The idea of Equal Opportunities is a great thing, on paper, but there are still a lot of industries that are male dominated. The issue of whether women are avoiding those industries by choice, through lack of training, or because they simply can’t get accepted into the “boy’s club” is a complicated one, but there’s no denying that some industries have highly skewed male: female ratios.
Here are just a few industries that could benefit from a bit more diversity:
5: Accounting: There are women working in accounting and finance, but fewer than 20% of them feel that they’re fairly compensated for their work. Women also feel they’re excluded from networking opportunities, and feel that the “boy’s network” may be holding them back.
4: Technology: Only 11% of American tech start-ups that opened last year were ran by women. Many tech companies have a shortage of women, and there are very few women choosing to enter tech related higher education courses.
3: Law Enforcement: While female police officers are not unheard of, they are in the minority. Female police officers have complained about difficulty landing the position in the first place, hostility and discrimination in the work place, and easy/non crime related assignments being passed on to them while men get the kind of work that the women had signed up to do.
2: Math: Just 27% of math related doctorates were completed by women, and only 9% of math related tenures are held by women. Recent research suggests that women are just as able to perform well in math classes as men are, but it seems that they just aren’t interested. Either that or the academic world is not welcoming to women.
1: Construction: Many major construction projects have zero women working on them. This could be down to the physical nature of the work – few women want to lug around welding equipment all day, but there are other issues too. Even women that do decide that they want to operate a welding positioner or spend their day working on scaffolding face barriers to entry. The construction world is male centric in structure, organisation, and atmosphere.
What Can Be Done?
Getting more women into male dominated industries is something that needs to be done from the lowest levels, up. It’s true that heavy welding equipment may be hard for a woman to handle, and you wouldn’t want to send a woman to arrest a known violent male criminal, but there’s no reason why a woman should face any extra difficulties in academic or office environments.
The glass ceiling, whether it’s perceived or real, is something that needs addressing. Any person that is competent with a welding positioner should be given the opportunity to prove their skills, and any person that publishes quality, peer reviewed papers, should have access to funding and research support. If we want diversity, we need to reward people for the quality of their work, not for who they are, or who they know.
This post was written by Crispin Jones for Westermans International who supply welding equipment throughout the world including welding positioners. Crispin writes on subjects relating to work and employment.
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