Tag Archives: second shift

Fouad and Singh, Stemming the Tide

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There’s been lots of links around the results of Nadya A. Fouad and Romila Singh (2011) Stemming the Tide: Why Women Leave Engineering. Since it’s freely available, I thought I’d encourage people to go directly to the source. Here’s an excerpt from the executive summary:

KEY FINDINGS: Some women left the field, some never entered and many are currently engineers:
Those who left:

  • Nearly half said they left because of working conditions, too much travel, lack of advancement or low salary.
  • One-in-three women left because they did not like the workplace climate, their boss or the culture.
  • One-in-four left to spend time with family.
  • Those who left were not different from current engineers in their interests, confidence in their abilities, or the positive outcomes they expected from performing engineering related tasks.

Those who didn’t enter engineering after graduation:

  • A third said it was because of their perceptions of engineering as being inflexible or the engineering workplace culture as being non-supportive of women.
  • Thirty percent said they did not pursue engineering after graduation because they were no longer interested in engineering or were interested in another field.
  • Many said they are using the knowledge and skills gained in their education in a number of other fields.

Work decisions of women currently working in Engineering:

  • Women’s decisions to stay in engineering are best predicted by a combination of psychological factors and factors related to the organizational climate.
  • Women’s decisions to stay in engineering can be influenced by key supportive people in the organization, such as supervisors and co-workers. Current women engineers who worked in companies that valued and recognized their contributions and invested substantially in their training and professional development, expressed greatest levels of satisfaction with their jobs and careers.
  • Women engineers who were treated in a condescending, patronizing manner, and were belittled and undermined by their supervisors and co-workers were most likely to want to leave their organizations.
  • Women who considered leaving their companies were also very likely to consider leaving the field of engineering altogether.

Nadya Fouad is also writing blog entries about the study, the most recent is Is it all about family…?:

We heard from women who said that leaving to raise a family was not their first choice, and if the work environment had been more welcoming or flexible, and if supervisors and coworkers had been more supportive of employees’ balancing multiple roles, they might not have made that choice.

Have a look through Stemming the Tide: what stands out among their findings to you?

My second shift

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I just read this post by seperis, i miss ship wars like so much, and I had to stop, blink, say “YEAH!” out loud, then IM it to yatima and Sumana.

I want to say this–I don’t know where I am getting the time to do this. I just don’t. This is worse than a twenty-four credit hour semester, because it never fucking ends, it’s every semester and I don’t even get to graduate and no one gives me a class schedule, it just shows up suddenly and I’m in for a sixteen week course where I have to guess at the reading material and sometimes, I’m not even sure what I’m studying. There are many things I’ve learned in fandom that I appreciate, but I have to draw a line somewhere, and I have no idea where, because on top of spending time researching things that are actually important to me as a human being, and writing, and enjoying fannish meta, and chatting with friends, and I don’t know, actually interacting with my source text, I have to figure out now if some researchers are using my people as fodder for a exploitative book.

I checked my timesheet–apparently I am creating hours from air for this, because the day is still twenty-four hours long, but my fannish life is taking thirty-six all on its own, and I still haven’t finished reading History of the Jewish State or found my copy of What If for creative writing, and there’s a small but growing pile of books at the foot of my bed that I have yet to get to and I’m two hundred behind on my flist. I mean, this isn’t bad time management here; my time management is a damn miracle. It is creating time from a vortex of not-time.

She’s talking about SurveyFail, but for me it’s been geek feminism (small g, small f). Ever since OSCON (or a bit before) I’ve had this enormous, amorphous thing eating my life. I get emails. People point me at articles. People ask me to opine on all kinds of stuff. And it’s important, so I try to find time to do it, and to do it thoughtfully and with understanding.

But god DAMN it, my life’s work so far has been ones and zeroes. I never studied gender theory, or sociology, or politics, or any of that. I’m playing catch-up. The only way I’m staying even remotely ahead of the game is to wikify anything I learn so I don’t have to look it up twice.

That LWN thread with Bruce Perens? That ate a day of my life. A whole day. I talked to some of the other women involved afterwards, and I’m not the only one. Between the anger and frustration, the difficulty of following the damn thread without a comments RSS feed, and having to express ourselves clearly and provide supporting documentation (over and over and over again), we lost perhaps hundreds of woman-hours that could otherwise have been spent, oh, I dunno, WRITING SOME DAMN SOFTWARE.

This? This is my second shift.