[Madison]

Originally Posted by JamesCH95

Both of my parents are PhD engineers. My mom is also PE, has a couple patents, and has won several awards related to her research. When I was 7 I told my mom "You know mom, boys can be engineers too" after the 3rd SWE conference I had been to. Clearly I do not have prejudices against women, let alone women in engineering.

I want to just share two anecdotal experiences:

In my senior design class we split into three teams to design machines that all had to perform a similar task. It just so happened that (in teams of five) there were no girls on one team, two girls on one team, and four girls on the third team. I know from observation that on the team with four girls, the girls spent an inordinate amount of time arguing about what to do and did not finish their project by the end of the semester. The team with 2 girls finished, but the machine broke on test day. The all-male team finished (barely) and their machine survived test day.

A contrasting story:

I also was a designer for my college's Chem-E car team. In that competition the team was roughly half-girls. They dominated both the design presentation, the safety presentation, and ran the pit and car preparation with an iron fist. In two years our team had a top-10 finish and were national champions with a nation safety award and national+regional design presentation awards.

My point with these two stories is that many people are biased by their own experiences. I know the single guy on the design team was totally fed up with all the girls on his design team that wasted a ton of time needlessly arguing, whereas I was incredibly proud of the girls on on the chem-e car team and would work with them again in a heartbeat.

Perspective is everything, and I think precious few people have had the unique perspective I grew up with. Don't get too worked up at male engineers who might have a slanted view on women in engineering, work to show them that they are wrong.

Also: don't argue with stupid, there are some things you can't fix. *don't feed the troll*

In my mind, these groups represent different mixes of people and personalities and the gender of the participants probably had little to do with how successful they were.