1351's new organizational structure calls for an administrative branch of more than 6 full-time people. When we started looking for people to fill these positions, there was a large influx of girls. With the exception of one girl on our team, none of them really seem to be interested in engineering. (But, of course, I haven't had time to meet all the freshmen yet, I think I saw a girl with them.) They will do engineering work, but it doesn't seem to interest them much and they don't seem to want to do the higher level (design type) work. Yes, they are participating in FIRST, but I'm not really sure I would call it a victory unless they did engineering work.
Now, on to why I feel this way...
The higher my classes go, the fewer girls there seem to be. Or in mathematical terms:
lim g(L) = 1/10
L->BS
where g(L) is the female to male ratio of a class, L is the level of the class, BS is is a BS degree. They seem to stick around in the lower level classes, then start to disappear. My classes seem to be getting closer to the 1:10 ratio in industry as I go on. I still haven't been able to figure out why this is though. Our society likes to think that we have gotten over the whole gender discrimination thing, but we obviously haven't. But, of course, there's also the studies showing that the male brain is more geared toward this kind of work/thinking. (Please don't hurt me... I'm only the messenger...) Then again, there's also the women that succeed in engineering/science and show that this might not be correct. But, there's only a small number of them, so it might mean nothing.
Although, I have noticed that the girls tend to go more toward the sciences rather than engineering. There's a lot of girls in physics and chem. Also bio, but I'm leaving that out because I'm not sure if they're going for bio or they plan to move into medicine. There's something strange going on there. Why Physics instead of Mechanical or Electrical Engineering? And why Chemistry instead of Chemical Engineering? I realize that science and engineering are different. Science is more geared toward investigation and theory. Engineering is geared toward application and practice. But that doesn't explain why they girls are in science rather than engineering.
And now the important aspect of this problem: Girls in engineering are hot. There are very few girls in engineering. Phil needs a
girlfriend. Supply and demand is working against Phil. Phil is angred and saddened by the situation.
P.S. Phil now speaks in the 3rd person...