ANd it shows. Someone who plays with electronics as a kid, even if they never take it up as a profession, are in a much better place than someone who doesn't. At the very least, there is a comfortableness about technology that is missing in other people.
I knew a woman who was afraid of trying to plug the keyboard and mouse into an old Mac Classic (when it was current), and of course, wasn't willing to try to take apart a faucet to find out why the water flow was so small. Note there is a difference between being able to fix something, and a willingness to approach something and hence learn something from it. If you don't have some level of willingness to approach something, you will always be dependent on others to do that work. ANd that woman liked the notion of being anti-technology, and it seemed more like since it was something out of her realm, it was dangerous.
One of the things I grasped when I spent a lot of time with a small child years ago was that small children are hackers. Everything is based on experience, they learn by experience and anything worth learning is right within their realm. They lack the language for learning to be more abstract. It's only later when they can talk that learning becomes isolated from their environment and abstract concepts can be conveyed, the more so when they land in school.
It's significant that Seymour Papert grasped this, and folded in what he learned from being in contact with adult hackers, and created Logo, a computer language that was about learning/hacking than about doing useful things,
And I don't know how this is lost to women as they get older. I would think experiencial based learning somehow better fits the traditional view of women's lives, yet somehow they do lose it, at least in terms of technology. Yes, the "standards" of society that tells women they can't deal in technology is bound to be burden, but I'm not sure that completely explains it all.
I know someone about ten years ago, when she was about ten, said something like "I want to try, but I'm afraid of making a mistake". And in that particular case, I think it was less about making a mistake but of making a mistake (as in erase a file on a hard drive) and getting in trouble for erasing it. That's a big burden. Yet, you often do learn when you make mistakes, and in a sense, the less you worry about making mistakes, the more willing you are to try things, and thus learn from those mistakes.
I've seen adults unwilling to try things differently because they were afraid of making mistakes (that was a woman that time too who said it), yet they've adopted someone else's plan without having an ability to determine the validity of the plan. And in the same sort of scenario, people then get puzzled when things don't work out as they had expected, "we followed the book", when the issue really is the book in the first place.
SOmeone I see that as an extension of the teacher sitting at the front of the class telling things isolated from need and often in an abstract fashion, which leads people to have a need to "learn first, do later" rather than gather information from the experience.
ANd somehow, helping the young to try things without worrying about making mistakes seems quite important to all this.
On Tue, 21 Nov 2006 09:39:51 -0800, Fred Stevens wrote: ...
It's programming - it's been handed down from generation to generation, and they don't even know they're doing it - it's just (to their mind) the natural order of things.
This is by no means a female-only thing - men do it as badly or even worse, which is why there are still wars.
We're certainly not scientists, but I use a lot of science, in the sense of dealing with physical reality quantitatively. We do have to compute flux, charge, energy, current, voltage, heat flow, thermal noise, pressures and forces, all that basic physical stuff, sometimes statically and sometimes as a very complex function of time. Control theory, dynamics, differential equations, number theory, statistics too.
Computer people and logic designers don't do much of this sort of thing. Most of what they do is qualitative.
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This is where the difference comes from. :-)
Cheers! Rich
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I think you have to find the subject (or similar subjects) interesting at a fairly early stage of your life to 'cut it' in the educational or work arena. This just doesn't happen too often - or at least it didn't used to.
At any later stage, the work must look pretty inane, when making career choices.
One other aspect of the "sales" thing isn't about money. It's that when important people think your stuff is good enough that they are willing to pay big bucks for it, and prefer it to somebody else's gear, it's a validation. You have to be very secure in the intrinsic value of your work to be satisfied with it for the art's sake alone. When Boeing buys 60 of them, it removes any lingering doubt.
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