Prospective Female Engineer

A friend's daughter is asking for my advice to be an Electrical Engineer. My initial reaction is to say, "Get an EE education, but don't expect to be a successful EE in the US". In my opinion, a successful engineer should be involved in the manufacturing/production process, which is dying in the US.

But I am a very negative person, so I need my friends and colleagues here to balance it out. Please give me some positive ideas to encourage her. I am going to collect and summarize the expected flood of opinions here. Thanks.

Reply to
linnix
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Make sure she understands that she will need a masters degree to get the same job a boy will get with a bachelor's degree.

good luck to her in these united states.

donald

Reply to
donald

[snip]
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I don't think so. In my consulting practice I'm inside many different companies all over the US. There are female engineers (and managers) everywhere.

My youngest daughter is a chemical engineer and is in upper-upper management.

...Jim Thompson

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|  James E.Thompson, P.E.                           |    mens     |
|  Analog Innovations, Inc.                         |     et      |
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Reply to
Jim Thompson

Please re-read the OPs question.

He is asking about "Electrical Engineer"s.

That is very nice that your youngest daughter is doing well.

Do you have any kids in the EE field ??

donald

Reply to
donald

"...inside many different companies all over the US." were EE's.

Oldest daughter (46) is a Republican politician/party chair ;-)

Youngest daughter (43) ... chemist.

Oldest son (38) is a software guru.

Youngest son (would be 36, but died of colon cancer) was an M.E.

...Jim Thompson

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|  James E.Thompson, P.E.                           |    mens     |
|  Analog Innovations, Inc.                         |     et      |
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Reply to
Jim Thompson

Suggest looking into getting started on Electrician apprenticeship as a parallel track (as her summer/vacation job, say) - aiming for the Master Electrician ticket - can pay as well or better, and harder to outsource the work.

--
Cats, coffee, chocolate...vices to live by
Reply to
Ecnerwal

There is nothing intrinsically different about women that keeps them from becoming (good or bad) electrical engineers. I believe that it's a cultural issue that results in most EEs being men.

In my 30 years of design, I've only worked with one female component-level designer. She was not very competent. Recently, however, I worked with a female FPGA (hdl) designer. She is absolutely superb and would be my first choice for any project.

On the other hand, there now seems to be about a 50/50 split in the software world between male and female engineers.

The we-don't-want-females "old school" engineers and managers are rapidly retiring and/or croaking. So, in my opinion, there's not much standing in your friend's daughter's way if she want to become an EE.

Regardless of gender, to be a good EE you need to really be interested in it. In fact, I would go so far as to say that electronics needs to be your hobby, too.

Bob

Reply to
BobW

Donald asked:

You said:

So the answer is NO, you do not have any kids which are EEs.

Ok

donald

Reply to
donald

So? What does that prove?

You clearly have not enough exposure to know...

How about you run a survey at Honeywell, Minneapolis, for instance?

...Jim Thompson

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|  James E.Thompson, P.E.                           |    mens     |
|  Analog Innovations, Inc.                         |     et      |
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Reply to
Jim Thompson

Interesting; I've had exactly the same experience.

But there's absolutely no reason a girl shouldn't want to go to college and get an ee degree. There's lots of demand for ee's in the USA these days.

I visited the Cornell EE school a couple of times in the last few years, and it looked roughly 50:50 to me. But on the other hand, nearly all of my customer technical contacts are male.

John

Reply to
John Larkin

I can only emphasize Bob's comment: They must have hobby exposure. Universities alone do not create a good engineers. Especially not these days. We need people with serious practical HW skills, regardless of gender.

Not for me. For example, the engineer at one client who does the really tough designs that others wouldn't touch with a 10ft pole (switch mode converters) is a woman. So is the director of engineering. In my whole career I have never seen gender discrimination and I've worked with female engineers at almost every client. Met my wife during my first job and she never traveled without pliers and screwdriver in her purse :-)

To Linnix: I'd tell here that she should do what she feels is her calling. But she should be prepared for tough roads ahead and preferably also be open to self-employment. EE is not the path to get rich, with a few exceptions of course. If wealth is the goal the better careers would be lawyer or dentist.

