Women's Program/Project Management Career Guide
So, you have choices!
Accept the status quo. . . or. . . apply your civil engineering program/project skills to strategically achieve your life/career goals.
Two references to support your development of your plan(s) follow.
Recognize & name the challenge!
ASK FOR IT! [1]
"While men seem to have no trouble negotiating and asking for what they need,
women hesitate or fail to ask at all."
"Social conditioning and cultural expectations are among the causes of these gendered differences."
"By not negotiating a first salary, an individual stands to lose more than $500,000 by age 60 - and men are more than four times as likely as women to negotiate a first salary."
"Ask For It: How Women Can Use the Power of Negotiation to Get What They Really Want" [2]
"Phase One [of a four-phase program] teaches women to recognize that "Everything Is Negotiable". As anyone knows, the toughest negotiation can be with yourself, and the authors help readers begin by asking questions of themselves to identify and clarify their professional and personal goals.
"Detailed four-phase program with exercises for preparing for and succeeding in life's negotiations."
"What makes this book a must-read for men, too, and not just for women are its unpleasant revelations about the realities of hidden bias against women at the negotiation table.
Q1. Why consider strategically taking charge of the reality of
"The Existing Cultural Climate?"
Q2. How might your formation of your personal/professional "Board of My Career Advisors" support your new journey to success?
Q3. When will you document your own assessment of your "Existing Career Topography" before just trying to jump-start this new beginning?
"It is never too late to be what you might have been."
-George Eliot
Did you know of the “George Eliot” story?
Cheers,
Bill
P.s. And “YES,” I know you are ‘covered over!’
[1] https://mediationchannel.com/2008/04/03/ask-for-it-review-of-babcock-and-laschevers-new-book-on-negotiation-for-women/ downloaded 15DEC2019
[2] https://womenintech.ucla.edu/resources/ask-it-how-women-can-use-power-negotiation-get-what-they-really-want
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William M. Hayden Jr., Ph.D., P.E., CMQ/OE, F.ASCE
Buffalo, N.Y.
"It is never too late to be what you might have been." -- George Eliot 1819 - 1880
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Original Message:
Sent: 12-12-2019 17:36
From: Irfan Alvi
Subject: The Gender Wage (and Workforce Participation) Gap in Civil Engineering
I had a look at the SE3 study report. The study does make a good effort to use statistical analysis to make apples to apples comparisons.
Here's the content from page 52, in which I've bolded some things:
"Despite gender pay gaps favoring men in nearly all bivariate analyses noted in Chapters 3 and 4, none of the variable selection methods identify gender as a statistically significant predictor of pay. This means that, in the SE3 survey data, gender, by itself, is not as reliable a predictor as any of the 13 factors in Figure 5.1. However, gender may interact in important ways with some or all of those 13 factors.
Once the initial statistical model, with its top predictors for all respondents, was determined, each of the predictors was then explicitly tested for its interaction with gender. It is important to explore gender-based interaction terms for predictors, because otherwise there is an implicit assumption that each predictor is gender neutral in its impact on pay.
In order to determine the impact of gender on each factor, two approaches were implemented. The first methodology was to implement the initial model separately for the male and female respondents in the SE3 data set. If a predictor were gender neutral, then its estimated contribution would be similar in models of men's pay and in models of women's pay.
The second methodology was to augment the 13-variable statistical model by interacting gender with each of the factors, so that there was a set of 13 predictors and a set of 13 gender-interacted terms, for a total of 26 predictors. If a predictor were gender neutral, the predictor would remain statistically significant, but its gender-interaction term would be statistically insignificant.
Both methodologies resulted in the same conclusion: 11 of the 13 top predictors appear to be gender neutral. The two that do not are being a sole practitioner and being a principal/owner/CEO/founder. When these two factors were modeled as gender-specific predictors, i.e., separated out into male and female sole practitioners and male and female principals/owners/CEOs/founders, the statistical model's adjusted R-squared value rose from 56% to 60%, a modest but meaningful improvement in the model's ability to account for the observed variation in the respondents' salary."
