by Eva Dameron
Daily Lobo
Women in science and engineering gathered to discuss the challenges they face every day in the workforce at a forum Wednesday in the SUB.
In a male-dominated industry, women need role models, said Anita Obermeier, forum coordinator and director of the Feminist Research Institute at UNM.
"All those women that were on these panels are high-powered and definitely inspiring," she said.
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Jane Zimmer Daniels, director of the Clare Boothe Luce Program, which gives money to women in the sciences, spoke to an audience of 50 people. She said early on in school, teachers respond differently to boys and girls. Boys are more aggressive and speak out of turn, while girls politely raise their hands and are less encouraged to speak up in class, she said.
Daniels observed college engineering classes in which the language was in the context of male thought, she said. Everything discussed in class was in terms of bullets and bombs, she said.
It is important to recognize gender language, Daniels said, because this sort of talk can be hard for women to relate to.
"Does it make any difference to science if you drop a care package on a village instead of a bomb?" she said.
The audience laughed.
She also spoke about a study related to men speaking up more often than women and how it affects them in the end.
"They did a study where they looked at the starting salaries for students graduating in computer science from an institution," Daniels said. "There was a $5,000 differential between the males and the females in the salaries they had."
She said the study showed about 80 percent of men negotiated their starting salary, while only about 30 to 40 percent of women negotiated their starting salary.
"Over time, if you took that $5,000 difference in starting salary and just said each year they would expect to get a 5 percent raise, or if they got a promotion it might be a 10 percent raise," she said. "And if you added all that cumulatively over the life of their career, it was over a million dollars difference."
Audience member and panelist Cathy Newman said the forum was a good idea.
"I like to get together and have discussions about different issues," she said. "In America, not many women are going into science and engineering. Citizens come over from other countries to get trained. The number of American students going to get trained is a lot lower than it used to be, and it's not growing."
Obermeier said she wants to hold forums for women in all different careers, including sports and health sciences.
"We're trying to target different constituencies within the University, so this year we're doing the science and engineering," she said.
