Smog now in Technicolor!

One of the undergraduate environmental labs at my university uses colored dye, water and salt to simulate smoke plumes and pollution. In a tank of distilled water a mix of salt water acts like an upside down version of smoke or steam pollution. After time these slightly more dense solutions will settle on the bottom of the tank much like a layer of smog can lay at a fixed altitude over a city.

 In the photo below the red layer is a medium density salt water mixture that settled into the bottom of the tank like a layer of pollution. The blue mixture is even more dense and as it billows upwards into the atmosphere (or down into the water tank) it being slightly more dense than the red layer it will settle as a more dense layer below the red layer. Never expected my lab photos to turn out looking so artistic.

Leaky Engineering Pipeline

You ask managers why they have problems recruiting women they will probably tell you things like well, women just choose to go into other fields. Or they like more fulfilling careers helping people and don't like working with machines. Ask those managers why they have problems retaining women they'll probably tell you because all those women keep having babies and leaving the workplace. My own manager in the same breath as promising to finally help me out here (see me whine about my salary here with a colorful graph to illustrate) asked whether he'd have to worry about me taking a "baby leave" anytime soon. I should have turned the question around as he is equally married, only a few years older than me, and just as likely to produce spawn himself. Instead I just took some Fukitol and shut my mouth. Turns out plenty of other women working in engineering might be taking the same drug.

 

A new study from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee nearly half of women who leave engineering leave due to the environment and working conditions. Only one in four who left did so to spend more time with family. How many never enter engineering? I know a female student who is graduating and may or may not enter the field. Nothing to do with babies either. According to the study, one third of women who graduate with an engineering degree but don't enter the field do so because of their perceptions about the field being inflexible and having a culture non-supportive of women. Listen to this chilling account from the article:

"Engineering school was pure hell for me," one survey respondent wrote. "My personality inspired much sexist behavior from my male classmates and my teaching assistants. At some point, after many interviews, I decided that I wouldn't want to spend the majority of my waking hours with the type of people interviewing me."

Holy crap. I'm happy to report no discrimination in my university experience. Or at least, none that I witnessed personally or can remember. But it could be my experience is not typical. And it's disappointing to me the cold shower of disappointment that hit after I entered the industry is actually getting to people before they even start working and discouraging them to enter the field. So what about the women who leave after they get started in the field?

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, according to the study.

Long working hours, unclear work objectives and a lack of company planning also drove women to leave the field.

...

"This study touched a nerve with so many women," Fouad said. "Those who stay in the field differ in that they have supportive supervisors and co-workers, and they have very clear perceptions of their jobs and how they can advance in the field."

Total shock that women probably want the same things from their jobs that men want. We are not all baby making machines ready to leave once the 'mones kick in. Asking too much not to be belittled or undermined in the job, having some vague idea about what your job purpose is, and knowing how to move up? I know you're thinking, "Hey FrauTech, I'm a dude, and I have these same concerns!" You're right sir!

Men could have the same complaints, but they haven't left the field as often.

...

Many companies have struggled with employee retention.

"There are probably quite a few male engineers who aren't necessarily thrilled with the workplace climate," said Charlene Yauch, Industrial Engineering program director and associate professor at the Milwaukee School of Engineering.

...

It also says companies should have zero tolerance for bad behavior.

"We hope to reach out to men as well," Fouad said about another study she wants to do.

It's kind of sad that for this kind of thing to get traction means they have to "reach out" to men. Like we're two different species. I tend to agree with the statement in the article that states that engineering universities should "give women a more realistic preview of engineering tasks and workplace cultures." But I don't think that's a women only problem. And much as the macho/top-dog/kill yourself working culture hurts women it hurts men too. Only the other societal pressures on men are probably not as heavy as they are on women, hence why women leave the industry more often. But that doesn't mean fixing the workplace culture wouldn't benefit everyone. And it means it's not some crazy niche idea for women only.

But the numbers for women have stayed pretty flat: "Women comprise more than 20% of engineering school graduates, but only 11% of practicing engineers are female, according to the National Science Foundation." I hate to think how much talent we lose when we ignore the low numbers of women and underrepresented minorities in engineering. Or the creativity and innovation we're throwing away when we stick to models of "good old boys" that hurt everyone, women, minorities, even white guys. I guess we need to "reach out" to those white guys to get them to buy into this idea that the system isn't working for them either. And that by working together we can make it better.

At last, validation

I just received this exciting email. Looks like my job search is over, this sounds like the right opportunity for me.

 

Hello.
We have vacancy in ---- Inc.
We have reviewed your profile, and concluded you are the right person to become
our employee.

If you meet the requirements, please kindly send your respond.

Please NOTE: You must be US citizen
Best regards

 

Where do I sign up?! If they want my social security number straight away, that probably just means they're serious, right?

Humanoid Robots

Or how foolish scientists will open the doors to Skynet and a future in which we run from robots trying to kill us. Perhaps literally so. Boston Dynamics, who brought you the infamous "Big Dog" robot (here's a video) have been in the news this past month for the DARPA funding of their new cheetah robot. Supposedly the thing is designed to chase down human prey. Luckily in CAD form it looks less menacing so far.

I have been thinking about the Uncanny Valley in robot design lately. I like Disney's Wall-E and of course I'm waiting for this KeepOn robot to go on sale so I can purchase him and have more moments of squee in my day. But then robots go past the divide. There are plenty of scary looking singing Japanese robots out there. Even a German company has gotten into the race with their "fembot" that can lift things and do factory work. [As an aside, I hate how we have to sexualize all our robots. "Dude-bots" are not called "man-bots" or whatever, if it looks male it is male and the difficult and that doesn't need to be mentioned. In this case I'm not even sure why the AILA was given some approximation of plastic human female hair and vaguely human female curves. Reminds me of the exec in 30Rock complimenting Liz Lemon on being "a good businessman." "You mean businesswoman?" "I'm pretty sure that's not a word."]

