WoW Blog (Woman of the Week)

With all due respect I'd say: let women make their own decisions ! what they chose to do for living should'nt be considered a problem that has to be solved by pushing through those so called barriers.

If you'd tried to force men into certain careers like accounting, bussiness administration, human resources (just an example, can be others), using the same strategy, most of us would feel insulted; because you belittle our capacity to decide what exactly we want to do with our lives.

Don't try to fix what is not broken, spend your efforts on something that really is a problem.

I think the problem (not just for females) is that engineering is perceived to be dull. Our image needs a bit of an uplift.

I feel like the comments are lacking a woman's perspective. No offense intended. It makes me think of the current debates about women's reproductive health that are being completely controled by men! (Ok, I'll try to keep politics out of this.)

Yes, I agree that both boys and girls should be exposed to a variety of opportunities. But not every event needs to be open to everyone in the name of political correctness. Allowing kids to see someone who "looks like them" working in a field that is dominated my people who don't look like them can be very important. Whether "looks like them" is defined by gender or race, it can open their eyes to new opportunities.

In the case of girls, they often don't have female role models in thier lives that are in science and engineering fields. I would have loved to know more about these fields when I was younger. I might have taken a more direct route to my engineering career. But at that age, the women I knew were either housewives (they weren't called stay-at-home-moms yet), teachers, secretaries, or nurses. Luckily, I did have some amazing female math teachers who were great role models.

By the way, I really loved this statistic in the article: "Stanford University's top 5% graduating engineering students were evenly split between males and females. The females, however, made up just 27% of the total number of graduates in engineering disciplines." Why wouldn't the engineering field want more of us. It looks like we are pretty good at it!