All you women listen up!

[lonestarnot]

Boost the Economic Security of Women and Our Nation Take Action!
http://capwiz.com/aauw/utr/1/ITLJKNVGOA/AICCKNVHBA/3376432861


In the current economic downturn, an unprecedented number of women are now the family breadwinners. However, many do not have the skills and opportunities necessary to obtain the high-wage jobs needed to adequately support themselves and their families. Urge your representative to support the Pathways Advancing Career Training Act (H.R. 2074) to help women train for and thrive in jobs that will boost the economic security of women and our nation.


This important legislation would fund programs that provide outreach, education, training, support, and job placement assistance to encourage and prepare women for careers in high-wage, high-skill nontraditional fields where they are underrepresented, filling the void left when similar programs were eliminated from the Perkins Vocational and Technical Education Act in 1998. It would also break through barriers to employment faced by single mothers, displaced homemakers, women re-entering the workforce, and victims of domestic violence.


Even as unemployment rates rise, America faces a skilled-labor shortage. Providing comprehensive, high-skill job training to a relatively untapped section of the current workforce benefits American businesses by matching employers with the skilled workers they need to compete in a global marketplace. It will also serve to diversify the workplace.


AAUW believes that career and technical education is increasingly important for women and girls working towards economic self-sufficiency for themselves and their families. It is in these fields traditionally dominated by men that women workers can begin to close the persistent wage gap between women and men.


Take Action!
To urge your representative to cosponsor the Pathways Advancing Career Training Act, just click on the "Take Action" link in the upper right corner or copy and paste the following URL into your Internet browser. Then follow the instructions to compose and send your message.


http://capwiz.com/aauw/issues/alert/?alertid=13386601



If your representative has already signed on as cosponsors, you will be able to send her or him a message of thanks.


For more information, read AAUW's position paper on career and technical education for women and girls.

[ensho]

1. kick

nt

[TahitiNut]

2. Yeah ... Goddess knows we need more college graduates to ask "do you want fries with that?"

Let's just keep repeating the canard that the reason American companies don't employ Americans is because we're unskilled and uneducated. Yeah ... great idea. :eyes:

[Name removed]

4. Deleted message

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[CTyankee]

5. What is unfair is that male domination of these fields has gone on so long

without remedy. Encouraging women to strive and succeed in Engineering and the Sciences is not unfair to men. As women increase their numbers in these professions younger women will face less discrimination and more acceptance.

[Name removed]

6. Deleted message

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[CTyankee]

8. Reality in lower paying jobs does indeed bother me, when compared to engineering jobs.

Hell, yes. But we have to ask why young women are NOT going into science and engineering jobs. They may not yet feel very comfortable in that environment. It's hard, being the only woman. So we have to work on that. Is that so terrible?

[omega minimo]

12. oh you must have missed the explanation

"Reality is that girls would rather teach and nurse than build and discover."

:puke: :evilfrown:



That's why it's doing them a FAVOR to make them uncomfortable as you point out:
:sarcasm:

"They may not yet feel very comfortable in that environment."

They don't really want to BE there b/c "Reality is that girls would rather teach and nurse than build and discover."




HFS why do we have this level of ignorance here?

[IDFbunny]

17. Girls have every incentive to go into engineering

full ride scholarships, job offers before graduation, fast-track promotions. There is no intimidation whatsoever. Those things STILL haven't been enough to entice girls to enter technical fields. As a group, collectively, woman simply do not want to go into science and engineering despite those craven enticements. Why do we have to force the situation which is what some people proposing.

Title IX in this case would require that the school is 50/50 or boys get kicked out until it does become so. That means overall there would be less engineers and scientist graduating.

[CTyankee]

14. Well, nursing and education has a history. It was historically low paying and so

men didn't want to go into it. OK, fine. Now we're in a different situation. We have men and women vying for the same jobs in all these fields that women were barred from previously (you don't remember the sex segretated want ads?).

Why don't we see how all of this is going to shake out, if we have an equal playing field? Let's just find out how well, or not well, women can do in science and engineering?

You know how it all "shook out" with law and medicine, don't you? Is THAT what you are afraid of?

Heh.

[IDFbunny]

24. Good example

Then explain why engineering and most sciences are still very male dominated while business, medicine, and law evened out. Why do you presume I would be unwelcoming?

