K-

I had a feeling that my AI example was unwise (at some schools, they give it another name like “Intelligent Systems Design” to avoid the stigma). But I got lazy and wrote it down anyway.

Anyway, I agree that the quote is relevant – my point is that it is incomplete. If you say you are uninterested in science and engineering, you are admitting to a lack of interest in something that goes far, far beyond dishwashers. You are admitting to apathy on the subjects that produce humanity’s most remarkable achievements.

Most workers in most fields don’t end up changing the world. A big difference, of course, is that the disappointed lawyer or physician makes a hell of a lot more dough. If you do major in engineering, an MBA and management career can match those salaries, but advanced study in engineering is virtually guaranteed to pay less.

I don’t really know what to make of engineering and science careers right now. I believe that the field is extremely important to humanity, and our wise leaders (very few of whom actually are scientists or engineers) seem to agree. I remember a funny article on the onion – “Report: 98 Percent Of U.S. Commuters Favor Public Transportation For Others”. I suppose you could say the same thing about science – everyone wants more scientists and engineers, but nobody wants to be the one who sits through 8+ years of math, physics, and chem for the kind of salary waiting at the end. One little factoid I noticed is that the highest LSAT scores (the law school admissions test) by major go to… math and physics majors. It’s not too surprising. This means, of course, that to get the best minds into science, you have to convince them not to make 300K+ a year as a patent atty (a path that requires only 3 years of postgraduate education, compared with the extremely long path of Ph.D + postdoc).

I think the real problem is that many people still think that the waning interest in science can be solved with a PR campaign when, in fact, there are much deeper problems.

But please don’t start to think that any of this means science and engineering doesn’t matter. It absolutely will cost big time us as a society if we lose our interest in these fields.

geoff,

“NASA employees over 60 outnumber those under 30 by a ratio of about 3 to 1″ http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/nasa_workforce_040307.html and AI has been comatose since about 1987, but I know of many engineers who work for dishwasher manufacturers, so the quote is relevant.
More generally, engineering jobs do tend to be detail-oriented if not downright clerical; a broad interest in popular science is irrelevent to a career filling out spreadsheet templates to update wiring diagrams for a dishwasher or Word templates documenting error codes for a car.
Even more generally, many women (though not all) seem to prefer discussing celebrity marriages to “cool” high-level science concepts. In fairness, men’s barbershop chatter tends more toward sports and stocks than astrophysics.

“Wherever you go, you will find females far less likely than males to see what is so fascinating about ohms, carburetors, or quarks. . . . Reinventing the curriculum will not make me more interested in learning how my dishwasher works.”

I majored in math, not engineering. So please forgive me if I sound naive, but do you actually need deep knowledge of ohms, carburetors, or quarks to understand how a dishwasher works?

A better way to put this would be to say “reinventing the curriculum will not make me more interested in space travel, genetic engineering, or artificial intelligence”. At least then you’ve admitted to something relevant.

Keep this in mind when you’re feeling depressed about the public image science and engineering. The field really, really matters.

Engineering has never had much glamor to attract people into the profession. If it did, someone would have certainly made a movie or TV show where it figured prominently as part of the theme. Instead, the only engineers protrayed in TV or movies are the misfits and geeks. I tried to think of engineers portrayed as central characters in TV/movies and the only one that comes to mind is Michael Douglas’ portrayal of a disgruntled gun-toting misanthrope in ‘Falling Down’. If you include programmers in the mix, we have the characters from Office Space.

I think that the engineering profession acquired some prestige when it was relatively easy to get a good paying job right out of college. I’m not sure that’s the case anymore. The starting pay is better than many other professions, but the jobs aren’t as plentiful as they once were.

“Engineering had prestige…when we had a manufacturing-based economy”. This rings true. You also had things like the moonshots in the 60s/70s that gave science and engineering much more prestige and air time than they have now. The modern marvels in the public’s eye today is just as likely to come from Taiwan or Japan…(e.g. your laptop or cellphone).

