FAA Space Commerce Conference: Still Middle-Aged Males in Suits
After 20 years of meetings the audience at #FAACST is still overwhelmingly composed of males in dark business suits. pic.twitter.com/x3XsQWP9oL
— NASA Watch (@NASAWatch) February 7, 2017
Well, I’ll point out the second part of your title. There are some women in the image. Except for the partial picture of the man in the lower left corner (maybe) I don’t see any men who aren’t wearing a suit and tie.
We seem to be getting over discrimination over gender. Much more slowly than I would like, and we aren’t even close to getting over it completely. But what is the obsession with suits and ties? Isn’t that judging people by their appearance and being superficial? (Yes, I know people can’t choose their gender, while men can choose to wear a tie, so these are significantly different issues. But they are both about judging people by an irrelevant criteria.)
I was in the room. Were you? Women in the room were vastly out numbered. I had 7 or 8 women approach me during the meeting after my tweet and thank me. You are just looking for a reason to see your words in the comment section.
No, Keith, and I was agreeing with everything you wrote and showed in the picture. I was simply pointing out that you illustrated two problems.
The one most people would notice is the small number of women present at that meeting. As I said, I see this as a problem, and one we are not solving as quickly as I would like.
I was simply pointing out that you also illustrated another issue. That people, in what ought to be a technical field, are often judged by how they dress rather than by their technical competence and the merits of their ideas. I think that is a sign of placing too much emphasis on appearance rather than fact. I consider this an important concern, and wanted to point it out.
Writing that I see two problems does not in any way mean I do not care about the existing gender discrepancy. It means I think we have more than one problem to solve.
Actually, from your title and image, we may have a third worth mentioning. The age of the participants. It would be better if more young people participated in meetings like this one. They have good ideas, often more innovative ones than more senior people (who are often more set on doing things is the ways they are used to), and the younger people in the field are the ones who will be living with the results after the more senior people retire.
One of the first things I did on moving to Florida? Pitch all ties. I kept a dark suit- for funerals.
Business on every level here is very casual dress- in fact after clients get to know me I switch back to shorts. It is liberating.
Keith,
I am middle aged aerospace engineer. When I graduated with from a major aerospace engineering program as an undergraduate there were a total of three women engineers out of 125. I currently work in a large engineering organization with an average age in the late forties. Most of the attendees to conferences from my organization are senior engineers and managers as they are experienced, influential and respected. When attending conference most attending dress professionally.
So seeing a room full of mostly well dressed middle aged males in a conference is not shocking but respresetitive of the current workforce. Diversity is a good thing and is certainly coming, but you can’t artificially create something wherevit doesn’t exist. If you look at the early career workforce you will see a large amount of diversity and in 10-20 years it will naturally show up in conference like this one.
Well said. I was thinking the same thing.
I agree that there is a long time delay, between ending gender discrimination in early education and seeing gender equality at senior levels. But I do have to ask about two of your ideas or assumptions.
First, you seem to think that it is naturally for conferences to be attended by more senior people. Because they are “experienced, influential and respected.” If this is about technical issues, which spaceflight certainly is, why should influence and respect be more important than technical competence and having good, new ideas? As far as the experience of more senior people is concerned, I haven’t noticed it at conferences. Some of the least competent talks I see are by the most senior people. They tend to cover a broad range of issues by presenting material prepared by others (often simply reading the viewgraphs in a manner which suggests they don’t really understand what the words mean), and are unable to answer questions about the details. Or, worse, give glib answers which simply avoid a real answer to a technical question they aren’t able to address. In contrast, the younger people, who do most of the detail work, really benefit from going to conferences and having a chance to talk with their colleagues. So why should more senior people be the ones to attend conferences?
Second, and I guess this is a personal gripe, why do you assume wearing a suit and tie is “professional”? I’ve never heard an explanation for that, beyond “everyone knows it is” or “that’s how thing are.” As a scientist, that is an unacceptable answer. Logical though should not be limited to physics. Do you actually think a computer programmer who wears a tie can write better code than one who does not? Is there some other reason why dressing in a particular was proves someone is professionally competent?
What is the real problem? Is the problem that historically certain sectors of the population were drawn to and easily fit in a certain role? Is there a problem with retaining and thorough use of time won experience? Is there a problem inspiring new people of varying parts of our society in these fields? Is there a problem showing new people that this field is fruitful and prosperous more than other fields and thus filling our ranks? Is it a supply and demand issue and what are its causes?
Why keep pointing out this discrepancy, dichotomy or difference if there is no understanding of the root causes and no solution or path forward has been explored?
I think the real problem is that there is no one, single problem and some of the problems are coupled.
There is definitely a time delay. If most of the people at that conference were “middle aged”, then they were in primary or secondary school in the 1970s. So the gender mix says quite a bit about how education worked in the 1970s and nothing about how it works in 2017.
Even as late as the 1990s, there were infamous things like the “talking Barbie” doll. If you are unfamiliar with that, the manufacturer built it to say things like “math is hard” and “lets go shopping.” Women have been subject to cultural biases against entering STEM fields more recently than the 1970s.
I think things are getting better. I see more female undergraduates majoring in physics than I did as an undergraduate around 1990. More female graduate students than I did when I was in graduate school (although the difference is not as great.) But the gradual improvements in early education are just starting to percolate up to the level of senior staff in industry or faculty at universities.
But that time lag is not the only problem. I have been told that it is socially uncomfortable to be the only woman, or one of the few women, in a department (or company) and the same is true about being the only African-American or the only homosexual, or the only anything. That doesn’t mean everyone else is treating minority members of the group badly (although that does happen.) Even with completely fair treatment, being different from everyone else can make someone feel uncomfortable. That creates a barrier to removing past discrimination.
