1. Women leave engineering because they lose the support of the male elite in stem.

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2. As a female, you must earn the support of the males to be an engineers. Certain females are identified as worthy by the old male guard, but most females must be discarded to protect gender norms in science.

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3. I really like your video. When I was little this boy kept telling me that women never invented anything. That they were only good for just being mothers, and cooking. Meanwhile when I went home, and watch television I saw bewitched, wonder woman, charlie's angels, the bionic woman. Something that he said didn't make sense to me. I saw that lady on star trek with the ear piece that captain kirk asked details where the starship was located. Something was up that didn't add up to what he was telling me. As I got older I went many libraries, and did hear about many inventors. Along the way I began to see police women patroling our streets. Some of the nurses, and doctors were women. I learned to not listen to anybody again. I am self taught in many fields now. I stopped searching for approval. I compose music independently for movies, and television. Since I knew there would be people that would tell me I couldn't do anything, because of my appearance I went the independent way. I learned that if you really want to do something different, and don't want to be stopped then you have to do it independently. I learned graphic design, photography. I have been a photographer since I was 8 years old. I'm 57 now. There are many things to learn. Most I learned on my own. If I'm not learning anything new I won't waste my time reading, or watching it. This video of yours touched me deeply. Thank you for bringing it forward.

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4. As a young girl (25 y/o) I found myself very much agreeing with what Fran is saying. I am becoming a large animal veterinary surgeon because I want to be a problem solver — but I also find myself wanting to do something that involves betterment.

   I think that despite the role I want to undertake, being largely assumed by women and femme folks these days, I find out job requires so much assertion and confidence. Not arguing with Fran at all there is a better and under explored way to raise girls, just thought I'd share my experience ^^

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5. Girls/woman can do this sort of work as a male I always thought were are the females because this job is just being carful not big andstrong it is clean work so girls go for it its a great life well payed too

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6. My great grandmother wired the control panels for the Apollo capsules. She was an electrician and worked for Aerojet General who was contracted with NASA to wire all their electrical panels. I still have the soldering irons she used for that job.

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7. I recently happened across Fran's YouTube channel and have become a huge fan. I am a chemical engineer, 1997 graduate (male), in Western Canada. My graduating class was about 61% female, which at the time was the highest proportion of female grads and also the only discipline that had more female grads than male. At that time the engineering school I attended did not have an environmental engineering discipline, nor was the chemical program particularly specialized in that. There was a computer process control subspecialty, which was overwhelmingly male. The computer engineering program was also overwhelmingly male, and the EE discipline was mostly male. After Ch.E. the next highest representation of women was in the Civil program. I reckon that the reason for the high representation of females in my Ch.E. class was that it consistently had produced both the highest proportion of new-grad hiring and the highest starting salaries, both of which originated in the petroleum and petchem industries, and that the leading companies in these industries had affirmative-action like policies of encouraging women to apply, and to hire them.
   As I have moved through my career, in my part of the world, I have observed that the once male-dominated profession of engineering has moved much closer to parity, although it is still more male than female. I have mentored and hired many engineers and my experience is that the most successful are those that are competent in STEM thinking and ability but also have the ability to conceptualize, to think visually, and to produce original thought from an eclectic background of concepts -traditionally "right-brained" modes of thought. Another key ability is the willingness to accept responsibility and manage risk. I have not found any of the above to be more prevalent in males than females, or vice-versa.
   I think it is OK to encourage girls to get to know STEM early on, and to make them comfortable in that environment. From that I think the best policy is to encourage girls to belive that they can succeed in whatever they want to do. I think that any policy that excludes or forces any young person into or out of STEM is misguided and liable to cause frustration, wasted time, and ultimately harm.

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8. In the 90's there was a concerted effort by the inhabitants of online computer-related forums to keep women out of the field. They were threatened by "soccer moms" entering the field, because they'd heard that programming was a good way to earn a living. I believe it's where the industry's infatuation with complexity began. There was a belief in the male-dominated field that women did not understand complexity, so it was a thing that could be emphasized to dissuade them from entering the field. At the time, object-oriented programming was the hotness, so two things happened. First, you had to not not only know its foundations, you had to be able to recite precisely-worded definitions. As if women couldn't do this. Instead of being a TOOL you used when appropriate, object-oriented programming became a RULE that defined you as someone who knew what they were doing. Because women couldn't understand OOP, of course. And second, prior to the 90's, a simple solution was considered clever and desirable, and after the 90's gratuitous complexity became the norm. I often say that current software development methodology is more about stumping your peers and inflating IT salaries than it is about solving automation problems.

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9. I am a retired electronics design engineer. I have worked for many manufacturing companies in the UK, in Canada and Australia. My experiences of technical employment are certainly mixed. In my experience the majority of employment situations are tyrannies. Managers usually are incompetant and self-seeking. Usually I was under-paid and exploited. But one day I found the solution to all this.

   The solution (for me) was to avoid so-called "permanent" employment and become a sub-contractor. This can be risky because there is no job security. A sub-contractor has virtually no rights and can be fired at any time. But I was able to work on really interesting projects. The managements were actually grateful to have me and I was paid much better than in the standard forms of employment. I have worked on flight simulators, medical electronics and fibre-optic cable systems. .

   But it is not for everyone. Sub-contractors must be happy to accept risks. Also they need to be lateral-thinking, hard working and enjoy what they do. And if they find themselves in a bad situation, just walk out. Companies who hire sub-contractors never ask for references. And the agencies find the jobs and negotiate the rates.

   And I have to say that, in my experience, women engineers are rare indeed. But I have occasionally encountered women scientists.

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10. I think in the statistic taken from middle-east you should also consider how many children even get to access education in general. It is not unlikely that people from these countries who continue to send their daughters to school after middle school are the same open-minded people who would not indoctrinate their daughters about any field or industry. It is not hard to find people from just one generation older than millennials who didn't attend any school in their lives, and they are mostly women. I grew up in middle-east, my own mother didn't attend high school either, because they believed she didn't "need" it. They put her in a typewriting course, and in a few weeks, she would start working in her dead-end government job that she will never change. With just one upside of retirement, which was such a luxury at that time in the country. She is a very speedy typewriter of course, but they also didn't give her a chance at going to high school or college, which is not how it is in the west. Even if you are a fundamentalist, conservative family(in the west), you are likely to send your children to expensive schools in the hopes of staying in the fashionable society, but maybe you would send your daughter into a profession you think is "suitable for women" in your belief system. It is not how it works in conservative communities in the east: you would get alienated by people for sending your daughters to college, and your neighbour would ask "Is your daughter going to be able to start a family if she goes to school, because there is the biological clock issue and now she needs to find a man after school, and what if she becomes a feminist in college and doesn't want to start a family afterwards? What if she doesn't wear religious clothing after starting to attend school? What if men reject her after getting a degree because she is older?" These are all that your brain-washed parents will be thinking before you start telling them you want to go to school. So good luck in having a career in anything I guess… but I digress. I just feel weird when people in the US make a paper and they look at the east like I can never look at it, It is weird how things seem much simpler from the outside. People usually get current-day data and they can't really put it in the context of the history of the region at all.

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11. If left to their own choices, men and women generally will choose different professions. I believe that blaming certain ratios on societal pressure is a bad road to go down.

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12. There is no electronics engineering in this country anymore US. Repair is also out. Go into automation and software engineering. My company does hire EE's but they will be doing PLC, HMI, SCADA COMPUTER programming and dealing with customers, also no work from home.

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