Tuesday, November 19, 2013
The male nurse vs the female engineer
Computer science programs, and other engineering type programs, have struggled catering to women. These programs have always been predominantly filled with males. This will always be the case. While it is noble to convince women to join these programs, nature claims it will never happen. As people have studied gender differences, one thing they have learned is that men have a greater capacity for logic and women have a greater capacity for emotion. Women have an inherit nature to choose more emotional and caring career paths, where men gravitate towards more logical and systematic paths. Just as engineering programs lack in females, programs such as nursing and elementary education lack in males. Engineering and nursing will always be gender skewed, and there is nothing wrong with that.
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This seems a little too black and white for me. Not every male lacks empathy, and not every female lacks a semantic mind. What we should not allow is a woman with an aptitude for engineering be turned away by feeling like they do not belong.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Nick's comment. The bigger issue is making both genders feel equally included in these majors. Gender does make people different, and both genders have a lot to contribute.
ReplyDeleteI completely agree with this post. 75% of all school teachers in the US are women. About 90% of all nurses in the US are women. I don't think it's up to those industries to change that. I also don’t think it’s up to the computer science industry itself to change a similar, but opposite, imbalance. I disagree with Nick because I don’t get the feeling that the author is saying every male lacks empathy and every female lacks logic, he’s speaking in generalities and statistics. I also have an issue with the assumption that we, as an industry, are intentionally turning away women. I don’t personally know any computer scientists that would turn away an individual based on gender. Sure, they exist, but there are women that turn men away from nursing or education. This is a two-way street kind of issue.
ReplyDeleteCertainly genders are different, but when we put so much emphasis on how different we are, we send a hurtful message, though I am sure it is not intentional.
ReplyDeleteWe imply emotional girls cannot be successful in a logical space. We imply that guys who have emotions are not welcome here. We imply that only one kind of person can be successful here and if you are not genetically that person, there is nothing you can do to succeed.