They defined principal/owner/CEO/founder as follows (page 11):
"Individual with a significant portion of the firm's shares, has control over the direction of the business within their sector, defines the corporate mission and values, heavy involvement in client and business development initiatives, proposals, and marketing activities"
What this is saying is that, apples to apples, there was no significant gender gap in compensation, except when comparing women and men who had a substantial ownership stake in companies, in which case men had higher incomes. There could be various reasons why there's a gender gap in income among owners (e.g., related to ownership stake and profitability of their companies), but it's at least encouraging that this study didn't find a gender gap among the non-owner engineers which represent the vast majority of engineers.
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Irfan A. Alvi, P.E., M.ASCE
President & Chief Engineer
Alvi Associates, Inc.
Towson, Maryland
www.alviassociates.com
<maskemail>ialvi@...</maskemail>
Original Message:
Sent: 12-12-2019 09:46
From: James Smith
Subject: The Gender Wage (and Workforce Participation) Gap in Civil Engineering
The pay report posted by Stephanie does support the existence of a pay gap in the structural engineering workforce, thank you for sharing. The full excerpt she references reads:
Male respondents earned, on average, $27,500 more than female respondents. This pay gap was skewed toward higher positions and more years of experience; there was essentially no pay gap found for entry-level respondents.
This suggests that the industry starts people out on equal footing in terms of pay. Good intentions. This suggests the gap increases at staff members get to more senior positions. I'm assuming by the verbiage of the passage that this is in fact an apples to apples comparison of senior female and male staff rather than just all female and male staff. While the report is for the structural subset of engineering, I think it can be considered representative of at the very least the civil engineering profession.
So the question would then be, "Why is this happening?" I think Stephanie answered that. As she has asserted it's not a single prong issue or even something unique to engineering. Its a more complex issue involving a lot of issues, biases, psychology, both conscious and sub-conscious, work environments, and more.
More research with similar apples to apples comparisons can still help us better root out specific areas to address and more effectively. But, with any issue in life, the first step is admitting that there is a problem. As engineers we are beholden to facts, and now seeing them we must accept this is a problem in our industry that we need to address and work to improve. Fortunately the data does show it improving, but we should not sit back and wait, but work together to help close it more quickly.
So the next step is: how? Stephanie had some great suggestions. I'd like to add to those with this: Continue to encourage women and minorities to get into engineering! Of course this starts at young ages, but needs to be encouraged throughout high school and into college. Support STEM for all. Make these programs more readily available to everyone. Once we make the profession more diverse, we can truly start to eliminate issues like these.
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James Smith P.E., M.ASCE
Project Engineer
Bergmann
Grand Rapids MI
Original Message:
Sent: 12-11-2019 08:12
From: Stephanie Slocum
Subject: The Gender Wage (and Workforce Participation) Gap in Civil Engineering
Here are a couple of other reports that have similar conclusions to the ones in @Peyton Gibson's original post on this thread:
1. The 2019 Women in the Workforce report., which @William Hayden shared. One of the most interesting sections is about "Only's" (see page 52 in the report, which is on page 28 of the .pdf). Per the report, "only's" are much more likely to occur in tech and engineering. An only is defined as a woman who is often or usually the only one on her team or in the room. The report also highlights that what many would consider "personal effectiveness traits", are perceived differently if that trait originates with a man or a woman of equal experience. According to the report: "Women who are Onlys are having a notably difficult experience at work. They're far more likely to experience microaggressions than women who work with other women. They are more than twice as likely to be asked to prove their competence, over three times more likely to be mistaken for someone more junior, and about twice as likely to be subjected to demeaning or disrespectful remarks........"
2. The NCSEA SE3 committee, which studies structural engineering retention and engagement. Here's a link to the latest posted pay report: http://www.se3project.org/uploads/8/9/5/2/89527265/se3_2016_pay_report.pdf. The 2016 report link shows the gender pay gap at $27,500. The pay gap is very small at the staff/entry level (i.e. the first job), and starts expanding at the first promotion level (project engineer in this case), with the largest gap being at the highest levels. That very much aligns with the ASCE survey data. That is also the same thing found in the Women in the Work Force report, across the board in all industries. And yes, it is my understanding specific to the SE3 report that rigorous data analysis has been used and that they have controlled for all other factors noted by the many posters on this thread when the pay gap was determined.
