Angry in the Great White North

I've become more disillusioned with my job as time has gone by (any newspaper editors reading this, call me!), but this news makes me think engineering in Canada is headed for the scap heap as a profession anyway:

Engineering schools in Ontario are grappling with a drop in female students in an alarming reversal of the trend everywhere else in universities.

So what? Who cares? As long as the engineer knows how to do his or her job, what difference can it possibly make?

Women have fallen to just 20 per cent of first-year engineering classes in Ontario, down from almost 30 per cent five years ago — just as they reach nearly 60 per cent of all university undergraduates, more than 53 per cent of medical students and nearly half of law and business classes in North America.

So young women are going to university, and are making choices that they want to make, in professions that make good money. I don't see a problem.

So why aren't they choosing engineering?

"The new math course is killing us, because even though girls do well in math, they often don't think they're any good, so they'll decide not to take it and then don't choose engineering," said biophysicist Gillian Wu, York University's dean of science and engineering.

Fair enough -- the high schools need to do a better job of challenging girls to go into math. But if they don't take math, they can't be engineers, right?

[Ontario's 15 engineering schools] have changed entrance requirements this year to make them more female-friendly, by scrapping the dreaded Geometry and Discrete Math course as a compulsory requirement for engineering, and instead making it one of several options students may take, including biology, a subject girls often prefer, as well as earth science and data management.

Scrap geometry?! Biology as a substitute?

This is about becoming an engineer, people! Not a ^%!& zookeeper!

[The schools] have formed a new province-wide committee to ensure high school guidance counsellors realize engineers are not merely "math nerds with pocket-protectors who work in cubicles all day long," said engineer Marta Ecsedi, the University of Toronto's advisor on women in engineering.

Uh, yeah, that's basically it for most engineers. Don't lie to these girls. Most engineering is like what you see in "Dilbert" cartoons.

Why do you think "Dilbert" is so popular with engineers? Because it depicts our lives.

"They need to understand that engineering is also a `caring profession' that works on ways to detect breast cancer earlier, or clean up contaminated soil or reduce malnutrition in the world through measures like fortifying salt."

Really? Engineering is a profession that develops economic solutions to problems in order to turn a profit. If high school girls want to pretend to change the world and get in touch with their feelings, take English Lit. But if they want to really change the world, engineering will be the way to go. But you can leave your mushy-headed feelings at the door.

Some engineers work on that sort of thing, of course. Most do not. It's just simple economics.

So why all the concern?

"We've raised the red flag about this because engineering needs to represent the full diversity of life experience — cultural and gender — to be truly creative," said Ecsedi.

Here's the cruel truth to any of the girls out there reading this -- the only "creative" thing I've had to do from dealing with engineers from the Middle East or China is trying to figure out what they're saying half the time. Do women in the mix make a difference? In fifteen years, I have yet to note a single incident where I was convinced that this is true. Not that a woman engineer didn't contribute here or there, as much or as little as any man, but her contribution had everything to do with being a good engineer and nothing about being a woman.

Bottom line is that an engineering solution is one that meets the minimal requirements of the physical problem for the least cost. Creativity plays a role in it, but it is constrained by science and math and physical reality. The strength of a beam is not a function of how many women you have on the design team, nor is the criticality of eliminating a memory leak from a real-time embedded software program mitigated by having your test team look like a "Colours of Benetton" ad.

Real engineering does not need to represent the full diversity of life experience. It needs to represent the best possible understanding of the physical and economic implications of solutions to technical problems. Period. Before you start eliminating geometry from the entrance criteria, you need to show positively that engineering solutions being proposed and implemented are somehow deficient because of the lack of "diversity".

"Look, the old image of engineers staying up all night drinking and waking up nurses doesn't really appeal to many girls today — or many of their parents," said York University's dean Gillian Wu.

"But people don't really know much about engineering, the way they understand dentistry or teaching or business. They'll read about some fabulous new building designed by architect Daniel Libeskind — but they won't realize it's engineers who will actually build it," said Wu. "Maybe we need a prime-time TV show like `CSI' to popularize engineering."

Drinking? Nurses? Sorry, but I missed all that. And a "CSI" about engineering? Sounds exciting. First there's all the sex between co-workers going on, just like in "L.A. Law". And then the realistic life and death drama depicted on "E.R."

Yeah, that's my life.

Not!

Sorry, but engineering is about spreadsheets and writing reports and filling timesheets, and lots and lots of bureaucracy. Oh yeah, and unpaid overtime when the crunch comes and the system still doesn't work.

It can be lots of fun, and it can be very satisfying. And it pays well. But usually it doesn't play well on TV.

Silliest depiction of engineering on screen: "Star Trek". Sorry, but as Chief Engineer, Scotty would work in an office reviewing time sheets and Gantt charts, and holding meetings in order to assign work and track progress. Some junior engineer would be inside the Jeffries Tube. Scotty's crisis of the week would be getting his report in to Spock on time.

Best depiction of engineering on screen: "Apollo 13". When the engineering went into the room to figure out how to deal with the filter crisis on the crippled spacecraft, and the lead engineer dumps a bunch of material on the table (binders, tubing, etc) in front of his team and says this is all they had to work with, because that's all they had on the ship.

Not a woman in the room. Or a visible minority. Probably limited life experience. Certainly not a lot of talk about feelings. But somehow those emotionless white guys who were good at math figure out how to save three astronauts and the US space program.