
Why Do So Many Women Who Study Engineering Leave the Field? - saycheese
https://hbr.org/2016/08/why-do-so-many-women-who-study-engineering-leave-the-field
======
mjfl
I think it's a little unfair to single out engineering. A lot of jobs with
large salaries tend to skew towards men:

Women are only 16% of mergers and acquisitions lawyers (the big time money
guys):
[https://www.law.berkeley.edu/files/bclbe/Women_in_M_and_A(1)...](https://www.law.berkeley.edu/files/bclbe/Women_in_M_and_A\(1\).pdf)

Women are still only 32% of physicians in 2010, despite "large advances":
[https://thinkprogress.org/despite-growing-number-of-
female-d...](https://thinkprogress.org/despite-growing-number-of-female-
doctors-and-lawyers-womens-pay-still-lags-behind-9b43f25c0335#.svn93bmdo)

Women make up 5% of stock traders, hedge fund managers:
[http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2012/06/19/would-
more-...](http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2012/06/19/would-more-women-
as-traders-make-a-difference/)

Women are only 14.6% of CEOS, 8.1% of top earners, and 4.6% of fortune 500
CEOS:
[https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/women/reports/2014/0...](https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/women/reports/2014/03/07/85457/fact-
sheet-the-womens-leadership-gap/)

~~~
chongli
Now the question is: do these fields discriminate against women? Do women just
not prefer these fields? Or do men crowd into high-paying fields?

One claim I've seen mentioned all over the place is that pay goes down when
women enter a previously male-dominated field [0]. Sure, that's one way of
looking at it. Was the question asked that men are actually leaving a field
because the pay is going down?

[0] [https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/20/upshot/as-women-take-
over...](https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/20/upshot/as-women-take-over-a-male-
dominated-field-the-pay-drops.html)

~~~
mpweiher
I'll take (e) All of the above.

There is strong evidence that women do not prefer these fields. There is also
strong evidence that high pay is much more important for men than it is for
women, so men will take less fulfilling jobs (and push harder and take more
risks).

There is also some evidence of discrimination, though I haven't seen any
evidence that it is stronger than in other fields, that it is systematic
rather than individual. Certainly a _lot_ of what is currently being claimed
as horrible discrimination in tech doesn't hold up to scrutiny.

------
sporkenfang
One of my coworkers, when he thinks people aren't doing a good job, calls them
ladies or girls. He also doesn't listen to the women on our team, insists on
pair programming with them if he has shared assignments with them instead of
splitting those assignments into subtasks like he does with the other guys,
and is in general a nice dude to the other guys and treats the women like
they're junior. If the rest of the men on the dev team behaverd like that, I
honestly bet there would be no women on our team. I'm not sure how to approach
him about it, but the women we work with don't seem to want to take
assignments with him or interact with him, for fairly obvious reasons I guess.

~~~
beachstartup
sexism aside, that's textbook un-professional behavior and i wouldn't accept
it from a female calling people little boys as a pejorative, either.

tell your manager about it. it's part of the manager's job to deal with stuff
like this. if your manager refuses to do anything about it, either tell your
coworker yourself or leave.

~~~
sporkenfang
Trouble is, we are a fifteen person startup and my boss is a friend of that
guy's from way back. I honestly would feel odd mentioning it. There's no way
to couch it in "what if a hypothetical person..." because he's known this guy
for longer than the company has existed.

~~~
azernik
Sit down and talk with the boss. Sure, he may find it harder to intervene when
it's a friend, but he may also have a _lot_ more leverage over a friend than
he would over an average employee - namely, the threat of shaming among their
shared friends.

~~~
sporkenfang
The problem I'm having with it is he has to know this guy does this. It's not
exactly subtle or I likely would not have noticed. He's been in the room
before when it happened, and the two of them go out for drinks on Fridays and
such all the time. I think it is not a problem for him or he would have pulled
the guy aside and told him.

~~~
raspasov
You should probably find a new startup to join/start.

