Gender-based Hiring in Engineering: Insulting Today, Inspiring Tomorrow

I have been fortunate to be shaped by incredible women in my field, and it is my conviction that with time, my experience will be less of an anomaly.
United States, Northern America

Story by Izzy Bauman. Edited by Rick Scherpenhuizen
Published on November 22, 2020. Reading time: 5 minutes

This story is also available in it kr tr



Listen to this story:


It is a well-known fact that the world of engineering is dominated by men. In the summer of 2019, the Technical University at Eindhoven in the Netherlands announced that in the next 18 months, the university would only be hiring women[1]. This was a direct response to the revelation that only 15% of their faculty were female[2]. We face similar statistics here in my home country (the US): only 17.4% of faculty colleges of engineering in the U.S. are women[3].

Some years before, in 2017, I was an intern at an engineering firm where one in twenty engineers was a woman. One afternoon, while my coworker was at my desk, a client came up to us and told my coworker that his nephew would love to have an internship at our firm. My coworker replied that he probably wouldn't get the job because "we only hire female interns''. When I countered that half the interns were male, he defended himself by implying that the company will hire women who are not as talented as men, just to have more women. I had to excuse myself so I wouldn’t get publicly upset. When I came back, the client leaned over to my coworker and said, jokingly, "ooh she's mad at you". Later, I cried silently on the train home.

I am not an engineering professor, but I have been affected by the biases they face. My greatest mentor during my Bachelor’s degree was repeatedly denied a promotion by department heads who insinuated that her obligations as a mother would get in the way of her performance. I was devastated to see someone I admired so dismissed. It is disheartening to see the gender bias played out so plainly - a bias that I will inevitably face in my own career as well. Yet I feel inspired to share her story – she is the reason I loved fluid dynamics[4] and led me to the internship in wind energy that shaped my career trajectory.

In its new measure, TU Eindhoven recognizes the benefits of diversity and seeks to overcome the inherent gender-based prejudice present in the hiring process. A 2012 study found that both female and male science faculty members “rated the male applicant as significantly more competent and hirable than the (identical) female applicant, selected a higher starting salary and offered more career mentoring to the male applicant”[5]. Although it upsets me, I am not shocked by this statistic – it took me years to unlearn my bias that the boys in my class were ‘naturally’ more talented at math.

I have been fortunate to be shaped by incredible women in my field, and it is my conviction that with time, my experience will be less of an anomaly. As I progress in my engineering career, I hope that I might grow in my capacity to mentor and advocate for those women who will shape future solutions. In an ideal world, universities will allocate more weight in their hiring decisions to the intangible ways how women and under-represented minorities will improve their departments. Despite the short-term reinforcement of gender-based bias, quotas inarguably provide a way to drastically increase female presence in TU Eindhoven’s faculty. My heart reaches out to those women who apply despite being insulted by the notion that they can only be competing against other women.

Regardless, I am hopeful that when they are hired, they will go on to inspire a new generation of scientists. A generation who will not question the need for a diversity of perspectives and intellects to solve the world's most pressing problems. 


Footnotes 

[1] TU/e vacancies for academic staff exclusively for women for the time being

[2] How a Dutch university aims to boost gender parity

[3] ENGINEERING BY THE NUMBERS

[4] In physics and engineering, fluid dynamics is a subdiscipline of fluid mechanics that describes the flow of fluids—liquids and gases.

[5] Moss-Racusin, C. A., J. F. Dovidio, V. L. Brescoll, M. J. Graham, and J. Handelsman. "Science Faculty's Subtle Gender Biases Favor Male Students." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 109, no. 41 (2012): 16474-6479. doi:10.1073/pnas.1211286109.


How does this story make you feel?

Follow-up

Do you have any questions after reading this story? Do you want to follow-up on what you've just read? Get in touch with our team to learn more! Send an email to
[email protected].

Talk about this Story

Please enable cookies to view the comments powered by Disqus.

Share your story

Every story we share is another perspective on a complex topic like migration, gender and sexuality or liberation. We believe that these personal stories are important to better understand what's going on in our globalised society - and to better understand each other. That's because we are convinced that the more we understand about each other, the easier it will be for us to really talk to one another, to get closer - and to maybe find solutions for the issues that affect us all. 

Do you want to share your story? Then have a look here for more info.

Share Your Story

Subscribe to our Monthly Newsletter

Stay up to date with new stories on Correspondents of the World by subscribing to our monthly newsletter:

* indicates required

Follow us on Social Media

Izzy Bauman

Izzy Bauman

Hello! I'm a 23-year old MSc student in Renewable Energy from Los Angeles, California, currently living in Copenhagen, Denmark! I'm passionate about intersectional feminism and environmental justice, and live for meeting new people and hearing stories that expand my world. I am happiest when I'm making music, climbing, playing a card game or having a good chat with friends.

