An intern's view on the STEM industry

Good to hear that about half the interns were women. Not only is this a good sign about industry, but its a good sign about engineering departments, that they even have close to a 50/50 split in the pool of potential interns.

I also suspect that the gender gap will close somewhat as the older (predominantly male) working generations retire from senior positions and the younger working generations (with more parity) take their place. But I'm a little pessimistic about the pace, since average retirement age seems to be increasing for both good reasons (older people are healthier longer and just want to keep working) and bad ones (your average 60 year old can't afford to retire). Gen X and later generations will not "take over" the apex positions when you would expect them to, so we can't expect the parity in later generations to be reflected at the top for a few more decades.

In the mid-sixties when I was an undergraduate engineering major, there was not a single woman in any of my engineering classes. In graduate school there was one. When I began teachingcivil engineering in 1973 there were about 10 women in a student body of 160.

We had a co-op program, so every student had to complete two paid internships, one of 5 months, the other of seven months, as part of the degree requirements. Since many of the available positions were in construction firms, women faced a very tough work situation, because the construction workers were often dismissive of any suggestions from women regarding work-related issues. In addition many of the female students reported that parents and school counselors had actively discouraged them from becoming engineers.

In 1988 I became the department chair, and about 15-20% of the students were women, but only one faculty member. By the time I retired in 2006, 40% of our students were women and about 25% of the faculty were women. Now for the first time, the department chair is a woman. Slow progress, but the trend is clear. Catching up on wages will take a while longer, as the first comment notes.

I have had nearly a lifetime of experience in academic environments and in industry as well as some in the Navy. My background is in physics.

If there is one overriding lesson to be taken away from that experience, it would be that one should have an extremely solid understanding of the fundamental sciences that are the foundation of whatever you are doing. Don't cut corners here. A PhD is just the beginning, not the pinnacle, of one's education. You must be willing to branch out into other areas.

There are advantages and disadvantages to working in specific environments, whether they be academia, industry, or in government labs. In every case you will have to be a good communicator of ideas and be able to write research and/or engineering development proposals. Every environment works on a budget; and every environment depends on people who understand the trends and know the people in the areas in which they are working. You have to be in touch and develop a vision for the future of whatever it is that you are doing.

Management, unless they are visionaries who have deep, fundamental knowledge of their fields, is most often short-sighted and looking at paying stockholders, so it is often up to the research and development teams to have a clear vision of where their work is going.

I have seen some horrible management decisions at a major corporation that ran a solid company into bankruptcy because they used their resources to try to squelch competition rather than apply their resources to being on the leading edge of a technological revolution.

And I also saw the devastating effects of layoffs on engineers who, over the course of their careers, became essentially one-trick ponies. They had nowhere to go and nothing else they could do. Those who survive such events were those whose fundamental scientific backgrounds allowed them to easily transition to another subfield.

One of the best pieces of advice I can offer - whether you work in academia or in industry or for the government - is to always take advantage of the opportunities to bring yourself up to speed in another field; in fact, seek out those opportunities. Don't confine yourself to what you did for your MS or PhD. Branch out and learn a new field every 5 to 7 years or so. Don't pass up opportunities to work on interdisciplinary teams.

It may be a little scary in the beginning, but if you make sure you are solid in the fundamentals of your science, you will find the experiences not only interesting and challenging, you will be able to find new jobs far more easily in hard economic times. Don't allow yourself to become a one-trick pony; keep on learning.

This advice applies whether you are male of female; anyone who is solid on the fundamentals of their science, and who is willing to branch out from there, will find opportunities in almost any economic environment.

And, by the way, even if you are in a scientific area that doesn't have a heavy emphasis on math and statistics, bring yourself up to speed in those areas as well. Those are universal skills.

One other piece of advice; technicians and administrative staff can be among your best allies or your worst enemies. Many of them have been on the job far longer than you have; and they have valuable skills and insights you can learn from. Treat them well; and don’t talk down to them. Be aware of but don't get bogged down in office politics.

Its not a origins issue but I have an opinion.
Why do people deserve positions/money based on identity in your philosophy? Why is there a right and wrong answer about which sex gets what? would you really repent if women were in the majority? i know vets are mostly women now and other scienceish subjects.!
you are saying its not about human beings but a more important identity determines who should and is desirable to get what in these kobs?
You are saying you wish the men failed or the men there were not there? How is this not sexist?
Why not they get those positions if they dreamed, worked, studied, and so on.? Why are you not encouraging men or boys? Its as if you wouldn't just to bring parity!
Why do yop presume women can compete with men in high intellectual things? Or why do you presume women can't outcompete men? Would you really say we need more men to bring parity if women shot ahead?
Its the moral contract in our nations that people deservem with our applause and encourage, to get what they can if fair and square!
PEOPLE. Its not the moral contract to desire, prefere, demand, only be happy, when its the right answer based on identity by someone in power deciding what the right answer is.
More power to the men. More power to the women. More power to the people and me.
If identity brings legitimacy to a profession and society then its not about freedom for individuals .
Its only the freedom of indivudals that gives womem the modern right and acceptance to professions since men created the society and didn't owe women equality. It was a gift. Not a natural right.
It was given on the basis of equality of citizenship. Not equality of sexual identity.
Would you also bring this concept of parity to ethnicity and class and region and urban/rural and poltical persuasion???
If so don't say so or you might get fired. Certainly here in Canada. Many examples