~~~
sporkenfang
That's my plan actually. Once I have nothing to lose I'm going to tell the guy
he's being an asshole to the women engineers and ask if he'd consider not
doing that because it's a shitty way to treat anyone. Preferably with boss
present.

------
madengr
Low pay,shitty benefits, demands to work long hours.

My wife makes HALF of what I make at the SAME employer. She does semiconductor
and microelectronics back-end process engineering. I do RF/Microwave circuit
design.

She transferred divisions a couple of years ago. In her old division (mine)
there were TWO female engineers out of probably 100.

It's not constrained to woman though, as 80% of those who graduate with an
engineering degree are no longer practicing engineering by 40 years old.

She wants to quit every day. We can easily live off my salary, but the
additional salary is good for college savings (2 kids) and retirement savings.

She want's to quit and quilt full time; yes quilt. She is really good at that,
applying all the engineering knowledge to CNC quilting, tricky geometry on
piecing, etc.

May have to do with woman, in general, being more risk averse than men. Also
less agressive for self promotion. At my employer, you must promote yourself
and make your argument in front of a review panel.

~~~
dongslol
What do you do?

~~~
nfbush
> I do RF/Microwave circuit design

~~~
dongslol
Thanks. (It was edited in.)

------
hashkb
> Kimberly wrote, “Two girls in a group had been working on the robot we were
> building in that class for hours, and the guys in their group came back in
> and within minutes had sentenced them to doing menial tasks while the guys
> went and had all the fun in the machine shop.”

I see this all the time. Women don't feel able to confront men about things
like this. Without speculating as to why, I'll say that when I've seen women
hit back ("like a man would") it often works. It sucks but you sort of have to
engage men on their level, which means meeting aggression with aggression.
People are always going to try to take advantage of each other, and men
respect aggression.

~~~
parennoob
Note that this is a self-report. Without actual data, it loses a large part of
its significance.

Here is _my_ self-report (also admittedly insignificant) -- when I was at
college doing machine shop projects, there would be few girls who would
enthusiastically volunteer for the machine shop. So the guys would have some
misguided chivalrous instinct to say "Okay, I'll do the machine shop work",
because they thought _they were expected to_. Even most American men I know
today would be diffident about saying something like, "Hey Jessica, I notice
you've been signing up for doing reports for the last two projects; do you
want to work in the machine shop for this one instead while I do the reports?"

The outcome of this is the exact same as your reported incident, but the
motivations are different. My solution would be to make sure women know that
they are expected and encouraged to sign up for tasks involving a lot of
physical labor and possibly danger (a machine shop isn't the safest of places,
even with all the precautions).

Social attitudes can make a lot of difference, and the traditional social
attitude in the US heavily favors males doing physically demanding and "dirty"
tasks more than women. This affects both men and women when splitting up
tasks, but it is somewhat unfair to blame it on dated stereotypes of men.

~~~
mpweiher
Very well put! I see a lot of situations like these that certainly have
multiple and nuanced interpretations being consistently interpreted (and
vastly overinterpreted) in one direction.

------
js8
I am little tired of this. The research is interesting but there should be
more consideration for alternate hypotheses.

There is lot of evidence that girls are biologically wired to prefer people
jobs, while boys prefer jobs with things. I really recommend Steven Pinker
talk:
[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=n691pLhQBkw](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=n691pLhQBkw)

But even if this was cultural, who are we to dictate preferences of people? I
think the whole nature vs nurture debate is a non-sequitur.

The article talks specifically about three reasons:

1\. Self-doubt. It's well known that it affects girls more. But maybe it's how
the brain presents risk-aversion to us? Or maybe it's actually needed for the
job? Computers can be unforgiving.

2\. Assholes. Sexism goes both ways. I label an asshole as an asshole, a girl
might generalize it to "men are sexist".

3\. Interesting work. Not much people in computing do world-changing work, you
have to fight for it. It seems to me that there was a tacit expectation that
someone will bring interesting work to you, which is IMHO false. The fact is
nobody is preventing those girls to have a Github account.

I am all for removing barriers, but at some point, when we just can't see any,
we will have to declare that it is a matter of personal preferences. If people
are indeed happier in some other job, why not just call it a day?