As for being involved in production, yes, it's necessary but it is no problem if production is 10,000 miles away. That is the case for almost all my projects. Got to be willing to travel though, no doubts about that. So don't become an EE if you are afraid of flying or something like that. And that does at times include a trip in that old Coconut Airways DC-3.

--
Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com/
Reply to
Joerg
[snip]

A very fine, RELIABLE, airplane ;-)

I flew in them when they were the work-horse of the airline industry.

Then came the DC-7 ;-)

...Jim Thompson

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|  James E.Thompson, P.E.                           |    mens     |
|  Analog Innovations, Inc.                         |     et      |
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Reply to
Jim Thompson

Oh, they are. But the maintenance efforts aren't always on par with US standards. Flying is also different. Once while talking to a pilot during a really bad thunderstorm in Puerto Rico a DC-3 lumbered in. "I just cannot believe this! Are they out of their minds?" the guy said.

My wife once flew back from India and the pilot stopped at all sorts of little airports, got out a stepladder, took an engine cowling off, tightened this, that and the other thing with a wrench, hopped back in, and off they went. Until something else started to leak.

Them's were the more spartan days:

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--
Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com/
Reply to
Joerg

Absolute hogwash! Females are in high demand. Actually, all competent engineers are.

No luck needed. Skills pay bills.

--
Keith
Reply to
krw

Then came the DC-9 and DC-10. :-(

--
Keith
Reply to
krw

When I was an undergraduate I used to get fly home to Tasmania in a DC3 pretty much every Easter - a very busy time and they'd dig out the DC-3's to carry the extra load. For the rest of the year I'd get home in about 2/3 the time in a Fokker Friendship (F27 - Fairchild also made them under license)

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I'd been flying in DC3s since I was about four and enjoyed the opportunity to appreciate a vintage aircraft.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Reply to
bill.sloman

If she has a good idea of what is involved in being an electrical engineer - which isn't the same thing as an electronic engineer, which is what this user group is about - you shouldn't discourage her.

There aren't all that many female electrical engineers, which will make it more difficult for her to get ahead in the profession, and she should get hold of a copy of Virginia Valian's "Why So Slow" (ISBN-10:

0262720310 ISBN-13: 978-0262720311) which spells out the problems.

Ginny originally published it in 1999 but it is still selling well - Amazon have got some 58 new and used copies available at the moment, though if some cheapskate university decides that it is time to clean up their attitude to gender inequalities every copy can vanish overnight. Ginny will give you a seminar on the subject if you pay her enough - she's got better things to do and when last I heard was asking $9,000 dollars per seminar, which kept the demand down to a level she was willing to put up with.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Reply to
bill.sloman

Plenty of female engineers where I work (In Australia), they do fine. The only problem they seem to encounter is once they have young children, part time work doesn't suit highly committing engineering jobs. Or so it seems from a number of women I know that have opted out for this reason. The EEO people may have a field day with this, but it's reality.

Reply to
Bruce Varley

"Jim Thompson" skrev i en meddelelse news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com...

DC-3 was designed to land with a Tank inside on an unprepared field. That's a safety margin right there.

When I worked with RADAR systems one of the systems (combined salesperson / site-surveyer / fixer) guys told of a DC-3 trip in west afrika where the pilot took a roll of gaffa with him on the walkaround - to patch bullet holes.

My colleague said that he much preferred a DC-3 flown by an "... old black guy who takes the thing on like his jacket to a new DC-10 with to new-in-the-box pilots in it"!

In some places in central america they would even have a regular DC-3 fligth schedule: Uneven days, the guerilla would fly, Even days, the government forces fly. So they do not have to meet. Bad for business all round.

Reply to
Frithiof Andreas Jensen

...and you make sure to keep her happy cuz getting a gal like that is hitting the jackpot for a nerd. 8-)

...and, of course, the hardware-toting was before pretense trumped reality.

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Reply to
JeffM

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