I’ve heard male engineers say that they have trouble working with female engineers. They don’t seem to have trouble working with women in general, but they have had trouble with female engineers. One of them said that almost every female engineer he has worked with has been pushy and resistant to admitting error.
My own experience in this regard is very limited; however, the female engineer that I do work with can be very difficult. I’m not alone in saying this, as several of my co-workers have complained about her before.
Is this consistent with your own experiences? (Mind you, I’m directing this question to both engineers and non-engineers.) If so, why do you think this is the case? If not, why?
I’m a female engineer and I’m a gem of a coworker!!!
I’ve never seen it as a male/female issue or an engineer/nonengineer issue. There are people who know how to work with others and there are those who do better on solo projects. At least in my experience.
Engineering is a male-dominated field. For a woman to survive in the profession, she must be strong enough to overcome the barrier put in the way of women who dare to enter traditionally masculine fields: an entrenched sexism reflected in a lack of understanding of a female viewpoint and a glass ceiling which prevents her from rising according to hard work and ability. The strength of character demanded of a female engineer may go hand-in-hand with a proclivity to intractability and a tendency to be “pushy”. Perhaps she may even be defensive - insecure in her hard-fought position and liable to overreact in order to defend it.
But I won’t. The above position is grossly generalised and is unfair to the female engineers to don’t want to made to feel like they are some victim of prejudice or a woman-warrior for equal opportunity. Moreover, it’s unfair to the engineering profession, which makes strenous effort to treat women equally. Instead I’ll say your sample size (and mine) is insufficient to reach a conclusion on the general character of female engineers.
FTR, I know two female engineers. They’re both lovely. I know a lot more male engineers, some of whom are complete asses, but what does that mean? Nothing at all.
For the record, I’m biased. (I’m a female currently an undergrad in Chemical Engineering.)
There are a couple of takes on this. First, the normal feminist whine that “pushy and resistant to admitting error” in a woman can be equal to “take charge and confident” in a man. One must watch one’s perspective. (And I’ve met engineering students like this, who think that my matching chromesomes mean I will never get the right answers, despite my grades and skills. Its annoying to work with someone who thinks you are doomed to be stupid, trust me.)
But beyond that, how many female engineers have you known and what percentage of them are too agressive? How does that compare to the male engineers you or your friend know? What is overly agressive? If you are going to divide things by gender, you have to make sure you’re measuring both genders equally. Even if you get all of this ironed out, what’s the sample size? I can get you a class full of engineers in training who work quite well with each other, regardless of gender. I can also get you several engineers in training who I know have problems working with women…but it’s not the woman’s problem its the fact the guys in question can’t work in a group to save their lives.
So, in answer to your question, no its not consistant with my experiances. But then, I’m a female who is a decent engineering student and I can work well with people.
I dunno, I’m a female engineer and I never had problems working with me.
But yeah, I’ve gotten the “boy, you can be pushy” thing. People flat out don’t like it when I stick to my guns on something. I don’t know if it’s a woman thing or what, but I even get this from Mr. Athena (a male engineer, btw). I agree with Medea’s Child - what’s “Take charge and confident” in a man is usually “pushy and resistant to admitting error” in a woman.
For the record, just about every engineer I’ve known, male or female, hates to admit error. I think it comes with the territory.
On the other hand, I can’t be too bad. At my farewell luncheon at my last job one of my coworkers was talking about another female engineer who used to work with us, and he said something about “At least when I show you a problem that shows up in your code area on my computer, you’re answer isn’t always ‘but it works on MY computer’” A backhanded compliment, but I’ll take it.
Narrad, excellent post. It’s true that women engineers often can be unfortunately perceived as pushy and bossy. And there are definitely female engineers that fall into that stereotype – but there’s also MALE engineers that are pushy and bossy as well.
Most of the female engineers of my acquaintance do tend to be assertive and self-confident, but I believe that comes from having to establish yourself in a male-dominated field and dealing with all the hassles that come with it (sexism, glass ceilings, et cetera). I’ve seen that time and time again in my field; we supervise a lot of construction and remediation contractors, and the female engineers in our office often get the “stand aside, little lady” treatment from those contractors in the field. (To their credit, our engineers were twice as professional as I would have been in that situation, and handled it admirably.) But as a gender, I can’t say that female engineers act much differently, better or worse, than males in the same roles (at least in my experience).
