[net.women] women in engineering

jamcmullan (02/08/83)

"I'm also curious if young women are giving fields such as engineering
more consideration than it has been given in the past."

I have been working in one of the teaching buildings for engineers, at the
University of Waterloo, since 1978. I can assure you that more young women
at studying engineering. Women coming out of the classrooms used to be in
ratios of 2:70 or so. Now, I am seeing women in ratios of more like 20:70
(purely subjective measurements).
  --Judy McMullan

roberta@bronze.UUCP (Roberta Taussig) (08/26/83)

Due to a series of apparently unrelated changes in organization and the
normal nomadic restlessness of engineers, I find myself about to become a
project leader of a design engineering team composed of myself and three
other women. All the management structure above me is male, and the other
project teams with which we will be working are almost exclusively male.
We will have no authorization to add personnel for at least six months, so
this situation will persist for at least that long. Technical abilities on
the team range from good to outstanding, and we will be generating assemblers
for microprocessors to support Tek's microprocessor development systems.

We've been kidding around about establishing an outpost of "feminist
engineering", but I'm wondering what, if any, will be the problems peculiar
to our situation. Does anyone have any experience with this? Advice?
Encouragement? Caveats?

Roberta Taussig
Tektronix
Beaverton, Oregon
..!decvax!tektronix!tekmdp!roberta
..!zehntel!tektronix!tekmdp!roberta

heretyk@abnjh.UUCP (08/29/83)

It seems to me that most of the time that women are
separtated (tokenized) into separate groups.  Working
in an all women group should be very positive in that
you won't have to deal with the conditioning
that we've been through ( i.e. let the boy win syndrome)
and other roles.  Make sure that your group doesn't receive more
than your share of documentation and "support" work.
Is your role of project leader a promotion?  If so congratulations,
if not congratulations past due.
			Shelley Heretyk