Topic: Gender




Get involved

At Correspondents of the World, we want to contribute to a better understanding of one another in a world that seems to get smaller by the day - but somehow neglects to bring people closer together as well. We think that one of the most frequent reasons for misunderstanding and unnecessarily heated debates is that we don't really understand how each of us is affected differently by global issues.

Our aim is to change that with every personal story we share.

Share Your Story

Community Worldwide

Correspondents of the World is not just this website, but also a great community of people from all over the world. While face-to-face meetings are difficult at the moment, our Facebook Community Group is THE place to be to meet other people invested in Correspondents of the World. We are currently running a series of online-tea talks to get to know each other better.

Join Our Community

EXPLORE TOPIC Gender

Global Issues Through Local Eyes

We are Correspondents of the World, an online platform where people from all over the world share their personal stories in relation to global development. We try to collect stories from people of all ages and genders, people with different social and religious backgrounds and people with all kinds of political opinions in order to get a fuller picture of what is going on behind the big news.

Our Correspondents

At Correspondents of the World we invite everyone to share their own story. This means we don't have professional writers or skilled interviewers. We believe that this approach offers a whole new perspective on topics we normally only read about in the news - if at all. If you would like to share your story, you can find more info here.

Share Your Story

Our Editors

We acknowledge that the stories we collect will necessarily be biased. But so is news. Believing in the power of the narrative, our growing team of awesome editors helps correspondents to make sure that their story is strictly about their personal experience - and let that speak for itself.

Become an Editor

Vision

At Correspondents of the World, we want to contribute to a better understanding of one another in a world that seems to get smaller by the day - but somehow neglects to bring people closer together as well. We think that one of the most frequent reasons for misunderstanding and unnecessarily heated debates is that we don't really understand how each of us is affected differently by global issues.

Our aim is to change that with every personal story we share.

View Our Full Vision & Mission Statement

Topics

We believe in quality over quantity. To give ourselves a focus, we started out to collect personal stories that relate to our correspondents' experiences with six different global topics. However, these topics were selected to increase the likelihood that the stories of different correspondents will cover the same issues and therefore illuminate these issues from different perspectives - and not to exclude any stories. If you have a personal story relating to a global issue that's not covered by our topics, please still reach out to us! We definitely have some blind spots and are happy to revise our focus and introduce new topics at any point in time. 

Environment

Discussions about the environment often center on grim, impersonal figures. Among the numbers and warnings, it is easy to forget that all of these statistics actually also affect us - in very different ways. We believe that in order to understand the immensity of environmental topics and global climate change, we need the personal stories of our correspondents.

Gender and Sexuality

Gender is the assumption of a "normal". Unmet expectations of what is normal are a world-wide cause for violence. We hope that the stories of our correspondents will help us to better understand the effects of global developments related to gender and sexuality, and to reveal outdated concepts that have been reinforced for centuries.

Migration

Our correspondents write about migration because it is a deeply personal topic that is often dehumanized. People quickly become foreigners, refugees - a "they". But: we have always been migrating, and we always will. For millions of different reasons. By sharing personal stories about migration, we hope to re-humanize this global topic.

Liberation

We want to support the demand for justice by spotlighting the personal stories of people who seek liberation in all its different forms. Our correspondents share their individual experiences in creating equality. We hope that for some this will be an encouragement to continue their own struggle against inequality and oppression - and for some an encouragement to get involved.

Education

Education is the newest addition to our themes. We believe that education, not only formal but also informal, is one of the core aspects of just and equal society as well as social change. Our correspondents share their experiences and confrontations about educational inequalities, accessibility issues and influence of societal norms and structures. 

Corona Virus

2020 is a year different from others before - not least because of the Corona pandemic. The worldwide spread of a highly contagious virus is something that affects all of us in very different ways. To get a better picture of how the pandemic's plethora of explicit and implicit consequences influences our everyday life, we share lockdown stories from correspondents all over the world.

Growing Fast

Although we started just over a year ago, Correspondents of the World has a quickly growing community of correspondents - and a dedicated team of editors, translators and country managers.

94

Correspondents

113

Stories

57

Countries

433

Translations

Contact

Correspondents of the World is as much a community as an online platform. Please feel free to contact us for whatever reason!

Message Us

Message on WhatsApp

Call Us

Joost: +31 6 30273938