There is more than enough data to show that there is something to the gender pay gap in civil engineering when considered at a macro-level. Perhaps we don't know exactly what that dollar amount is, but does the exact amount really matter if the trend is there?
I am troubled by some of the opinions on this thread implying that somehow civil engineers are above both societal trends and other engineering disciplines in this area. I am also troubled by some of the data I've seen (for example from Zweiggroup's surveys) indicating that something like 90% of AEC principals are male and 60% of those don't believe there is an issue with diversity in the AEC industry. That makes it awfully hard to even talk about any of these issues, including a pay gap, if we won't consider that it even might exist.
To be clear, there are some firms ahead of the curve. Additionally, I don't think someone sat down and thought "well, as an industry/society we are just going to pay the women less than the men." There are a lot of factors at play. For example, from a statistical standpoint, women are less likely to negotiate, are less likely to get a "yes" when they do, and are more likely to experience backlash (from both genders of bosses) for even attempting to negotiate. That's fairly easy to fix: Negotiate, and when it becomes "normal" for everyone to negotiate, the backlash will cease.
The bigger - and much more daunting - challenge is tackling what some might think of as "personal effectiveness" traits. In many firms, these traits are often the unwritten rules required for promotions and higher-level positions, and are often subjective, poorly defined, and rooted in some sort of unconscious bias that we don't acknowledge.
As a hypothetical example: Let's say you are in private consulting, and almost all your firm's clients are white men (which is statistically likely, especially if your clients are contractors or architects). Let's also assume that your firm's clients appear to generally treat everyone - all genders and races - with respect. Yet, unless a particular client is a statistical anomaly, he is much more likely to accept the competence of a "stereotypical engineer" (i.e. a white male) at face value than that of an equally qualified young woman, a minority woman, or a minority man. Not because he's out to get anyone, or consciously thinks that way, but because of unconscious biases that we all have by virtue of our humanity.
Now, imagine that there is a "stereotypical engineer" and an equally experienced minority woman who are both project managers, and are both managing different projects for that same client. It's likely (at least from all the data available around women in the workforce) that from the onset of a project, the more stereotypical engineer may have an easier go of the project than the minority woman, regardless of the specific project challenges. That minority woman is going to need to re-prove her competence at every turn, in a way that the stereotypical engineer does not, simply due to societal stereotypes and unconscious bias. She's going to have to spend extra time (and project budget) to demonstrate her competence, while the "stereotypical engineer" is more likely to be given the benefit of the doubt. It will show up in the way she is received in meetings and in the ways her decisions are questioned more often. It will show up in something as basic as the number of emails she has to answer.
Now, when that client comes back to their boss with raving reviews for the male project manager, and reports back that the minority woman was "technically excellent, but I just didn't hit it off with her," and that happens over and over again throughout both of their careers, who do you think is going to eventually be promoted and paid more? When the boss hears this feedback, who is he or she going to be most likely to view as having leadership potential, and provide mentorship to? Who is going to have an easier time bringing in client work in this scenario (required for the highest level positions)? Where is the line here between "personal effectiveness" and unconscious bias?
The data does show the pay gap improving. Two things everyone can do to close it more quickly.
- For individuals – Learn to negotiate, it's a skill that will serve you well not just in salaries but many areas.
- For organizations –Clearly define metrics for success in a title or role, as well as what is required to advance to the next level. Once defined, these should be transparent to everyone in the organization. Then, make your base salary grades consistent with titles/roles. Those with the same titles should be the paid the same base salary. If the performance (as measured by transparent metrics) of one employee warrants a higher bonus, so be it.
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Stephanie Slocum P.E., M.ASCE
Founder
Engineers Rising LLC
www.engineersrising.com
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