David Gerard wrote:
Also, you know how any technical field laments the strange lack of women? Technical fields have had that strange lack of women for a hundred years and still there's no solution to what the heck is culling them so early.
- d.
This is not anything but anecdotal, however it may shed some light: when I was in high school, I signed up for wood shop - and the instructor ignored me. It was as though I were inaudible and invisible. He would hand out materials for an assignment, except I didn't get any. If stood in front of him with my hands out, I did receive a cold stare until I moved - but not a scrap of wood. If I reached for a tool, he grabbed it first or took it out of my hands. If I asked a question, there was no reply - none. This is not an exaggeration. I don't know how bad it is now, but then... it was bad. I dropped out of shop. To this day I don't know much about practical woodworking. In recent years, I have observed meetings where women were ignored or dismissed. If a man said something people responded to his words - if a woman said something then she got a verbal pat on the head. In my office, where there were 57 people, mostly men, the women cleaned the kitchen/break room always, and made the coffee more often than men - including the head of the office, a woman with a doctorate and 35 years in her field. It was easier than dealing with trying to get the men to do any of it. And this is in software development, a field with less earnings gap than almost any other field in the US. So why do women leave technical fields? I'm guessing it is because they are full of men, men with bias. I don't want to sound misogynistic here - certainly some men were more biased, some less, some not at all, and some were feminists. But they still didn't clean the kitchen.
-kc-