The Hidden Gender Gap

This blog is probably gonna be a little controversial. However, I do think that it's a serious issue and I feel sufficiently passionate about it to have an opinion. I read a couple of interesting articles today, with regards to a hidden gender gap in engineering. It isn't about the number of students who're enrolled in engineering, but the number of women who find themselves at the high-end of the engineering profession.

The article claims that most people agree that most technology entrepreneurs are from an engineering background but there are very few women who end up as technology entrepreneurs. A follow up article comes up with some ideas as to why such a gap exists. Of the various reasons, a few caught my attention.

There are much less self-taught female engineers than male ones. Women seem less inclined to learn engineering just for fun and are more likely to see it as a job. This seems to imply a lack of passion, which is further enforced by two other reasons: that women are attracted to careers where they can help others (for instance medicine) and women are more social creatures (rather than simply pushing forward as 'lone wolves' driven by individual curiosity). These reasons result in less women getting a chunk of the technology entrepreneur pie.

Now, I'd like to add is some of my own personal observations. In the engineering department here, there are a large number of female undergraduates. However, when we go into the list of post-graduates, the number drops dramatically. A quick (unscientific) scan of the various engineering groups will show about a 10% female population among PhD students. This has alwas been a worrying thing in my opinion.

I've always liked to ask fresher engineers why they chose to do engineering. Although most of them will give some lame reason such as a good career path and what nots, hardly any females actually say that they do it because they have a love/passion for engineering while some of the males do say that they like engineering (ie, building stuff). This is not good at all.

Who knows how much we're missing out on with so few females among our ranks. I'm sure that they'd be able to contribute many interesting opinions and ideas to our discussions. Sad leh. Maybe the solution to all this is to have all the male engineers, train up their daughters to be technically inclined!! So, instead of letting our daughters play with dolls, teach them logic and analysis skills. And hope that they'd end up with a passion for understanding how things work. That's an idea that I might try in the future!

http://www.venturebeat.com/contributors/2007/01/02/the-hidden-engineering-gender-gap/

http://www.venturebeat.com/contributors/2007/01/04/a-modest-proposal/

* gfdl image from wikipedia *