To think that hard hats do put off girls from pursuing engineering?

[LivingDeadGirlUK]

Having a discussion on facebook about this article.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-50315019

I think the association of engineering with hard hats and dirty work is a big issue in attracting both men and women to the industry however another poster took exception to the stereotype of 'heels and dresses' being used to combat the stereotype of 'hard hats'. Person in question did not believe that women are put off of engineering because of the protective gear. However I disagree and think that it is a factor (alongside many others) as young women can be very sensitive to their image and 'fitting in' during that secondary school age range when we think about our careers and uni choices.

AIBU to say that for quite a proportion of teenage girls the thought of wearing a hard hat and boots and being outside/in a dirty environment all day would make them dismiss a career in engineering, given the association?

(think this is my first AIBU so please be gentle :) )

Well they’re normally yellow aren’t they? So unflattering.

I have a pink one, they also come in purple, red, blue, green

Hope that helps

I'm an engineer and have a pink hard had and pink safety boots. I only wear them when I need to... which isn't that often.

How unflattering, or otherwise, PPE is had absolutely nothing to do with my choice of career.

It seems highly unlikely that hard hats have anything to do with girls being put off engineering.

If it were true, virtually no girl would ever dream of riding a horse.

In Germany, an engineer is seen as prestigious as a doctor or lawyer

Too bloody right that is!

Yeas ago i used to work for a firm making audio hi-fi equipment and worked wioth a REAL engineer but it was an eye opener just what it was like making anything in england.

One example was the control knobs for the equipment to be moulded in plastic. These came from Germany as they Bayer employed Plastics engineers!!

now he said what if your some was a bright lad and was to be admited to Oxbridge what would you want him to become afterwards and most thought "why a Doctor Lawyer Accountant etc one of the "professions"

A plastics enginer??

Go figure!

Oh dear.

I work in construction - both on site and in the office, and wear full PPE (hats, boots, high vis glasses etc).

The attire is not the issue, the shite career advice and skewed perspective is the issue.

In 20 years I've never been treated than anything other than a qualified professional. The opinion portrayed in the media/world is that all the men are terrible and you'll be bullied for being female.

@ConFusion360 I brought a bright pink tape measure once in the hope that it would deter people on site borrowing it but alas it was still gone in weeks :p

I don’t think civil engineers are doing bits of digging and heavy lifting all winter, Daisy, I think they turn up now and again to make sure the digging and heavy lifting is done right, so that whatever is being built is built properly.

I am an engineer. No other engineer in the family. And no it’s didn’t put me off. I dint think I ever thought about how I was going to be dressed or if I would wear a hard hat (not all engineers do btw, far from!!).

Maybe it would be better to STOP assuming women will be out off by what you wear and assume they are string enough to cope with wearing a hat?

Omg the very idea of that being a factor makes me want to just give up and die! Are girls really being brought up to be that vain and shallow?

If a girl is stupid enough to be put off by a hard hat she probably isn’t clever enough to be an engineer 🤷‍♀️

There is absolutely no reason why more women cannot be Engineers !

However, there is an 'old boys network'

Working hours are not family friendly

There are lots of different types of Engineering

With new technologies emerging, I would expect more females to engage

I've found that female engineers are better communicators

Engineering promotes itself in lots of ways but unfortunately there has to be a receptive audience and that isn't always the case. There are plenty of competitions for schools to enter and schemes like the Arkwright Scholarships to support budding engineers, but they rely on teachers and sometimes parents to support and drive things forwards. In the current climate a lot of schools dont have the resources, time and energy unfortunately.
But there are some great schemes out there. If anyone's children get the opportunity to participate in First Lego League then I would really recommend it. It is very time consuming but it develops a lot of great skills and the teams are judged on a raft of things including teamwork and communications, not just design and programming. My children have been lucky enough to go to a number of national finals and my youngest got to internationals once which was an absolutely amazing experience. There are a lot of positive role models for girls involved at that competition and they've recently started a junior competition aimed at younger primary school children (the main competition is for 10-16 yrs if i recall rightly). Hopefully things like this can catch the interest of girls early before too many negative influences start and girls begin to see STEM subjects as not for them.
I wonder what it is about physics in particular that isn't attractive to girlsthough? I was one of only 2 girls to take Physics A level in my year at school. Chemistry was about 25% girls and Biology over half. And here we are over 35 years later and my son still tells me that there are hardly any girls in his Physics A level class. I really thought it would have changed by now. This is a science specialism school with outstanding results across all the STEM subjects at GCSE and women well represented on the staff in all subjects. Nearly 50% of the A level maths students are girls. So what is it about physics?

girls ovaries dry up when they do maths..

