[Dmentor]

Originally Posted by Mikell Taylor

It is getting better. My mother was one of the first women allowed to be hired into a male-dominated environment (the Air National Guard) and she had it much worse than I did. My life is easy compared to what she went through.

Originally Posted by Kims Robot

Is it EASY to be a Female in Engineering?
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3. Yes. Getting a job out of college IS easier as a girl.
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I loved reading these comments.

My research colleague, mentor and friend retired from Lockheed-Martin (LM) a couple of years ago after almost forty years as a practicing engineer. After graduating with a doctorate in chemistry from Carnegie Mellon in the 1960s she was unable to find a job. After a long and fruitless search she went on to do her post-doctorate work at Harvard really out of frustration. She finally was able to find a job at IBM where it turned out that her work in theoretical chemistry could be applied to very early ballistic missile defense systems and she eventually migrated to the field of anti-submarine warfare localization and tracking. Over the years I have been blessed to learn amazing things from her. Her first-hand stories of prejudice and gender bias in the workplace were quite eye opening for me as a young engineer and ones that should never have to be relived.

Being a father of a twelve year old girl, I'd like to think that things are significantly different now (and in many ways they are); however, when I look at my department (which specializes in the development of acoustics, sonar signal processing, detection, estimation and tracking algorithms) today we only have 2 female engineers out of 16 (12.5%). Looking across my entire second line systems engineering organization, I see 23 female engineers out of 106 (22.7%) which is a little bit better but nothing to write home about. And when I look at recent and current LM fellows (which are the top 1% of LM engineers), I see that about 1.5% of them are female. While we may be making inroads, they are certainly slow coming in the most complex fields and particularly at the pinnacle of technical engineering.