Women In Engineering – will we last?

Near the beginning of the year I was asked to co-lead a group with a very specific goal: improve the engagement of our women engineers. This came about because a woman in HR thought to take a look at what the difference was between women and men when it came to the yearly survey given to all employees. There was a difference! It showed that women were not as ‘engaged’ as men in our engineering department. Here we are using ‘engagement’ to mean those things that make you want to stick with a job or company. When our friend in HR brought this to the attention of our managers in the engineering department two other women and myself were asked to spear-head this problem: how do we improve engagement? Since that fateful moment I’ve been neck deep in the issue, and it spawned the very creation of this site for my personal fight that I carry past the work-place. Now we are nearing the end of the year and managers are starting to become more stressed over the need to finish projects, where we are spending time, and how to wrap things up for the year. This resulted in the most heart wrenching moment of the year – my manager asking me and another co-leader of the group to spend less time working on our Women In Engineering efforts. Less time means cutting down from 10% of my time to 2.5% per our discussion. This is a significant cut and was quite surprising. After all, we are making great headway. Women are working together and coordinating speakers, volunteering, creating fun events, participating in recruitment, and finding ways to involve our women and improve the engagement we initially set out to improve. The other co-leader and I are not alone in feeling this pain. One of our officers was asked to drop the group entirely so that she could focus on her job. I understand the issue – work comes first. Without jobs we wouldn’t be able to put in 1% toward this extra activity, but still, it hurt. So now I hold my breath and I wait to see. Will our Women In Engineering group live through the next year? Will the pressure we feel now only increase or will it dissipate with the start of the new year? I hope it is temporary, but it made me think about the overall issues. I could quit my engineering job and decide to focus my efforts on getting more girls into STEM by being a teacher full time, but then I’ve removed myself from my STEM job as a software engineer and defeated my own efforts in a way. The fact that I am raising the question about changing jobs means my own engagement at my workplace has suffered from that single conversation with my manager. <sigh> Does this happen often? Do other women who start to tackle these kinds of issues see the same sort of things happening? Do they leave STEM jobs to fight the fight? Cross your fingers for me and my team. We need a bit of extra luck to see us through.