Combine male engineers who, despite their intelligence in dealing with analytical issues, are (God bless them) among the most socially clueless and interpersonally inept creatures that walk this planet with female engineers, many of whom probably have a somewhat justifiable short fuse regarding questions about their professional competency, and you have a situation ripe for conflict and misunderstanding.
Having said this, however, I can easily imagine that it is within the realm of possiblility that a female engineer will get her back up more quickly than male engineer if challenged and be more obdurate in admitting error. This is because males and females, despite professional training often have different ingrained interpersonal interaction styles and strategies.
Men on teams or in cooperative work environments like to “fight” and challenge each other in dozens of both subtle and overt ways in the workplace about whatever it is they are striving for. In short men often enjoy beating the crap out of each others ideas (if not each other) and do not always do so politely. Many women (not all) have a different, less dominance oriented and more inclusive interpersonal style and can react to this type of challenge as a direct personal affront rather than a “King of the Hill” pushing match desired and enjoyed by men.
This is obviously not true of everyone and there can be male and female engineers with the exact opposite interpersonal characteristics of those I cited, but by and large I think it is true, in general that men and women in groups deal with cooperative tasks differently and this can lead to misunderstandings.
Based on my experience*, being obstinate and resistant to admitting error (especially if the feedback is coming from a non-engineer) is a trait shared by the EEs (male) I know. I wouldn’t be surprised if female engineers shared the same trait.
The next time this woman becomes “difficult” picture one your male counterparts said the same things she did.
*I’ve had electronic equipment ruined (didn’t even need fixing) by an EE who insisted that “I know what I’m doing”. I played in a band with another EE who would rather see his horribly complicated guitar effects patching project crap out in front of an audience multiple times (thus ruining the performances) than give in to our pleas that he use a simpler, more robust system. Of course he used the time-tested engineer’s way to fix the problem: he furiously pounded the cabinet with his fist. And he switched to a simpler, more robust system.
Well as I’ve said, my own experience with female engineers is very liimited. That’s one reason why I thought I’d ask what other people’s experiences were – because I didn’t want to draw any immediate conclusions. On the other hand, I couldn’t dismiss all the anecdotal evidence, either.
I think some of you were right to point out that it can be advantageous for a female engineer to be “pushy” in a male-dominated field – and that “pushy” male engineers are less likely to be perceived that way. I also suspect that female engineers feel more pressured to be pushy – sometimes justifiably, sometimes not. If carried too far (and this is easy to do in hindsight), it can strain one’s relationships at work.
As with many things, I think there’s blame to go around – after all, both men and women need to strike a balance, and that’s not always easy.
I work in the Engineering Dept. of a plastics manufacturer, in fact, I’m typing this at work right now. I don’t think your problem is that she is a female engineer, it’s that she’s just a plain ol’ engineer. Many engineers that I have worked with were typically the same way. Engineers are usually “know-it-all” people. Not saying that in a bad way, I tend to be like that, engineers just think they have an answer for everything. The business for them is more of what you know than who you know, so when you tell an engineer they were wrong, or that you have a better idea, they generally do not like this. You are challenging her mentality, which is like an act of war with some engineers. A general reaction to offense is to put up a stern defense.
Also, in general, engineers tend not to be the most adept at social situations. Engineers are a race of geeks. I’m a geek. If there is an enginner anywhere that doesn’t admit to being at least a partial geek, then they have identity issues. Being an above mentioned geek, she probably isn’t the best with dealing directly with people, and she probably doesn’t take well to critisism. She’s probably not even trying to be pushy, like other people have said, she’s just trying to “stick to her guns”. (Athena)
I’m an engineer, and I know quite a few other engineers, both male and female. These days I’m not working directly with too many other enginners, and my work involves a lot of creative (non-engineering) type stuff. So I think I have a pretty good take on this from the ‘inside’ as well as the ‘outside’.
Engineers as a group tend to be the type of people that are rigorous, logical and confident in their abilities. We often do not reach our opinions without lengthy analysis, therefore we feel very well justified in holding strongly to those opinions. We are often seen as being rather cold, placing a higher degree of importance on logic than emotion. And, yes, engineers often are rather lacking in social graces. I think engineering attracts these type of people, male or female. There personality traits are often perceived as being ‘male’ traits (rightly or wrongly), so when a female exhibits them, it is both more likely to be noticed and less likely to be forgiven. Some female engineers may also be compensating for the male-domination of the field, as mentioned previously.
