Engineering360: "Women Still Aren't Going into Engineering"

Fully staffed, I (male) had women engineers working for me. Their main problem in my office, including occasionally from me, were socialization comments from both sides, but mainly from the men, that included varying degrees of fundamental boy-girl stuff and most of which was purely innocent conversation, but, more often than it should have, elicited a response from the other (opposite sex) party of a ''cute'' response, to which there was the ''look''. Why the same repartee between parties of same sex just slid along into immediate oblivion, but not so more often than not with the same between opposite sexes, is just the way it is, I suppose.

But there definitely is a sexism problem for women engineers engaging the larger world beyond their immediate work place, and that sexism seems also to be quite rampant as the women engineers engage other women in ''positions of stature'' in the broader commercial, institutional and governmental world. I was always surprised when one of my women engineers would come into the office after a venture into the outside world fuming about ''bitch this'' and ''bitch that'' resulting from an encounter with another woman in the course of my engineer's doing her job.

A casual observation: The women I have encountered as physicians and lawyers seem to be a more self-confident, engaging and assertive group than the women engineers, as a group, that I have encountered in the typical engineering work force. But, things, they are a'changing: The past, current and president elect of the American Society of Civil Engineers are three women engineers, a never-before event.