Monday 29 October 2012

Sexist Engineering Memes

So there was an article online about sexist engineering memes. I thought the article was great and it discussed a lot of problems with some of the photos posted on a specific meme page (not mine). One of the very bad photos, which I would never use is where a girl is trying to do a math problem. She is not able to complete the question so instead there's a sentence under the photo that says, "Eff this shit, i'll become a stripper instead."

These are the types of memes that I find distasteful and degrading to women. I do not agree with these types of photos and I believe that women in engineering are just as capable as men who are in engineering. Just because someone is a woman engineer doesn't mean she will under perform compared to her male counter parts.

I guess problems like these are what causes women from not joining engineering. But how do you know what is considered 'going to far' when creating these memes?

Here is the online article written about different types of memes that have been found to be offensive to women:

What do you think of these memes? How do you feel sexist engineering memes affect women in engineering and women who want to go into engineering?

Thursday 25 October 2012

What Stops Most Women From Joining Engineering?

Who would have ever known that going into engineering would not have many girls. When I first got into university I saw mostly guys in the field. When I transferred schools and got into electrical & computer engineering the ratio between male:females was approximately 40:1.
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Engineering Female Error 404 by Engineer Memes is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

However, in the faculty of arts they had 60% girls and the ratio of girls/guys in science was pretty even. I'm still glad I went into engineering though. I met a lot of great friends there and who said we can't search elsewhere for girls?

I think one of the main reasons why girls get discouraged from engineering is the way they are brought up. When you look at engineering you think of cars, machines and stuff like that. Boys when they're young are given stuff they can play with where they can build and design (like lego). Girls are often given barbie dolls and baby dolls where they can take care of. This reason may not be true for everyone, but I believe this is one of the causes on why girls do not choose to go into engineering.

Another reason they may not be going into engineering is because of the stories they hear. Stories like "there are like no girls in engineering" or "how guys in engineering can be sexist". I think it's true that guys can be sexist in engineering. We need to learn how to treat the women in engineering better and be more welcoming to new women joining engineering. When us guys start treating them better, i'm sure they will have better stories to tell all their female friends that would make engineering more appealing.

What do you think stops them from going into this field of study?

Sunday 21 October 2012

Love(t)

As engineers some of us may or may not have the chance to meet our significant others in school. We always have too much work to do to have the time to have a chance of meeting someone. As well, there aren't many women in engineering that we can meet. The odds of meeting one is low.

I'm sure we all have sometime to meet the girl of our dreams in school. I wonder what married life would be like. Do you think this underdamped system is too simplified to describe a relationship? I can see that some parts of a relationship are great, but I can also see parts where they aren't so great like your first argument ha. Do you think you can describe 'love' with an equation? Or do you think it's too complicated to be described by mathematics?

So what do you think love is? Have you ever been in love? Did you have the time to start a relationship when you were in university? I think everyone who organizes their time efficiently can have the time to do so!

What field of Engineering did/do you study?

Looking at the Engineer Memes fan page it looks like we have all sorts of Engineers from all around the world! It's pretty cool how we all can relate to the same pictures and videos.

It's shocking to see how many types of fields there are in engineering. You can have a mechanical engineer, a civil engineer, an electrical engineer and environmental engineer (just to name a few). I even just received a message the other day where someone asked me if I knew what a packaging engineer was. I told them I didn't and then she told me she was studying it in the Philippines! I was shocked at first and then ended up googling it and found a page that described what it was. I thought it was pretty cool. It's great to see diversity on our facebook page though. It looks like the two popular engineering fields are electrical/electronics and mechanical engineering.

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Female:Male Ratio in Engineering by Engineer Memes is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

I made this picture for my fanpage and I thought it was hilarious. It might not be true at your school, but it is definitely true at the school I went too, University of British Columbia. I think in my graduating class (electrical & computer engineering) we had like approximately 20 girls out of 200. I was jealous of chemical and biological engineering though! They had such a better ratio compared to the other departments. However, I wouldn't want to go into chemical and biological engineering because I have no interest in chemistry and biology. I also met a lot of great friends in my department so I am happy with my choice!

So what kind of Engineer are you? Does the photo above reflect your engineering school or all the girls in civil/mechnical engineering at your school? Feel free to comment and discuss!

Or you can just leave a comment of what kind of engineer you are, where you studied, and where you are from, also how many girls were in your class!

Example

Electrical Engineering, University of British Columbia, Canada, 20/200

Engineer Memes

Hello!

With the success of Engineer Memes and obtaining over 60,000 fans in under a month I have decided to create a blog to share my life experience and other engineering students/engineers to relate to the photos posted on our fanpage!

What is Engineer Memes? It is a page that will show funny stories that can describe the lives of engineers and engineering students. They are things that we can relate too. They are the experiences we have been through or still going through.

Thank you for your support and thank you for joining Engineer Memes

You can find our fan page here https://www.facebook.com/TrustMeEngineeringMemes

Now here's a little information about myself. I am an electrical engineer in training. I graduated from the University of British Columbia in electrical & computer engineering specialized in nanotechnology and microsystems. My interests currently are in renewable energy sources and control system design. I just want to thank you people again for checking out my blog and facebook page. I hope you guys can find this site useful and something you can relate too.