Friday, May 20, 2005

It's very important that girls study engineering ...

1998 IEEE-USA UNEMPLOYMENT SURVEY: THE RESULTS

From a report on unemployment performed by the main professional society for electrical engineers:
Respondents were asked to describe their current employment status.

Modal respondents (42%) responded that they were involuntarily unemployed. About 26% had been re-employed full-time as a technical professional; the rest were employed in a nontechnical profession (4%), employed part-time (8%), or self-employed (9%). Some 4% reported voluntary unemployment; while 2% said they were retired voluntarily; and 5% said they were retired involuntarily.
These are old numbers, but they were quoted this month in Fortune magazine as though they were current and was true of all electrical engineers. I couldn't believe the quote, so I googled and found te PDF (link is to HTML extract). The Fortune quote was very misleading.

Even so, there's a lot of unemployment among electrical engineers. Some of our best and our brightest. This occurs even as very, very wealthy CEOs demand increases in immigration visas for young engineers willing to work for 1/4 the cost.

Hmm. Anyone notice any analogies to how we staff our nursing homes and how we obtain child care? For that matter, how we staff rural hospitals?

In any case, tell me again why it's important to encourage girls to study science and engineering? Is this some misogynistic conspiracy?

No comments:

Post a Comment