When you consider the math for female engineers, the numbers simply don't add up. Women make up more than half of the nation's population. The majority of students who earn bachelor's and master's degrees are women. Yet, in the past decade, only 12 percent of the professionals in engineering are women. We need to work towards closing this gap for a number of reasons, not the least of which women represent a large pool of untapped talent and the demand for engineers is on the rise.
I've worked at Qualcomm for over 20 years. Today, I'm an executive vice president and president of Global Market Development, but I began my career as an engineer. Over the years, it has been truly exhilarating to be part of a team that is continually pushing the boundaries of what's possible. Early in my career, I worked on a project that made it possible for a moving truck in the middle of Nebraska to communicate with its headquarters via a satellite 22,223 miles away -- seemingly by magic, given this far preceded cellphones. Later, I led the division focused on building one of the industry's first app stores and the accompanying developer ecosystem. The first time we downloaded an app we were astounded by the knowledge that it was now possible to customize our own phones.
These days, I spend my time focused on developing new businesses underpinned by cutting-edge technologies being developed across our company. The mobile industry has reached an inflection point where connectivity is poised to affect traditional industries like never before. Our cellphones have become part of the largest communications platform the world has ever known. The possibility that represents to challenging issues such as education and healthcare are mind-boggling. It is because of my engineering background that I am lucky enough to be in the midst as the positive impact of wireless as it begins to unfold around the globe.
I say lucky because I am also very familiar with the hurdles for women interested in pursuing a science or math degree. I attended a high school with more than 4,000 students, and met with a guidance counselor only once during my four-year stint. Despite my clear strengths in science and math, my counselor's advice was to pursue a degree in business. A career in engineering was never encouraged nor, in fact, ever mentioned. Based on my counselor's direction, I enrolled at San Diego State University as a business major.
It was happenstance that led me to where I am today. As a college freshman with an on-campus job, I was delivering paperwork to the engineering department one day. There I encountered two department assistants whose faces lit up with the hope that I was a prospective student. I hadn't come there to enroll, but their reactions piqued my interest. When they told me that an engineering degree incorporated math and science -- two of my favorite subjects -- I switched my major the next day. With a short conversation, those two ladies changed the course of my life.
As a woman in what has been perceived to be a "man's profession," I've learned some lessons along the way which may be helpful to young women considering a technical career:
Be proud that you stand out.
Early in my career, I was the last in line as a group was filing into a meeting room. The man who was leading the meeting turned and asked me to go get the coffee, confusing me for an assistant because of my gender. At first I was confused and admittedly a bit angry, but then and there I realized it was an honest mistake and decided to just roll with it. A colleague quickly set the record straight -- that I was a part of the engineering team -- and we laughed it off. I found that in a sea of men, the few women present are more likely to be remembered later for their input. It's best to leverage these situations as an opportunity to take the lead and push things forward.
When you push yourself out of your comfort zone, you will grow.
In 1989, I answered an ad for a software engineer at a small startup named Qualcomm. Long before mobile devices were changing lives, Qualcomm was best known for developing communications technologies and systems. I was hired and quickly set about learning an entirely new area of technology for me. I listened, worked diligently and never took my position for granted. Daily, I would attempt to push myself outside of my comfort zone and never turned down an opportunity to take on more. Twenty years later, I'm in a role I could have hardly imagined when I started, but it would not have been possible if I had not closed my eyes, taken a deep breath and moved beyond the limits of my comfort zone.
Be yourself and trust in your strengths.
You don't have to fit into a mold that someone else has defined. Throughout my early career, I was told to speak up more in meetings and generally be more assertive, attributes that are highly valued at review time. At some point I realized that wasn't my nature and I would never be the most vocal person in any meeting. I told my manager that if I were to continue to be rated on those traits, I was not going to be successful. I am grateful that he listened and, supported by the company, he modified our performance ratings to be more equitable for all employees. If we succumb to the pressure to be something we are not, we risk losing the very characteristics which make us unique, and it can devalue the collaboration, teamwork and relationship skills which are an important part of any equation.
Keep your priorities balanced.
To young professionals -- and particularly women -- looking to advance, it is imperative to keep your life in balance. I recall something I read years ago that said to consider the different aspects of your life, eg. family, friends, work, health and integrity, as glass balls to be continuously juggled. Each one is vitally important and the challenge is to keep all the balls in the air. However, there will be times when you need to work 12 hour days, 3 days in a row and there will be times when you need to leave at 3 o'clock to watch 8-year-olds run around a soccer field. And you can't spend time feeling guilty about doing either one. You may need to put one down briefly, but the lesson here is to take care never to drop one.
Increasing female interest in "male dominated" industries is a challenging but fully attainable goal. It is important to start as early as elementary school to encourage curious young girls' minds to seek opportunities in the science, math and engineering professions. I look forward to helping develop the next generation of women engineers, perhaps in part due to revolutionary mobile technologies providing them access to an exciting new world of opportunity.