~~~
js8
By the way, research shows that guys think they are more intelligent while
girls think they are less intelligent than they really are. I would like to
propose a theory of why intelligent girls have more doubts about their
intelligence than intelligent guys.

High intelligence is an asset. You don't want your competition (in social
situation) to know that you're smart. So it's generally better for you to
believe you're not that smart, yet be in reality.

However, for males, this is different; they need to show off to attract
females. So they need to display their intelligence (because it's a desirable
trait) despite the above. That's why they act as they were smarter than they
really are.

It's similar to why in many birds, males are often wildly colored, while
females have masking similar to the environment.

------
paulddraper
> it’s been estimated that nearly 40% of women who earn engineering degrees
> either quit or never enter the profession.

Fantastic! That's much, much better than the 73% rate of college graduates not
entering the field of their major
[https://www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/news/wonk/wp/2013/05/...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/news/wonk/wp/2013/05/20/only-27-percent-
of-college-grads-have-a-job-related-to-their-major/)

Of course, maybe men in STEM have an even lower rate. IDK, and this article
certainly doesn't seem to know that important piece of data either.

~~~
azernik
Comparing engineering-only numbers to all-graduates numbers is not useful.
All-graduates numbers are strongly affected by the very low number of jobs
available for most humanities and (to a lesser extent) social sciences majors.

This article doesn't have numbers on men leaving the engineering workforce,
but this one [1] does. The numbers aren't exactly comparable, since it doesn't
count people that never even start working in engineering, and is from 2009.
It claims about 10% of men leave engineering by age 30, compared to around 25%
of women.

[1] [http://machinedesign.com/editorial-comment/more-women-
leave-...](http://machinedesign.com/editorial-comment/more-women-leave-
engineering-earn-degrees-same-rate-men-how-break-bad-news-screami)

------
Cerium
Here is a short story about this. My wife has a computer science degree, but
has since left the field to become a teacher. She worked at Foxit in software
test before we got married. When we got married she moved to live with me. She
doesn't like working with computers much, so she got a job at an after school
program as a teacher. That went well, now she is going to school to get her
teaching credential. For a while she talked about staying in software since
the pay is better than in teaching. I like engineering and make enough money
for both of us to have what we need. I think everyone should have a job they
enjoy.

~~~
extra88
Why would someone who doesn't like working with computers much get a computer
science degree?

Perhaps she was interested in computer work more like what she did while
pursuing her degree but isn't interested in it if it means more of the QA-type
work she did at Foxit. But if she finds teaching engaging, that's certainly
also good for society, the field needs more engaged teachers with a STEM
background and mindset, even if they're not teaching a STEM class per se.

~~~
Cerium
She didn't know what to study, and one of her friends was studying computer
science.

------
gibbitz
I found it fascinating that the question we're asking is wrong. It shouldn't
be "Why do women leave engineering?" it should be "Why do men stay in higher
proportions?". It seems that being arrogant makes working as an engineer more
palatable. I know I suffer from this problem and many of the men I know in
engineering do too. So between dealing with self-doubt (the imposter syndrome)
and being around a bunch of oblivious ego maniacs, why would anyone stick
around?

Honestly, this article just fed my confirmation bias. I have (ashamedly)
believed that the reason there were so few women around me in engineering
(specifically software engineering) is because they were too smart to be lured
into the mind-numbing, sedentary, OCD-laden field by money alone. Leaving the
number of women in the field approximately the same as the number of men who
genuinely enjoy it. The rest of us are just out for a paycheck that most women
deem "not worth it" (especially if the pay is not equal -- separate but
related issue). I know that there are many cases that are not this simplistic,
but in my experience, I have only seen women leave teams I was on for the same
reasons as men (better position/pay elsewhere). I have never seen or heard of
any Mad Men style harassment or the like in my immediate environment. I'm not
sure if the coloration I have of normalcy is skewed by my experience or if the
coverage of the gender gap has colored everyone else's. I'm sure this is what
we're all asking ourselves in this industry the more this topic is covered.
Regardless, it seems that we can't have these kinds of conversations as a
country until pay is equal.

------
neivin
Here's a question: Which sex of all the sexually dimorphic animals on the
Earth can give birth?

Answer: Females.

The simple answer to all these bait questions is that women can and do have
children, which is time consuming and whether people deny it or not, mothers
are far more integral in raising a child than fathers.

Naturally, spending less time in the workplace leads to them falling behind
even though they might have started on equal or greater footing as their male
counterparts.

