Blog Ten
We can rag on Lawrence Summers for claiming that women make inferior engineers all we want, but his acknowledgment of the lack of women engineers is not off-base at all. Indeed, according to the Extraordinary Women Engineers Society website:
* Less than two percent of high school graduates will earn engineering degrees
* Colleges and universities are having difficulty recruiting women engineering students
* Just 20 percent of undergraduate engineering students are women
* The number of women engineers in the professional workforce amounts to less than ten percent
Clearly you cannot blame Lawrence Summers for attempting to hypothesize why women don't become engineers; though his message may be hurtful, it's the simple fact that women aren't choosing to become engineers that's the problem.
This is not to say that women cannot become engineers or scientists; indeed as Bublick states in her commentary on the Summer's conference, women have helped make many strides in expanding our knowledge of science and medical developments and I'm not going to deny that women aren't just as good at solving complex problems as men.
Nevertheless, I feel that both the Bublick and Fausto-Sterling pieces miss the mark in that they focus on the idea that because women are just as capable at engineering as men that it means there should be more efforts to allow women to be engineers because by stating that we should "allow" more women to be engineers undermines the fact that there is a deficit of women actually applying to be engineers according to the EWE Society. Quite simply, I feel that it's not a problem of womens' smarts, but a problem of numbers.
The idea that there is some vast conspiracy is preventing women from becoming scientist and engineers also seems to undermine the fact that schools do not care what your gender is when you choose what you major in; it's the person who makes the actual choice. In other words, it ridiculous to call the lack of women engineers a problem if it can't be back by actual reason which is simply this: until more women apply themselves to be in the scientific field, it will continue to be predominantly male.