I don’t think you have a handle on it. For the most part what you are saying is like saying you wouldn’t be a firefighter because it would infuriate you that people didn’t plan on having their housefires during normal working hours.
Of course, some rush work is because people tell you about things at the last moment. Most is because unexpected trouble happens that no one wanted or planned at all.
I can’t speak for where you are but I can speak to my experience. To put this in perspective, several of my closest female friends are lawyers. They dropped out to have families. Period. They were on a steady upward trajectory when they fired the retro rockets. They did not get stuck up against a misogynistic glass ceiling and decide to give up. Not only that, but when I look around and think of women who did make it to the top, they are quite simply almost without exception childless. It’s not misogyny it’s the lack of family friendliness that does it.
Generally this is, sadly, true… but not true for me (a woman) or for many people I know.
My father was enough of a workaholic to last me a lifetime, and I’m in a LTR with a guy who delivers pizza to make a modest living, which leaves plenty of time for living a fulfilling life and having good relationships.
If my boyfriend all of a sudden decided he valued ‘career advancement’ over all and worked overtime at a cutthroat job while stressing himself towards an early heart attack, I’d be out pretty quick.
You’re absolutely right- what I was saying is that in a lot of firms, there can be a definite macho culture, and I think that women who don’t buy in can catch a lot of heat, and probably primarily from the men in the firm. It may really be anti-family, but it’s easily perceived as misogynistic, if the anti-family stuff is always coming out of a man’s mouth.
(incidentally, this message/source confusion is probably the genesis of a lot of cries of racism that get thrown around. It’s one thing if Bill Cosby says something, and another entirely if a white man says it, even though it’s the exact same message)
In Spain, business school has been female-dominated for over 20 years. Some engineering specialties are already over 40% female, including “hardware engineer” or my own, chem eng (note that this one has been available to women only since the late 1970s; by the late 1980s, we were already 50:50). Architecture is starting to be female-dominated. And then you get to the job market - and it’s divided into “companies where the only woman is the receptionist” and “companies where there are more and more women every day” (simply because this company will hire women, and the other ones won’t).
We’re seeing both men getting into fields which had been heavily female (such as nursing) and that more and more women are getting college educations while more and more men opt for vocational training.
Unfortunately, despite occasional glowing news reports and (shudder) blogs about women entering Engineering…where the fuck are they? Seriously? What are they defining “Engineering?” (drafters, techs, and computer scientists are not “Engineers”, one or two States excepted). I’ve had to review thousands of resumes to hire people this spring and summer, and the ratio of male/female new graduates who are applying is about 50:1, maybe even 100:1. And we’re offering good jobs at high dollars (starting salary about $50k + full benefits, in one of the lowest cost of living areas of the US - good grief, you can still buy nice 3BR 2B homes within 5 minutes of work at $129k!) and no women are applying. Either they just somehow don’t want to work with my company, or they aren’t out there. We get some non-US women Engineers applying, but the problem is an Engineer from Europe, China or India has to have a MS or PhD to be the equal of a BS in the US, and there seem to be few female MS and PhD’s applying, if any.
And female PE’s are rare, very rare, to see in the marketplace looking for job. I’ve never interviewed a single, solitary other one, in fact.
Una, that may be it, they may not want to work with your company or in that regio of the US.
Perhaps they’re going into cosmetics? Only semi-joking, but a chemist/chemical engineer friend is now working with L’Oreal. She got into chemistry and engineering because she wanted to work with cosmetics and perfumes, and she’s now working in that area.
Of the other friends who are engineers, one dropped out of a PhD program with a Master’s after she got pregnant (despite the fact she could’ve finished it, but that’s another topic), and now works as freelancing in whatever she can find (entrepenour, engineering, tutoring, etc.).
The other one got fed up with her job and is now doing a Fulbright project in South America.
OTOH, I can attest first hand to the increase of women in veterinary medicine. It was mentioned during my orientation, and you could see the change if you went through the old class pictures. My 80-something class had less than 20 guys. I’m sure Pullet and horsetech (current veterinary student) can back that up.
It WILL be interesting to see how this shapes up in the future.
I will add that the number of women working at power plants has increased markedly since the late 1980’s. It used to be you could visit 10 plants before you would find one woman Engineer or operator, and you would never find any in the management of the plant. Nowadays almost every single plant I go to has at least one woman engineer, and several in technical positions (such as on-site drafters, IT specialists, chemists, environmental scientists, etc.) Women operators are still very rare, however - I can think of only 2 or 3 I’ve met, out of hundreds of plants.
After checking that we’re not in the Pit and reminding myself that this is an English-language board:
the graduate courses offered by the American Uni where I did my postgrad, both in the Chemistry (which I was attending) and Engineering Schools, were equivalent to courses I’d taken as an undergrad; most of them were 1st or 2nd year, the highest one was 4th. Like every Spanish “Ingeniero Superior”, my undergrad required 5 years of classes and labs, plus independent research (usually two years).
My experience is the opposite of what you indicate, at least for Superiores.
Only semi-joking, but a chemist/chemical engineer friend is now working with L’Oreal. She got into chemistry and engineering because she wanted to work with cosmetics and perfumes, and she’s now working in that area.