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Originally Posted by Steven Smith
*Citation Needed* On about half of that... but skipping over that for a second.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/24/sc...tifically.html
http://www.simplypsychology.org/gender-biology.html
http://www.child-encyclopedia.com/ge...-and-behaviour
That's a decent summary of my points. I'm not going to do the research for you. Males and Females have well documented neurological differences. There is a reason there are 4x more autistic men than women and there is a reason why the grand majority of chess masters are male. Our brains are not constructed in identical fashion. You can't deny that and you can't deny the hundreds of studies showing obvious differences in a variety of competence tasks between the sexes.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Steven Smith
If I were to take what you wrote as truth, I would still argue that being aggressive is not the determining factor in success in engineering or a corporate environment. I would argue that passion for your work is important, as well as competence.
In science, we don't only need competition, we need passion and empathy. I have read, and I have seen, that many women (not all) in engineering tend to connect better with projects that have a societal good associated with it. This could be a project that helps the environment, provides water to 3rd world countries, or saves us from a hurtling asteroid. If there is a project she is passionate about, and she is a competent engineer, than the lack of a primal male aggression is probably not going to hold her back. Increasingly, today's problems are so complex, that it is becoming difficult to do anything of any magnitude without a team as well. Many "traditional female characteristics" also can bring a lot to balance and increase a team's performance.
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You are employing a strawman argument. I never said that women in engineering roles was bad; in fact I agree that diversity of engineers leads to new outlooks and solutions. I am just trying to explain the reasoning for the trends that women tend to not go into STEM fields. As far as science not being competitive, this is false. Innovation is the process driven by wanting to make some solution better than ones peers. Further science happens in a capitalist economy and thus there is a competition to get results that trickles down from company level contract bidding wars to the scientists themselves doing the science. To say that science isn't driven by competition is naive. Empathy and morality are important to development too but without competition there is a good chance different countries could be speaking very different languages today.
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Originally Posted by Steven Smith
Also, while you have a relative anonymity with a new user name and little details to personally identify yourself, I would encourage you for your own career protection to know that posting on the internet about how women are biologically incapable of succeeding in a competitive workplace could have consequences in the future, perhaps in a time when you have changed your opinion but the internet is forever. You could very well be working for a female supervisor in the future who may not be amused that her employee feels she is incapable of during her job due to her chromosomes.
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I've decided to keep my primary account focused solely on the mechanical side of engineering. I created this account to direct the ad hominem attacks I would surely receive away from my team and it's members. My views do not represent those of my team.
Additionally, I don't want people who can't be bothered to read correctly making assumptions about my personal beliefs. Not once in this thread have I said women are incapable of succeeding in engineering fields. I said that on the whole, men and women are predisposed to different things. I don't believe biology ultimately controls every factor of a persons life, but I do believe it heavily influences it.