[intheflow]

30. Are you saying medicine isn't a science?

:shrug:

[IDFbunny]

38. Do I have to qualify everything.

Insomuch as woman choose science, they choose the life sciences like biology and not so much physics or chemistry. That's the 'problem'. Or do you have a problem with the fact the most physics, chemistry, and engineering degrees are still going to a large male majority?

[CTyankee]

40. Oh, I think it is just a matter of time before those areas will be well populated by

women. Or do you believe that women are "unsuited" for those fields. If so, how are they unsuited?

With a lot more acceptance and exposure to these sciences at early ages, girls will come to view them just like they do other professional areas. More will come in to them and then more will follow. It happened in other areas and it will happen in these.

[IDFbunny]

41. There has been no change in their preferences

for a long time. Others don't want to wait until it happens on its own like you do. This is why the Title IX stick is being brandished. I would only encourage woman, and have, to enter engineering, even if the don't like it, as a stepping stone into management.

[CTyankee]

43. Engineering might be the last holdout. That is what I suspect.

We have seen the barriers fall in medicine, law and other sciences. It's no good trying the argument that women aren't suited to engineering. There just isn't. The same argument was used against women being lawyers and doctors.

You have to look for external factors to explain this. Nothing else makes sense, unless you are willing to go down the path that women are ill equipped by nature to be engineers, a strange assertion indeed.

[mahina]

16. Can't say I agree. Meet Shannah Trevanah, engineer, and dynamo behind the sustainable Saunders model

at UH: http://sustainablesaunders.hawaii.edu/

Stereotypes exist for a reason, but they aren't the same thing as data; anecdotal evidence is a fool's trap.

Girls can't write
Girls can't paint
Girls can't think
Girls don't like math

phooey.

[IDFbunny]

21. Don't put words in my mouth

I said nor implied any of those things. The hard fact is the woman aren't choosing tech fields in equal numbers as boys.

[mahina]

22. Love right back atchya

Geez!

Nobody's putting ANYTHING in your mouth, of all places.

[IDFbunny]

25. You put up a strawman that you would disagree with.

I never implied that girls can't _____. I argued that girls WON'T enter engineering. The tokens are spoiled spectacularly.

[mahina]

26. Not the women in engineering that I know.

Do you insist that we agree? Seems futile.

This ain't goodbye- it's adios.

[mahina]

23. Anyhow

hostility hardens the arteries, did you know that? And it causes spastic colon.

[Quantess]

33. Guys should really consider pursuing a degree in Speech Pathology.

The graduate programs are fiercely competitive, but since colleges actively seek the oh-so-rare male speech-language pathology students, male applicants have preference.

As for your first statement, you can shove it. That is an ignorant, sweeping generalization, as well as being a sexist stereotype. I personally love biology, and I probably should have majored in that. Instead, I got a masters degree in speech pathology and ended up, basically, as a schoolteacher. I never wanted to be a teacher, and besides, I'm lousy at it.

I must admit I was attracted to speech pathology partly because it was an all-female club. I fit in with that group. Has it ever occurred to you that people of both sexes are drawn to certain professions because that is what is expected of them?

[omega minimo]

11. and you say that like it's a bad thing

:sarcasm:

[lunatica]

18. Wow, males have ruled for Centuries but now life in unfair to them

Get real. Stop feeling sorry for yourself because all those people you white males have kept down for centuries are now getting some equal rights. Eat it. You and your kind created it.

[Name removed]

31. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[lunatica]

19. Jesus! Get a degree for what exactly? A minimum wage job in the service business

being a maid to the wealthy? That's about the only job they can't outsource. Maid.

[TahitiNut]

28. The father and son team who mow my lawn are both teachers.

The father is a retired teacher and track coach ... who has gone back to coaching part time near where he's moved (Michigan's Irish Hills region) for retirement. The son is a teacher who found a job in North Carolina at the beginning of the school year last year. As I hear it, the school district that hired him fired 75-80% of the new teachers at the end of the school year ... strangely the most 'liberal' of all the new hires. The son had enough of the stress and walking on eggshells ... so he left. He's back in Michigan and looking again for a teaching job ... and mowing lawns with his dad. He candidly admitted that he makes more mowing lawns than they paid in North Carolina. (Oh ... and the school district did NOT have a teacher's union, either. Convenient.)

It's an "employer's market" ... and they're recycling employees like a kid with ADHD in a toy store.

