Letters to the Editor
-
The data is real and it's not just family pressure
Talented, hard working, unmarried, childless female engineers and scientists in their 30s and 40s have discovered that the glass ceiling is surprisingly still intact. As the HBR article states, "Many women report mysterious career paths: fully 40% feel stalled." This observation is in line with my colleagues' and my own experiences. Many of us are extremely frustrated and some have considered leaving the field. Strangely, we thought that this battle had been won and expected to be on a level playing field at this stage of our careers.
We've observed that many technical women become very successful program managers. It pays better and has more advancement opportunities. So keeping women on the technical path is one difficulty, but another thing that is baffling is what happens to the brilliant women who choose to stay on the technical path.
In larger companies, we've seen that higher level positions are staffed by men, and no amount of outperforming them opens up opportunities for advancement. There are only so many positions, and if the current people block them, no one moves up. My colleagues at smaller companies have faced different challenges, such as men being brought in above them with no qualifications rather than promoting a woman, or facing a double standard that sets the bar excessively high for women.
Moving from lower levels to more senior roles is the primary gap that some of us face, as opposed to the family pressures and cultural barriers. There are many groups studying this issue, and I hope that they are able to identify the institutional barriers in addition to the family and cultural barriers commonly mentioned.
As for what can be done about the issue, most people have advised against trying to challenge institutional problems, and instead suggest leaving any company that will not promote women. I tend to prefer trying to fix the problem to leaving it to the next generation, but they're probably correct that promotion is not actually the best path to advancement for most people, women included, so perhaps if the attrition rate is sufficiently high, policy will change.
At the individual level, a very senior technical woman gave these two pieces of advice to reach the most senior levels: 1) pick a field and stay with it because you only get to the top of your field by specializing to some degree, and 2) occasionally be willing to take positions and roles that you might not "enjoy" because it will further your career. Of course, this won't fix the institutional barriers, but it makes it much harder to blame the women themselves.
At the end of the day, all we're asking for is fairness. Even if only 1% of scientists are women, that 1% should be treated fairly.
-
Oops
"Gender-biased", not "gender-biases". I really should preview my posts, dammit.
-
Work experiences
Angelbug, that's interesting it is exactly the opposite problem I have had. My college professors (all men) were indifferent, covertly sexist or overtly sexist. All of the women I know have been great, they just haven't been able to help me because they are either at the same level or junior. I have concentrated on the engineering side of things, more practical. Maybe that is the difference?
As a single and pretty cute female, I do get similar social responses from the married or attached men I work with as mentioned previously; I get sort of included socially at work, but never outside of work.
-
GISgal (and others) on icky high-tech jobs
I don't think there is anything that would have made that bearable for me. More flexibility would have helped, but still the job requirements are to be there at odd hours and there until the job is done.
A lot of people these days — men as well as women — telecommute to jobs very much like the one you described. In many cases the reason is simple: they have families and want — or need — to be able to spend more time at home with their children.
There is a certain juvenile period in life, characterized by a gung-ho willingness to take any orders and work any hours, no matter how idiotic, that is only well-suited to military recruits, undergraduates, and Google employees.
Past that point, it turns out that nobody is really happy with the expectation of slavish devotion to their jobs. Fathers, wonder of wonders, dislike being separated from their families almost as much as mothers. And so work habits change as technology (and cultural acceptance of technology) permits.
Maybe another way of saying the same thing would be: only boring, slavishly-devoted scientists and engineers have boring, slavishly-devoted work lives. Examples to the contrary abound.
So why do we jump so willingly to the conclusion that motherhood (or perhaps even parenthood in general) is incompatible with work in science and engineering?
Ruth Bader Ginsburg was once asked (somewhat apprehensively) by a young woman studying law how Ginsburg had coped with going through law school as a young mother.
Bader Ginsburg answered, without the slightest bit of her usual thoughtful hesitation, that it had been a great help to her, because "there is nothing like having to take your two-year-old to the emergency room in the middle of the night to put studying for an exam into proper perspective."
Her point, not to belabor the issue, was that one doesn't always do better work simply because one is obsessively committed.
So it's still not clear that the "unforgiving culture" argument is at the root of the attrition that Catherine Price's original citation describes. When these cultures were even more male than they are now — and by the given logic must have been even more unforgiving — women managed to break into them anyway.
Something else is happening.
-
Confusion of Cause and Effect
"... many U.S. science, engineering or technology companies are complaining about an overall lack of American talent ... Last June, Bill Gates, Intel's Craig Barrett and National Semiconductor's Ed Sweeney lobbied Congress to allow a higher number of foreign workers to be let in to do these jobs."
The defacto national policy to reduce science and engineering labor costs by a combination of explicit offshoring of technical jobs and large-scale importation of foreign talent has made these challenging fields far less attractive careers for 'American talent' of all genders. A secondary effect is that the national cultures of the vast majority of lower-wager imported talent are quite sexist, and the very large numbers of imported workers involved have made U.S. institutions notably less friendly to women. Many engineering fields have seen dramatic drops in female participation in the last decade. It's not a hold-over of '70s attitudes, it's a much more active backsliding due to a fundamental abandonment of long-term national social progess in pursuit of short-term cost reductions. Women's participation rates are the canary in the coal mine, indicating yet another pervasive hollowing-out of the American economy. The majority of graduates from U. S. academic institutions holding technical degrees do not find work in their fields. The fact that women scientists have a somewhat higher attrition rate compared to their male U.S. counterparts probably just shows that they are smarter or less romantically oblivious to the relative unattractiveness of modern technical careers. It's not something likely to be fixed by mandatory sensitivity training or one-week science camps for teenage girls, it's a much more fundamental reflection of poor national priorities. The squandering of so much potential talent, given the huge challenges facing our nation and the world, is a crime that we will all be punished for. We can only hope that the next U.S. administration will appreciate that we've been sleepwalking for many lost years, and that serious and focused investments in education and technology are vital to our national survival. Unfortunately, our current ruling elites seem to actually believe their own BS, which is the usual prelude to catastrophe. :-(