My experience follows Anita’s comments above. When I was on the faculty at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, teaching computer science, my introductory undergraduate classes were pretty close to a 50/50 split between male and female students. Advanced undergraduate and masters level courses were down to about 85/15, and I think there were just one or two female doctoral candidates in the whole (large) department. IIRC, there were three women on the faculty. This was 1988-1992. What’s really sad is that these proportions have not changed much over decades! I just checked and there are five women among the 38 faculty listed.

In the corporate division I work for now, there are three women in the engineering force, four if you count the technical publications writer, out of about 100 people. My employer is definitely sensitive to equal opportunity hiring issues. But I don’t know what we are doing to encourage more women to enter the pool of applicants.

There is more to this than simple mathophobia. Some highly technical fields in the biosciences are strongly dominated by women, although not as strongly as “traditional” engineering fields by men. I hate the idea that this is simple “hard” versus “soft” stereotypes at work.

When I was in engineering school in the late 80’s, women were outnumbered by men by about 8 to 1. That improved in the 90’s, but has apparently declined in recent years. Women still suffer from the impression that girls can’t do math and gravitate away from math-intensive fields.

I wonder, also, if it’s a symptom of the culture of people wanting to make loads of money for little work. Like in fashion, so many people only see the glamour and flash, but ignore that it actually takes work to get to that point.

Geezer’s eyes appreciate phone numbers
in large print and obvious places.

Amusements are wonderful. Tickle my
fancy and I’ll remember you forever!

Tom

Oh, and I love the business cards. How many points off for ‘flirts at parties and collects their business cards’?