The family (Mom, Dad, and 2 sons and their wives) are all college graduates, politically active liberals. I feel blessed to have them take care of my lawn and love shooting the shit with them. They're great people. Smart. Well-informed. High integrity.

[wildflower]

3. Thanks for this

:kick:

[Mythsaje]

7. My wife makes roughly 4 times as much as I do...

From my day job AND considering book sales. This isn't a surprise.

[Wednesdays]

9. K&R

:kick:

[ohheckyeah]

10. kick

and thanks for the info.

[omega minimo]

13. Thank you for posting this, lonestarnot

:thumbsup:

It seems simple enough. Yet the detractors have to show up with some regressive BS about how the status quo is just ducky.


Whatever the twisted logic for that, whether it's completely sexist or not, the message appears to be that

THIS WILL BENEFIT AMERICAN FAMILIES IN A TIME OF NEED DURING AN ECONOMIC CRISIS AND BEYOND.

"In the current economic downturn, an unprecedented number of women are now the family breadwinners"


Detractors want to pretend that there are not historic gender gaps in employment, education, professions, math and sciences, wages, rights, management, etc. They are not dealing with reality at all.

We have a new president, a new Millennium and a Reaganistic economy that finally crashed and burned. Time to be creative, NON-BIASED and forward thinking in how we proceed.

:hi:

[Quantess]

36. In the current economic downturn, an unprecedented number of women are now the family breadwinners

Men have a higher unemployment rate than women right now. I suspect it is partly because women get paid less than men, on average, for the same work.

[omega minimo]

37. good point

wonder if women in more "hands on" type work are also the ones not having jobs outsourced.

[Quantess]

39. Not sure about that. I think outsourcing of jobs affects all of us.

But I was told recently that welding is a great career opportunity for women. (No Flashdance jokes, please.) Seriously, though, welding is supposed to be a great career for women, I was told.

Anyway, women have lower salary expectations to begin with, so maybe that has something to do with their relative employment resilience?

[Number23]

15. A happy kick and a smiling Rec too!

[lunatica]

20. I'm the breadwinner in my family

My family is basically screwed if something happens to me. I'm also the caretaker for my mother who has Dementia. I best not even thing about getting sick or having an accident or losing my health till the end of my mother's life, or mine, whichever comes first.

[Manifestor_of_Light]

27. I earned a science degree THIRTY YEARS AGO.

I'm a female.

I earned a B.A. in Biology (with some pre-med) in 1979 from a very fine liberal arts college.

This degree did not get me any job offers. In fact, some asshole I interviewed with shortly after graduation asked me why I did not get a B.S. He implied that I was stupid, getting a B.A. I told him that Trinity University does NOT offer the B.S. in biology, which was true at that time.

:banghead:

I also have a Juris Doctor (law degree). It hasn't gotten me any job offers either.

Of course the Biology degree is obsolete now. And the interviewers at law firms act like the law degree is obsolete, too, although the main purpose of law is NOT to change unless there is a good reason, unlike science. :banghead:

This sounds like the usual BS saying that Americans don't have jobs b/c they are not skilled.

There are millions of highly educated baby boomers out there, with bachelor's degrees, master's degrees and doctorates, and nobody will hire us because we're OLD.

[TahitiNut]

29. Word!

The crap about training and education being needed to solve the unemployment problem is getting REAL tiresome.

[riderinthestorm]

32. I hear you! 20 year old MBA from University of Chicago means shit.

Because I've been running the family corporate farm for the past 20 years means squat cuz I'm also OLD (closing in on 50).

In an effort to try to diversify in these economic times, and because of the hardship of manual labor on a farm, I gave it a shot for 5 months trying to find another job. No way. Old and female are the major obstacles. Running your own small biz and now trying to re-direct your life? Useless. Education, experience? Nada. I'd get an interview but no sale when it came to anything further.

My BS is in bio-chemistry from Northwestern and I can't even land a pharm tech job. Too "overqualified" or too old.....

I hear you.

[Manifestor_of_Light]

35. Annoying as hell, isn't it????

I salute you for passing and even excelling in biochemistry.

I did well in Freshman chemistry, couldn't memorize the structures in organic and Biochem was probably wayyy beyond me.

:hi:

[denem]

34. K & R!

[lumberjack_jeff]

42. What percentage of college degrees should go to women? n/t