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From: hp-sdd!hp-sdd.hp.com!andrea@ucsd.EDU (Andrea K. Frankel)
Newsgroups: soc.feminism
Subject: Re: umm...silly question, but...
Message-ID: <17819@paris.ics.uci.edu>
Date: 14 Jun 89 20:37:13 GMT
Sender: news@paris.ics.uci.edu
Reply-To: "Andrea K. Frankel" <andrea%hp-sdd.UUCP@ucsd.EDU>
Organization: Hewlett-Packard, San Diego Division
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Approved: tittle@ics.uci.edu

In article <17669@paris.ics.uci.edu> gazit@cs.duke.edu (Hillel Gazit) writes:
>For example, feminists have claimed that Affirmative Action is the
>right war to have more women in engineering.  There have been more
>than ten years of AA, and by the report that Cindy published in
>soc.women the number of women in engineering goes *down*.

As a woman employed as an engineer, I venture the suggestion that as
more women try it and report back on their experiences (informally to
friends, more formally to college career fairs and such), some of the
women who might have decided to become engineers are picking different
fields.

Like management, engineering isn't all it's cracked up to be.  Yes,
you can earn a decent salary, but after a decade or so one realizes it
can be stultifying work that doesn't begin to utilize all the
wonderful facets of our talents and personalities.

Therefore, I believe it is not necessarily a bad thing that the number
of women engineers is going down.  A good question would be, of the
women who WANT to become engineers, what proportion are getting decent
engineering jobs vs. what proportion are un- or under-employed?  And
another good question: how many women engineers are choosing to enter
other fields, and why?  There may be "glass ceiling" discrimination
(we certainly see it happening here), but there is at the same time a
very healthy process of personal values clarification that can lead us
to joyfully abandon career paths we previously worked hard to pursue.

Andrea Frankel, Hewlett-Packard (San Diego Division) (619) 592-4664
	"wake now!  Discover that you are the song that the morning brings..."
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