Many a true word said in jest.

I think mine did.

Engineering isn’t a protected term and can mean many different things to different people.
The girls I know wouldn’t be put off by gear.

Dd wants to go into engineering. Even she’s not in scouts or cadets uniform or walking gear she does wear mascara etc. None of her friends want to go into engineering, and none of them wear anything remotely feminine.

35 years later and my son still tells me that there are hardly any girls in his Physics A level class.

Yet undergrad engineering courses have roughly 20% female students. It could be that a very high proportion of the few that do do physics go on to study engineering at university level.

@FloatOn I culd almost believ yoi work woith DH

there does seem to be the perception that there is something scary about being out with the actual workers and that a woman wont be accepted. He got VERY angry with one director for saying that out loud. He was quite clear that the 2 female engineers they had, who had left, had not done so because of behaviour on site. The men on site thought they were great, really knew their stuff. DH, Site Manager/On Call Engineer, was clear he preferred them to the chocolate teapots, aka male engineers, that had replaced them. The reason they left was the Director kept call them in for a pep talk, telling them she knew how hard it was to be female on site and to keep their chins up! They said so in the exit interviews. It was really unnerving, patronising. Almost as the the Director didn't have faith any in them.

If anything I have found the opposite and if a member of the public accosts me on site I normally have a number of men appear behind me for support. That too! An [oops, best redact the company name] engineer once wanted to take one woman to task for her calculations. DH was alerted by one of the riggers and he had a listen in. She didn't need any help putting the Jobsworth right but did say she was aware of a subtle shifting in the workforce as all of the men she worked with moved that little bit closer!

I suspectmany men who work on the dirty end of engineerin, Civ or otherwise, have simialr stories to tell. There are more and more women slowly entering the field and all are as welcome as they are skilled - which is actually a warning rather than a welcome, if you read it right. One all new engineers on site get, according to DH

My previously mentioned 14 year old is doing German GCSE as well as her science/techy ones on the advice of the schools careers teacher. She was going to do it anyway but he recommended German and sciences as the way to go for her. We dont come from a sciency, engineering background, she discovered a natural apptitude the minute she stepped into secondary school.

I did a degree in engineering, and didn’t question the PPE in the labs, even though they were men’s boots. It really didn’t phase me at all, and neither would a hart hat. I went to an all girls school and loads of us did STEM courses at university. I think that the careers advice in school is probably the biggest factor at play. I was given every option available to me based on my grades. I know for some schools this isn’t the case which is quite sad.

I culd almost believ yoi work woith Sorry. I am working in a cold office. Must dig out my fingerless mittens!

It really didn’t phase me at all, and neither would a hart hat. I went to an all girls school and loads of us did STEM courses at university. I suspect the girls only school helped with choices too. It's easier for a teenage girl to get into physics, maths, engineering at a girls school than at a mixed one.

Don't think it helps that "engineer" is used for all levels in a way that doctor, statistician etc isn't. Might help if there were a term that tripped off the tongue better than "chartered engineer".

Might help if there were a term that tripped off the tongue better than "chartered engineer".

"Real engineer"?

my hard hat is regulation White, to my position on board.

@MereDintofPandiculation Almost all my husband's European colleagues use their "Eur Ing" title with pride, though he never bothers as nobody in this country knows what it means. Mind you, I think that is even more unwieldy than Chartered Engineer and does unfortunately sound a bit like "urine".... One of those situations when just plain letters might have been a better choice.

Cultural differences are so interesting on this topic. I attended the top girl's school in my country - basically, in our system, you write an exam at 11 and are placed according to your score and you needed a score of 97%+ to enter the school I did (the pressure was and still is ridiculous, esp on such young children).

Because of the image of the school as a prestigious, high-achieving one, the ONLY option we ever felt we had was to pursue professional jobs, preferably in STEM so medicine and engineering were the first choices, then law, accounts and management if you didn't want to do anything scientific. So, in the end, we had the opposite problem where you felt that pursuing something creative or vocational or more blue collar was absolutely not an option. It was so bad, that out of 90 persons pursuing A-Levels, they were 2 classes of 30 each dedicated to Chemistry, Physics, Maths, Add. Maths and Biology.

This mindset is prevalent in all the prestigious schools in my country, regardless of if they are same sex (male or female) or co-ed. The result is that we have a saturated workforce with medical and engineering graduates having a hard time finding work and definitely being underpaid in general.