Quote:
Originally Posted by Dumper FTW 435
Maybe they want girls because they want the kids to have strong female role models? But I hate that idea. Why do they assume that a kids role model has to be the same gender as them? I have both male and female role models that I aspire to be more like. It seems sexist to show a girl a strong female role model for the purpose of saying "even girls can be good at this!" instead of showing them any strong role model to say "this is the type of person you can become if you work hard!".
In summary, boys can learn from girls, so why can't girls learn from boys
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I agreed with you 100% (and I AM a female engineer), just going off my own experience. I was on a team in high school, with only male engineers, and I felt like I learned a ton... though I did push my way in... but they were always accepting and often even turned to me for a lot of things on the team. I originally thought I felt, like you, that it didn't matter the gender of a role model. As long as the role model was equally open to teaching males or females, I felt it was fine. One thing I did eventually realize is that from a young age, two of my biggest role models were my aunts - one of whom was a Geology professor, and the other was a programmer at financial company. From a very early age, I knew that women could do Science & Technology.
So, as I thought more about it, I decided to ask several of the females that I had mentored (and were now in college), and asked them if it had made a difference to them, since they had both male & female mentors... and while they were close to me, they were also close with several of the male mentors. The overwhelming response came back that it had made a huge difference to them (much more than I had realized). Many of them were a bit more "timid" than I was, and to see a Female in engineering running the team from an engineering perspective (not just administratively), it had given them a lot more confidence that they could succeed in engineering roles on the team. It did help that I had great support from male mentors - there was a male programmer on our team who did an amazing job mentoring 2 of them (and all of the students) when they were on the programming team (he is now a WFA winner). I never directly pushed to have these girls included any more than any other student on the team, but I guess just having me there, pushing for everyone to have a role, gave them a lot more confidence. One is off at NASA on an amazing internship, another is traveling the west coast for Toyota, and another is now pursuing Nursing!
So while I don't know that it is anyone's intention to exclude male mentors, I do think it may be more important than we realize to have female role models and females in leadership positions. And as others have mentioned, girls/women tend to take "whatever role is needed" and often on teams that is leading a chairman's group, or designing the spirit items, or whatever... Not that other roles aren't important, but there is a huge gender difference in our field, and its reflective of the pipeline... the pipeline needs to be fixed, and one way people are focusing on fixing this is to have more female role models in engineering mentorship roles.