~~~
mhluongo
Then why is this trend so different between disciplines? And why does it
impact STEM and higher-salary jobs more? What about in other countries, like
Malaysia, where IIRC there are more women in engineering (or at least computer
science)?

You might want to revisit your thinking.

------
heisenbit
While I think the article is primarily a collection on anecdotes the number
describing the issue are amazing:

> Women make up 20% of engineering graduates, but it’s been estimated that
> nearly 40% of women who earn engineering degrees either quit or never enter
> the profession. Clearly, some elementary and high school reforms are
> working, but those at the college level are not.

There is obviously a mismatch. I'm wondering however to what extent the issue
is at the receiving engineering job market end and what can be attributed to
the pushing school side? A lot positive can be said about scholarly
achievements of women but we all know there always has been limited
correlation of grades with any genders success in job. Maybe some women are
directed towards engineering, succeeding initially when they are faced with
school type exercises? Maybe the selection at university is tuned to be hard
for men and works indirectly as a selection for other traits than math?

In any case considering the magnitude of numbers I'd like to see a breakdown
of where women exit. University, first year at job, 5 years and after first
child. The article does not help here.

------
brighteyes
There are obviously many factors here, but one major one is

> women, more often than men, add that they want to become socially
> responsible engineers, working to solve major problems and making a
> difference in people’s lives—which is consistent with other research showing
> that women are significantly more likely than their male counterparts to be
> interested in engineering work that is “socially conscious” (i.e.,
> specializations such as environmental vs. electrical engineering).

Electrical engineering and computer science and similar fields are, for the
most part, just not a great fit for people with such aspirations. There are
some nonprofits in the area, of course, but overall the industry is very
profit-oriented. Most of us optimize ad revenue or something like that. We
spend most of our days writing code instead of interacting with people whose
lives we improve.

------
badsock
And yet, a significant portion of the comments on HN when this topic comes up:

    
    
      * Claim that there is no problem, and/or
      * Condemn any action to address this as anti-egalitarian because it treats men and women differently

~~~
amorphid
I do my very best to treat people equally. For me, that is done simply by to
focusing on what it takes to get the job done, trying to not be an asshole,
and expecting everyone I work with to do the same. Is there more to it than
than?

~~~
badsock
If some people don't want to put any effort into making society more just,
that's fine. Just so long as they don't get in the way of people that do, or
take pot shots from the sidelines without offering any alternatives.

------
Alex3917
Any studies looking at the career trajectories of self-taught developers? Not
to equate web development with actual engineering or whatever, but I think it
would be interesting.

~~~
gravypod
My initial impression is that if you have the motivation to self-teach you
have the motivation needed to breeze past anyone going to university. You'll
see a higher rate of acceptance into the job market vs college grads.

On another hand I don't think you'll only be looking at web-devs. Self study
is everywhere: machining, mechanics, and other engineering like low level
firmware work.

No colleges teach "important" skills like "how do I make this 300k line C
program compile into a binary under 512k" or "how do I write this program so
that it can run on this 50kHz CPU".