Then there are some problems which don’t have a clear solution, not even a long-term one. In the 1990s, a friend pointed out a study on how undergraduate physical science courses were taught, what worked well for some students and poorly for others, and that there was an underlying gender bias. (I’m afraid this was twenty five years, so I don’t remember the references she gave.)
According to this study, some people have an easy time learning undergraduate physics when the professor starts by telling them the theory, and then follows by showing demonstrations or having lab session which illustrate the theory. Some people have an easier time learning when the demonstration or lab work comes first, followed by a lecture on the theory which explains what they have observed. The study my friend pointed out showed that there was a gender difference. Man tended to learn better from one approach and women tended to learn better from the other.
I don’t remember which approach was better for which gender. And I don’t want to get into the issue of inherent (genetic) differences versus differences due to early upbringing. That’s an almost unresolvable issue, in my opinion. But if that sort of detail can make a difference in male versus female learning, I really don’t know how to teach STEM subjects without some sort of gender bias. I’m not saying there isn’t a solution, and I hope there is one. I just don’t know what it is.
In my work I have been in literally hundreds of engineering departments over the last thirty years. There have always been very few females in them and I have seen very little change in that. I have also noticed that engineering departments in the mid-west are more exclusively male than the rest of the country. Lately I have had a chance to interact with quite a few high school and college students of both genders. I have only met one young woman who wanted to be an engineer. I convinced her to attend UW-Madison because the Mechanical Engineering department had professors doing research in areas she was interested. She told me a few years later that she loves going there and thanked me for the advice. Many of the other bright young women I have run into have gone into business, education, art, music, medicine, veterinary, etc. With the one exception, none of the rest had any interest in engineering.
In the mean time I have run into many young guys who are planning to or are going into engineering. I frequently ask young people why they are choosing a specific path. They usually go down a road because it is what interests them for what ever reason. A few days ago I asked a mechanical engineering student why he wanted to be an engineer. He said he grew fascinated with engines working on restoring cars with his dad. He want to figure out how to improve them. That is as good a reason as I’ve ever heard.
The question is, where is the problem? Is it discrimination keeping women out? Or is it that not as many women are interested in engineering? Is it a false assumption to assume that there is or should be equal interests in career choices between genders? One very bright young woman I know is in pre-med. She told me it was what she always wanted to do. There are more women attending college than men. If more of them want to lend their talents to other fields it is their choice. Isn’t following what you want to do the way it should be?
I counted 31 women in that picture.
I was in the room. Hundreds of males.
How many of them of color? I have been in this business almost 25 years. The pace of change is sloooooooow….
Totally unscientific guess by me (I was in the room) is that the representation of people of color (regardless of gender) was on a par with number of females. I recall a time when there were no women and virtually no people of color. Progress? Yes. Fast enough? No.
That’s consistent with what I’ve seen for planetary scientists and aerospace engineers over 40 years old. But I think it’s worth mentioning that this is not uniform over all “people of color.” Some ethnic minorities, such as Asian-Americans, tend to be well represented. Others, including African-Americans, are under-represented. If we are interested in correcting this, we need to go deeper into the details and not simply lump all “people of color” into a single category.
Were you in the room? I was.
Keith, you were in the room and I was not. Why is that relevant? I said that your on-site observations where consistent with what I have seen in the professional community. That supports your observations. I said that “people of color” is an overly broad classification, and that means we need to look closer if we want to solve this problem. That does not contradict anything you wrote. It simply says we need more details.
I was referring to the audience in a room that I spent more than 12 hours in.
I know, and I appreciate your comments on that meeting and the information you have provided. But, as good as that information is, I think it only points out the gender and ethnic disparity issues we need to solve. Solving that problem is more difficult than identifying it and pointing it out. But I really do appreciate your work in pointing it out.
My tweet and picture were mentioned in a panel that talked about diversity. Several dozen people – most of whom I do not know – came up to thank me.
That is great. But we need to solve the problem your work has illustrated. I would welcome comments on that subject.
How many people of color in that picture?
You guys, this conversation is crazypants. You’re talking like noooobody’s ever studied this before. It’s been studied for decades. Decades. Findings disseminated. Recommendations made. Reams and reams of pages of recommendations, mostly ignored or paid lip service.
The problem, in short, is you. So long as you require women in your field to —
a. not make you feel bad about having been rejected as young men;
b. not make you feel bad if you make advances;
c. not talk about being sexually harassed by you or other men in your field;
d. not make you uncomfortable by being in the room;
e. not actually be smarter, on the whole, than you;
f. not make more money than you;
g. not get as much credit as you;
h. not be heard at the table as often as you;
i. not live the reality of women in our society, which is to say that we’re still the primary caregivers to children and other family members, and are frequently divorced and left holding the bag anyway if we refuse to accede in being primary caregivers;
j. behave in general like junior mascot fake men who don’t mind being given the garbage jobs and left out of important conversations because, well, you didn’t think of us —
THE ROOM WILL BE FULL OF MEN IN SUITS. And we haven’t even addressed the question of anybody of color.
Because we may love space but have had it with you and would like not to wake up every day and have to fight our way through just to the starting line for doing the job.
I am not joking about any of this. Not long ago my department chair wanted to relieve one of our few women faculty, a tenured double-CAREER winner, of her important committee role because he figured she’d be best used as a social-committee person, because she knows how to plan a good party. IN 20 DAMN 16.
Let me reiterate: the problem is you. If you are actually interested in solving the problem, my dears, the research awaits, as does blog after blog of woman in science.