I understand the instinct of percentages and to think its not fair if women are fewr but thats not a rule or right answer.
Its not a rool of the dice or a cross section of society.
You really are saying you reject a man if there isn't the right number of women. Its profound rejection of a soul.

By the way the salary difference would be there since the females , in a curve would not be in a cross section of the salaries.
They are not just less in percentage but that would be in the lower areas. Its not injustice.

I bet there is lots of affirmative action to interfere with the men and move the women up based on a philosophy of what they deserve as opposed to what they deserve on merits.

Most people interested in origin subjects, with no money or position involved, are men. Fair and square as a reward of interest and effort.
Thats my opinion. Why am i wrong??

Emily,

The standard practice here is to let Robert have one post, encourage everyone to ignore it (since it is usually incoherent) and then dump any further comments or any responses to the bathroom wall, since Bobby refuses to post there. I urge you to follow this policy. It's your choice, but experience has shown that Booby is only interested in disrupting real conversations about science. He never answers any questions, even though he asks where he is wrong and he refuses to learn how to use capital letters (even i). It's useless to try to correct either his grammar or logic, both are apparently beyond his capabilities.

Poor Byers. It would be odd if he were ever on the right side of the argument (or coherent for that matter). As it stands, Emily's well written post isn't really an argument. It is the presentation of evidence that further demonstrates what we already knew, women are underrepresented in STEM fields but that things are improving. Only someone like Byers would think this trend is a bad thing. I wonder if he is an MRA as well as a YEC.

When I was a graduate student, 50 years ago, it was common for a group of male biology graduate students meeting in a small seminar with some older professor to be told by him that, personally, he didn't believe that women belonged in science, since after all that education they would just get married and drop out to have kids.

We were mostly oblivious about issues of feminism then, as well as not brave about contradicting the older professors. So we did not contradict the old guys, and may even have grunted our agreement. Those are not proud memories.

This is a very old observation, but in 1977 I was "2 timing" with a post-doc fellowship (for weak money), and a night shift industry job in polymer chemistry.

There were two major differences I saw at the time;

1) If I wanted equipment, or chemical stock in my industrial laboratory I only had to order it. In my academic job there were several committees of over-the-hill nitwits that had to be bypassed. Even when my grant money covered the purchase of needed materials, these stupid senile "faculty review committee" members were able to interfere.

However, in the industrial labs (specifically the National Research Materials Cooperation then owned by the Celanese Corp), I was repeatedly expected to lie, and fake data. I always refused, and I lasted about 6 months. I quit just before I was fired.

It isn't just engineering. When I was a biology major at a small private college in 1980, the school had a huge four year nursing program (unusual in the day when most RN programs were closer associate degrees) but there were no women in the pre-med program. My favorite professor, an immigrant from Kerala, taught Anatomy and Physiology in the Nursing program and prided himself on weeding out any less than dedicated students from the program.

He also encouraged his best students to think about becoming doctors instead of nurses, and so two of my classmates became the first women from my school to be accepted into medical school and become MDs. The idea of a female doctor isn't odd today, but the point of my story is that STEM departments should be more than just welcoming to women and minorities. They should be actively seeking promising students who, because of their backgrounds may not consider themselves suitable for such programs, and convincing them they can succeed in a STEM program.

Joe Felsenstein said: When I was a graduate student, 50 years ago, it was common for a group of male biology graduate students meeting in a small seminar with some older professor to be told by him that, personally, he didn't believe that women belonged in science, since after all that education they would just get married and drop out to have kids. We were mostly oblivious about issues of feminism then, as well as not brave about contradicting the older professors. So we did not contradict the old guys, and may even have grunted our agreement. Those are not proud memories.

Mike Elzinga said: We've come a long way since then.

When I was in under grad geology, my class had 4 women. The class behind me had 10 or 12 and then the third class had about 40. All out of classes of 80 or so people. Now that I am back in school, most of my science classes are more than half women, primarily because of our nursing program. Of course my anatomy prof and I wonder how you can become a nurse without passing anatomy?