"Five years after finishing college, about 60 percent of computer science graduates are working as programmers; at 15 years the figure drops to 34 percent, and at 20 years — when most are still only age 42 or so — it is down to 19 percent.
It should be noted that other technical professions do not show this rapid decline of work in their field. For example, consider civil engineering majors. Six years after graduation, 61 percent of them are working as civil engineers, and 20 years after graduation, the rate is still 52 percent; compare this to the decline for computer science majors from 57 percent to 19 percent seen above. True, some computer science majors eventually go into management and so on, but the same is true for civil engineers. Careers in programming are far shorter than in civil engineering, even though both fields are technical and require attention to detail. The difference is that skill sets change rapidly in programming, but not in civil engineering. "
http://www.cis.org/ComputerIdunstryVisas-h1b
Society has no appreciation for women "geekery" in any subject. It's time to change that. A lot of it comes from ourselves, some of it from our surroundings, but we have to move past the focus on the superficial. Sitting with the books and laptops has to become trendy, not just shopping and collecting pretty shoes.
I firmly believe in supporting the development of interest in all children, but we do have to be careful to try not to FORCE what we believe on others. My daughter is an engineering student and has a great aptitude for mathematics and science. I support her completely and push only hard enough to keep that interest alive. In our current society, she will have many opportunities available to her and believe her colleagues will stand up for her as they did with you. The older generation will fade out and the issue of women in "men's" fields will be a historical reference. It all boils down to a person's aptitude and interest. My son is a software engineer and enjoys it immensely, but I also pushed him only hard enough to maintain his interest. When the opportunity to choose is there, and we guide our children into their own interests, we shouldn't be worried about the result of who is where. The mythical DISCRIMINATORY gender-wage gap looks at results of decisions and tries to pin it on discrimination instead of choices. The gender-wage gap will always exist in one direction or the other. In almost all metro areas, younger women outearn men by 8% at last count.
I completely agree with cultivating interest, with a cautionary caveat to make sure it is your child's interest, not society's that is being cultivated.
It isn't just women doing it to themselves, the problem is much larger. No one expects a woman to have an intense interest in anything. Sure there are a few "freaks", but see how they are treated. Learning and loving hard subjects has to become mainstream.
This sounds like a bad hipster-ariel meme:
"I used to be a programmer..."
"before it was mainstream for men".
In general mothers prefer the latter, even more so than a decade ago.
http://pewresearch.org/pubs/536/working-women
Among working mothers with minor children (ages 17 and under), just one-in-five (21%) say full-time work is the ideal situation for them, down from the 32% who said this back in 1997, according to a new Pew Research Center survey. Fully six-in-ten (up from 48% in 1997) of today's working mothers say part-time work would be their ideal, and another one-in-five (19%) say she would prefer not working at all outside the home.
There's been a similar shift in preferences among at-home mothers with minor children. Today just 16% of these mothers say their ideal situation would be to work full time outside the home, down from the 24% who felt that way in 1997. Nearly half (48%) of all at-home moms now say that not working at all outside the home is the ideal situation for them, up from the 39% who felt that way in 1997.
You could apply these vague points to any field.
Why does she not mention the increase in pay or the feeling of accomplishment you have by creating something? She also failed to mention the real difficulties in working in a male dominated industry. You will not be taken seriously most of the time or you will have to learn how to play politics like a man.
Me, my mother and sister-in-law both have degrees in chemistry and my degrees (bachelors and masters) are both in accounting. I never considered a liberal arts education...it's not where the money is.
Looks like you're incorrect and misinformed (shocker!), MOST women do not graduate from the majors you listed (one of them, "sex studies" isn't even a major in its own right. perhaps you meant gender studies, but then you're just being redundant).
As one of only a handful of females in the CompSci department in college I was not so surprised to see the blatant effects of social conditioning. Every one of my female cohorts and I had all been tomboys with very open minded, anti gender socializing parents. To think that raising girls on dolls and easy bake ovens and boys on legos and chemistry sets isn't going to influence their interests later in life is just plain ignorant.
Those easy bake ovens are almost the same thing as the creepy crawler lab. I took both apart and rebuilt it, without anyone "guiding me". In my parent's home country of India, women play with dolls and still about half of the software engineers are women.
nobody is excluding men from universities. men are simply too stupid and lazy to make it. that's been exposed.
you know nothing about feminism. feminism is about giving women choice. since it levels the playing field, we've realized men are too lazy to compete. it's men's own fault. so shut up about sexism, and stay out of the women's section.
And in spite of now being the majority in university, women still make less in the workforce, because women make life choices not to persue a career, that has been blatantly exposed as well... In fact, women who don't choose to have babies make more than men, so any claim of discrimination against women is laughable.