How Women Mentors Make a Difference in Engineering

Studies about education are famously not done well and are hard to replicate (this is true of other fields as well). Instead of having a psychologist who has never done engineering do the study, have actual engineers. Different people respond differently. Engineering is one of those fields that if you screw up, many, many people can die so it takes a certain kind of personality and I believe it is someone who is very passionate about doing it.<p>The same is true with medicine.

“Often, science is messy and things don’t turn out neatly,” Dasgupta says. But in this study, “it was very gratifying how clean the results were.”<p>This is an unfortunate choice of words in the age of p-hacking and publication bias.

Part of the problem here, which the article doesn&#x27;t quite reach, is that the possible pool of mentors is growing but those women are themselves lacking in the confidence they need to become mentors. Encourage your female engineering senior managers and leaders to knowing that they are respected and capable of being role models and mentors to others if they choose!

My female engineer friends tell me that female mentors work well for them, but that female bosses often don&#x27;t.<p>They all cite some sort of attitude where the boss had to gut it out in an unfair sexist world, and don&#x27;t have much sympathy.<p>Anecdotal of course, but if true to any significant measure, would make mentors even more important.

While I think more women, and underrepresented groups in general, is a good idea. However I am against treating them any differently in a professional setting, for better or worse.<p>This means, if you have a standard for defining someone is not compliant or aligned with the company, it should be the same for everyone.