Engineering had some social prestige in America back when we were had a manufacturing-based economy. Now that we are moving to a service/entertainment-based system, there’s just not a lot of glamour to be found in the profession. I think that’s why more and more engineers are driven to flying airplanes and nude photography, but that’s just my theory. I was an English major.

Mr. McGuire: I want to say one word to you. Just one word.
Ben Braddock: Yes, sir.
Mr. McGuire: Are you listening?
Ben Braddock: Yes, I am.
Mr. McGuire: Plastics.
Ben Braddock: Just how do you mean that, sir?

I recently chatted with young woman a few months after receiving her BS in Electrical Engineering. Much to the horror of her parents, she was babysitting by day and receiving on-the-job training to become an insurance agent at night…she had decided that she wanted to do just about anything but work as an electrical engineer. Of course, many men also pursue alternate career paths.

What makes her case a little more interesting is that EE enrollment remains overwhelmingly male at many institutions, for instance, 12% at Northwestern University (http://www.nu-news.com/news/2004/11/17/News/Lecture.Speaks.To.Women.In.Engineering-807210.shtml), 0% at MIT in 2002 (http://www.macnewsworld.com/story/40381.html).

These articles also fail to differentiate between native and international students; it is likely that many of those 12% are international students hail from China, India, Malaysia, and various Arab countries.

Dusty: There are many studies along this line, see the following for examples.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=8845125&dopt=Abstract

“In the present study, relations among prenatal testosterone levels, spatial play experiences, and mental rotation task performance were explored in 7-year-old boys and girls. A positive correlation was observed between prenatal testosterone levels and rate of rotation in girls.”

The link is not so obvious in males because testosterone is created by converting estrogen, so some studies find higher level of estrogen correlating with spatial abilities in males.

“By contrast, estrogen has an effect on brain development in males, since conversion of testosterone to estrogen takes place within the developing brain itself.” (Small S.L., Hoffman G.E. (1994)

Anyway, the overall link between testosterone and spatial abilities is well-known, even if the exact mechanism is not understood. See this for a review:
http://www.sfu.ca/~dkimura/articles/sex.htm

Also:
“Women with congenital adrenal hyperplasmia (CAH) have been exposed to above average androgen levels in utero. These women have been reported to display higher spatial ability than matched controls as adults (Resnick et al., 1986; but see also Ehrhardt & Meyer-Bahlburg, 1981; Reinisch, 1983). They ordinarily do not have elevated T levels as adults, but T levels of CAH women were not presented in the above-cited studies. Women with Turner’s syndrome, whose gonads develop improperly and produce only minute amounts of sex homones (Nyborg, 1984), are hypoandrogenized both prenatally and in adulthood. They were found to perform poorly on spatial taks in adulthood (Nyborg & Nielson, 1981; Nyborg, 1984). Fetally nonandrogenized genetic males with androgen insensitivity syndrome (AIS) produce a normal amount of T, but their tissue is insensitive to the steroid, both pre- and post-natally. AIS patients also were found to perform poorly on spatial tasks (Nyborg, 1984).

Female Hormones Make “Female” Skills Better, “Male” Skills Worse
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1175/is_n11_v23/ai_8335327/pg_2

I’d like to read some evidence to back up your claims, Konrad. Do you have any links or publications you can point me toward?

Testosterone during embryo development tends to bias brain development towards physical/spatial skills and away from verbal/emotional processing. Just because the “boys like math, girls like English” thing is a stereotype doesn’t mean it’s wrong.

To a lesser extent, the same is true in adults. There was a nice study showing how women’s ability to solve puzzles requiring visualization of 3D objects varied throughout their monthly cycle and correled with levels of testosterone.

Of course, it’s not always true that someone with exceptional math skills will be a social dunce but there is a strong link. It also seems to be affected by genetics. Jews in particular have a strong tendency to develop math skills without sacrificing social skills. Compare humourless Isaac Newton the Englishman with Richard Feynman the (Jewish) lady’s man.