I think that men and women have equal opportunities to pursue an engineering career. However, parents, kindergarten and elementary school play a crucial role in motivating them to do so.
If you hide something from a child (for example do not let them dismantle, repair, destroy things, learn how the stuff works etc.), they can loose interest in some fields. On the contrary, if the child sees parents doing engineering, they can gain much more interest. This also applies to other fields of interest.
I believe it is a job of a parent to expose their children to various fields and help them with their process of finding, what makes sense to them (but not choose for them).
I think that men and women have equal opportunities to pursue an engineering career. However, parents, kindergarten and elementary school play a crucial role in motivating them to do so.
If you hide something from a child (for example do not let them dismantle, repair, destroy things, learn how the stuff works etc.), they can loose interest in some fields. On the contrary, if the child sees parents doing engineering, they can gain much more interest. This also applies to other fields of interest.
I believe it is a job of a parent to expose their children to various fields and help them with their process of finding, what makes sense to them (but not choose for them).
I fully agree. Engineering by itself is as gender neutral as it gets. History and early education are the biggest reasons for the real numbers of engineers.
I tried this with my children and wife. Wife still insists on not being the slightest bit interested in electronics even though she sees me having so much fun. My daughter also never exhibited any interest in electronics, no matter how many times I did interesting things and did double art instead. Admittedly I like art so we did visit art exhibitions and galleries together. My son tried and did do a Robotics MEng and had to do some electronics, but eventually he decided no, and did something called Software Engineering - whatever that is, textiles maybe. I still do not understand how he did software engineering on a robotics MEng.
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