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| Diversity, Equity and Inclusion |
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| paulca:
--- Quote from: sokoloff on August 22, 2022, 02:26:58 pm ---I would respectfully suggest that perhaps nudging it back towards the impacts on engineering, the workforce/jobs, and related may help to keep it productive and in-range for the site. --- End quote --- The other thing we should, and have in this thread occasionally, consider how we DO attract more women (as an industry). I believe there will be bias still, but listening to the women in tech movement, or rather speakers for it, from actual women IN tech can reveal topics which impact women that men might not even see. These could also be things that men are not delibrately doing it and don't even know it irks them. It might even be things we would happily change and do differently. One that struck me, which re-occurred in half a dozen talks from women was in how tech is presented from an early age towards women. One commented that in high school before a career's fair, her Maths teacher mentioned that she had the aptitude of an engineer and should consider it as a career. She said her mind went blank thinking of what exactly an "engineer" was and settled on a picture of a old fat man with a beard driving a train. Thus highlighting an issue of education which has been for one reason or another prevailant for far too long. How many women WOULD have been engineers if they had been correctly sold it, correctly offered it and supported towards it, which instead had a malformed skewed limited view of what exactly STEM subjects there are. Also, we need to be careful as the gender diversity across STEM is pretty close to 50/50. Only because other areas, such as medicine and healthcare are predominantly female. I believe it is the T and the E which are the more skewed to male. What the industry needs to be very careful with however is that engineering and stem in general tend to be disciplines which highly value experience. As such they tend to have a hierarchy. While we can certainly keep efforts up to pump women into the lower end as recruits, there is a limited an finite supply of senior female engineers. We can just materialise them out of nowhere. So any deficit that engineering disipline roles cannot and should not be "Affirmative actioned". Doing so could be calculated on man/woman years of experience in higher tiers as a loss of expertise. moving out to the more extreme, the concept of the "Mass retirement" of 2019 and 2020 are very real potentials for a lot of the 45-67 year old males in the industry. A lot bailed already when the-virus hit and their pension pot was under threat. They cashed out and retired. Put too much undue pressure on that (most warmly welcomed) group, the somewhat-middle-aged, men, statistically white senior engineer and an excidus into early retirement or late career changes could put the digital and electrical infrastructure into genuine risk. One inaccuracy in "Idiocracy" is in how the lights stay on, how all the tech stays running. I don't think the "Idiocracy" of the real future looks that bright and functional in an technology pov anyway. It's similar to not knowing how WWIII will be fought just knowing the WWIV will be fought with sticks and stones. |
| pcprogrammer:
You are right that woman should be introduced to engineering or technical professions early on. But I guess early on means just after the cradle. Don't push the stereo type gender specific toys onto kids and see if anything changes. During my education in technical schools I only saw two woman. Was on mid level electronics school, some 40 years ago. They were a year ahead of me. One white and one black to be specific since it is about different "minorities". The white woman had to redo her last year so we ended up in the same class, so got to know her. Was fun and she was one of us, no looking down on the fact she was a woman. Despite the fact she had to redo the year she was good at most of it. Can't remember which subject she failed on before. But only two woman on 100-120 students over four years time is not very much. No idea what the ratios are today. About "Idiocracy" it was on TV a while back and I recorded it due to someone stating it was a good comedy. Was not able to watch it to the end :palm: Talking about bad acting and nonsense it scored very high. The premise somewhat ok though. The future might steer that way. |
| fourfathom:
--- Quote from: pcprogrammer on August 22, 2022, 05:16:31 pm ---About "Idiocracy" it was on TV a while back and I recorded it due to someone stating it was a good comedy. Was not able to watch it to the end :palm: Talking about bad acting and nonsense it scored very high. The premise somewhat ok though. The future might steer that way. --- End quote --- Idiocracy was largely based on a 1951 short story called "The Marching Morons" by C.M. Kornbluth. I think it has aged pretty well: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/51233/51233-h/51233-h.htm |
| paulca:
--- Quote from: fourfathom on August 22, 2022, 03:45:14 pm ---Now, in spite of STEM programs and DEI, the kids seem to be much less enthusiastic about the tech fields. I sometimes help out at the local High School STEM center and the student participation is quite low. Why is this? So much has changed in the last 50 years that it's hard to identify the main factors. I do find it a bit troubling that in my experience, STEM focuses more on project management than on the underlying tech. If it were up to me, I would say to hell with the project, just learn enough to build stuff and see what happens. --- End quote --- This is a good point to bring up. The number of applicants and graduates from both genders is falling. The software industry in particular is no longer requiring IT degrees. We exhausted that pool over a decade ago. Part of this might be due to something I have felt myself as a "hobbyist" programmer. ie. the core personal interest from which I draw my strength and passion for