While Boston Dynamics was busy making a robot that would hunt down human prey (I'm not sure what kind, or why...terrorists? illegal aliens? Convicts when we finally implement a "running man" or "the gamer" type of future where falsely convicted hero-types must compete for their freedom and lives on a gladiator-like gameshow that bloodthirsty Americans just eat up?). You might have missed their introduction of a bi-pedal robot, ATLAS.

Boston Dynamics already has a two-legged robot, and the video is seriously creepy. It doesn't help ATLAS looks like a freaking Terminator but imagine it walking around non-chalantly like their existing robot Petman and you'll see what I mean with uncanny divide. When the operator shoves him to the side (see me using masculine pronouns for this thing? dammit) I really expected the robot to finally go psycho after being pushed around one too many times and kill the guy.

It's only missing a nice big HAL light on the front of it. So sure Boston Dynamics I'm impressed. But I'm also creeped out. I'm going to go back to watching your snake robot and this weird climbing robot that looks like a lizard. I bet audiences in the 1980s seeing the movie Terminator for the first time wondered how stupid humanity could be that it created the thing that became self aware and destroyed us. But now I see it! We'll make them for coolness factor! Coolness factor is going to be humanity's downfall. Good thing my fallout shelter doubles as robot defense shelter.

Fool me once

Everytime I think I don't have to look for a new job and actually have a future at MegaCorp the brutal truth swings around and smacks me in the face. It's like the know exactly how to reel me in every so often to make me feel like I could stay here, just often enough to keep me from focusing as much as I should on the outside job search. At what point do you try more aggressive methods? Is it worth mentioning my unhappiness and pay disparity or is that going to piss them off to the point of me losing my job? I mean, I've mentioned it, but how in their faces do I have to be to get some traction. Or is it pointless to bargain with fools.

More on STEM recruiting

In BusinessWeek Sophie Vandebroek writes about why the US must promote engineering. She doesn't really do a good job at saying why though and I think her article is more of a how. She doesn't say why the US would be better off with more engineers or with discouraging fewer people from staying away from the field. And while I agree with her general premise, some of her points seem too out of line for me to ignore.

First, kids should experience early on how much fun science is. In my family, we encouraged our children to treat the world as their laboratory. As my now-22-year-old engineer daughter, Nena, can attest, she and her brothers watched minimal television throughout elementary and middle school, so they were left to find more creative ways to spend their time. Their afternoons regularly involved digging for bugs, building furniture for their fort, and constructing makeshift dams across the sidewalk after rainstorms.

Great that she didn't let her kids watch TV but she fails to realize that her own background (she's the CTO at Xerox) enabled her to give those lessons to her children. Being an engineer is a decidedly middle class, sometimes upper class, career. It's true that technicians, and mechanics and carpenters and many blue collar workers do excellent jobs at convincing their kids to go to school for engineering but many more parents don't convey that message. Not because they're too good for it, but because just as many kids don't know what an engineer does many adults don't either. And if you grew up and your parents were nurses or secretaries you may not know anything about engineering. I like getting parents involved, but it's not people working in STEM already whose kids we need to reach. It's the kids who no one bothers to tell them what an engineer does or why they might like it.

 

Second of all, my sister and I (though we watched TV) had a similarly creative upbringing. But we didn't spend hours building dirt forts, rather we spent hours writing creative stories or writing computer programs. Not everyone's path to engineering is the same and I think the implication that all kids need to build stuff when not every engineering career is even remotely like that is a rather closed minded way of recruiting kids. If you like programming, or like solving problems, or like writing reports it doesn't mean you shouldn't go into engineering because all these skills are in the field as well.

 

The author also talks about expanding green cards and trying to encourage immigrants to stay here after college rather than going back home. But I have to disagree with her there. It's good to have a flexible immigration policy that allows for new people and new ideas but with our economy still bleeding jobs and with the great many engineers out of work I know I'd rather focus on recruiting underrepresented minorities into the field instead of foreigners.

 

Over at Under the Microscope they talk about a program to recruit girls into engineering, Spark Talented Minority Girls' Interest in Engineering, Female Recruits Explore Engineering (FREE). A mouthful I know. Funded by the NSF the program follows and guides young women from high school, through college, and into their career.

The FREE project focus group included mostly minority girls from Ohio, Colorado, and Iowa from the following additional demographics: most came from low socioeconomic backgrounds; all were recruited through their schools; all were girls who were strong academically in both math and science; none had family members or extended family members that were engineers (to ensure few preconceived notions of engineering); none had decided with any level of certainty on one field; and all of the girls agreed to simply explore engineering as an option.

I really like how we're showing engineering to people even if they don't choose it as a career. I would love for more professionals to just know about what engineering is not necessarily that everyone needs to pursue it. In this case they were doing a study on these girls so hence their goals of not choosing girls who had family members who were engineers, but I think that goal is fantastic. Not that girls and minorities who are related to engineers don't need the help and guidance, but clearly that's not the demographic we're having trouble reaching. I think perhaps that's a noble goal for outreach programs to target only people who would not otherwise participate.

Geek Bait

I have a couple geeky things at my desk at work. They're like signals to the people who recognize them. A lot of people I've never met come by to compliment me on them and then we strike up conversation and learn we have something in common besides working together. That's that sort of networking bs the social media sites will tell you to do, but I just like meeting new people and flagging the geeky ones down with my signs. Plus I feel cool in an übergeeky sort of way using symbols in plain sight that are like a code to my comrades in geekitude.