An important factor to consider though, is that it takes far fewer negative experiences than positive ones to generate a strong reaction. For example, someone may interact with dozens of excellent female engineers without forming any negative opinion. Then one encounter with an overly aggressive female engineer, and suddenly this person believes they are all that way. Squeaky wheel. . . One bad apple. . . We (all of us, I mean) often have to guard against this phenomena when we are forming our opinions of others.
One of the female engineers I know is the most stubborn and competitive person I have ever met. Even in the face of great expertise, she doesn’t admit to being wrong. Since she is so outspoken and hard to deal with, it is almost impossible not to notice her. Other engineers who are more reasonable are less obtrusive, so they aren’t taken into account when people start forming their opinions. So, in the public perception, that one difficult female engineer may outweight hundreds of reasonable ones. I also know several female engineers who are very good at their job without being hardheaded or difficult.
There are a lot of gross generalizations here, of course, but I believe there is generally ( ) a kernal of truth there.
I agree with most of what you said, Big Sam, but I suspect there’s more to it than that. While your description may apply to the specific engineer mentioned in the OP, there is still a widespread perception that female engineers are difficult to work with (think: Alice from Dilbert).
Several posters have opined that “pushiness” in a woman would be perceived as “self-confidence” in a male. I don’t entirely agree. While we probably do tolerate more pushiness in men, I found that engineers strongly dislike it in both male and female co-workers. Also, one can be confident and “stick to one’s guns” without being pushy. It all depends on one’s people skills – one’s diplomacy, diction and social graces.
I think that astro has it exactly right. Women tend to have different interaction styles, which complicates the work dynamic. In addition, I’d say that this male-dominated field makes it easy for women to over-compensate by becoming more pushy than what’s acceptable – or healthy.
So while I think there is an unconscious bias against women in this field, I also think that the situation is one which can make women overcompensate, thereby aggravating the situation.
I’m a scientist as well as an engineer. I’ve worked with several female engineers in my time, and even shared an office with one. I can;t say I’ve ever found them difficult to work with, or even different than the male engineers I’ve been thrown in with. There are, however, a lot fewer of them. In the last place I worked, despite having quite a few people come and go over the years, there was only one female engineer, and she was only with us briefly.
For reasons not clear to me, male engineers tend to hook up socially with nursing types. “The Engineer’s friend is the nurse,” said one engineer friend of mine, and I have to admit it’s true that most of my girlfriends and dates have been health-care professionals, including Pepper Mill, whom I married.
I’ve worked with about 20 female engineers throughout my 15-year career in software development – only one has come even remotely close to the archetype described in the OP. For the most part, they’re not much different than the men I’ve worked with, except that they have less facial hair.
I think software development tends to be different, though. For whatever reason, the male-female barriers seem to be lower there (IMexperience, of course) and the male-female conflicts are less acute.
I’ve known guys who have had trouble with female engineers, but this was primarily in fields such as mechanical and electrical engineering, or cross-disciplinary fields such as electromechanical systems integration. I haven’t known this problem to exist in pure software development, but I suspect that it does to a lesser extent.
This has also been my experience. I think this has a lot to do with the fact that software engineering is fairly different from other types, and also the fact that it’s about the same age as late 20th-century feminism. The latter fact may be the most relevant.
I have to agree - aside from the issue of what constitutes “engineering”, software is a different ball game from mechanical design, civil/strcutural, chemical, etc.
I have noticed, at the power plants I visit, that even just since the early 1990’s women are starting to move into many different roles and job positions that you never saw before. There is a definite, slow progress occuring. Go sisters!
I’m a carpenter by trade. I’m also a university graduate. I’ve had some run-ins with engineers who could not accept that 27 years in the trade teaches more practicality than books do. Most engineers are fine, but there are some that consider tradesmen to be, at best, semimorons. Some tradesmen I’ve met could make semimoron by vigorous study, also.
Actually, the female engineers I’ve worked with have all been easy to get along with. No conflicts whatsoever.
Don’t get me started about male architects, please.:mad:
) a kernal of truth there.