engineering. He's bored. Why? Because the speed of software development and advancement is so vast now that almost any small personal project will appear completely contrived and boring, because every kid in the class can download an app that does just that 100 times better. Even if they select something that hasn't been done, it will be so complex and by the time a small team of student's writes it, it's old hat and you can get it FREE as an online service with a mobile app. No longer do they (aspiring engineers) actually need to bother MAKING things better themselves. They just wait for another app or service to be added to Android/Amazon/Google store. I feel it myself is different ways. Hobby projects I'd like to do, by the time I've thought them through white room and I look and do research, it's all been done before, it's already out there by company x, y, and z and most of their implementations, while sub standard are now "standards". No room for a hobby project here, waste of time. At one end, the high level coding is becoming so basic the industry of coders writing it (looking at mobile and webui devs) are barely dry behind the ears, make every single UI behave like it's on a mobile phone, completely deny that left and right click exist etc. and tell me to "shut up and deal boomer". And the quality of these apps is diabolical. It has a high attrition rate, a lot of them leave when their ideal job of being a snow boarding web designer from the cartoons turns out not to exist, or the miss conception that mobile app devs are all cool, highly regarded software engineers. They also leave when they discover it's a LOT more complicated than the university project they did. At the other end, low level coding is so complex it is usually very specific to task and area. It requires you are a specialist in that field. Like database programming or network programming, OS programming, graphical programming (games) etc. This type of person usually knows exactly what they want to do and do it long before anyone even tells them a job exists doing it. So it's either too simple to bother not just watching someone else do it on YouTube. (Like a lot of games these days, it's easier to watch someone else play it) OR it's so complex you would need to dedicate years of dedicated hobby study to even getting an embarrassingly newbie project running. We need to find where exactly the interesting stuff is and lead with it, without setting false expectations. They once tried, for a local initiative, to video our floor in work as the lively industry it was. Everyone sat silently staring into their screens, nobody spoke, nobody moved. Sadly a lot of engineers are also introverts. The producer after only 5 minutes of footage, said, "Ok, rap. It is what is is. Let's go." At the same time, having photos of "Work - Sports day" publicly in the press doesn't really help either. It might show we have a sense of humour and the company lets us out to play in the sun, just like teacher used to, but it doesn't help inspire. I'm certainly too long in the tooth and far too jaded to inspire. I'm going to have to learn for my daughters sake though. She can't even pronounce "experiment" properly yet, but she's obcessed with them, loves watching "Ryan's World" which is a kid doing kiddie science with his parents. I hope I do not fail her. |
| IanB:
--- Quote from: paulca on August 22, 2022, 05:39:45 pm --- --- Quote from: fourfathom on August 22, 2022, 03:45:14 pm ---Now, in spite of STEM programs and DEI, the kids seem to be much less enthusiastic about the tech fields. I sometimes help out at the local High School STEM center and the student participation is quite low. Why is this? So much has changed in the last 50 years that it's hard to identify the main factors. I do find it a bit troubling that in my experience, STEM focuses more on project management than on the underlying tech. If it were up to me, I would say to hell with the project, just learn enough to build stuff and see what happens. --- End quote --- This is a good point to bring up. The number of applicants and graduates from both genders is falling. The software industry in particular is no longer requiring IT degrees. We exhausted that pool over a decade ago. Part of this might be due to something I have felt myself as a "hobbyist" programmer. ie. the core personal interest from which I draw my strength and passion for engineering. He's bored. Why? Because the speed of software development and advancement is so vast now that almost any small personal project will appear completely contrived and boring, because every kid in the class can download an app that does just that 100 times better. Even if they select something that hasn't been done, it will be so complex and by the time a small team of student's writes it, it's old hat and you can get it FREE as an online service with a mobile app. --- End quote --- I think you are perhaps doing what many commentators seem to do today, in equating STEM with "Tech" (ugh, horrible term), in other words computers and software. But the field of science and engineering is so much more than computers. You have mechanics, chemistry, electronics, physics, biology, astronomy, geology, the scope is endless. So much to do and explore, make stuff, go outside and get close to nature, build things that do stuff, make smells and bangs, have fun! I was lucky when I was growing up in that I didn't get to see a computer until I was about 16, so my whole childhood involved consuming the library and doing as much experimentation as I could think of. If there is one thing I would suggest when promoting STEM in schools, it is to give the message that STEM is not computers. Just look around you and think of everything you encounter, use, touch or consume, from buildings, furniture, water, transport, infrastructure, fuel, vehicles, paints, plastics, food, anything man-made you can imagine. How did that stuff get designed and made? STEM. All of it, STEM. Wouldn't it be fun to be involved in that? |
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