One of the things I have noticed is how much more confidence a female engineer gets from using my ideas. Our work is commonly male-dominant and is enough for most females to feel shy or lack the extra confidence.
I have been fortunate to have trained many women and I found they have done better than their male counterparts.
Let me relate a tue story of the mouse that roared, Sammy was in her thirties when she decided to go back to work , now that her children at school all day. Very pleasant and happy but very nervous in the design office, hoping only to get simple instructions and happy to get tea and coffee for everybody. She was assigned to me, I gave her a task to complete and she was profusive and apologetic about her lack of experience and so on.
I arranged a couple of graduate lunch and learns and invited her to join them. After six weeks we had covered many subjects all to do with the design office, their roles, the big picture and tips for the practical side of the design. She then learned how to construct calculations and I taught her most of what I know about the computer. She became the office guru to a team of engineers as she mastered the details of Word and Excel. After eight months I took her into the shadowy world of dynamic designs and showed was involved and how I would prepare the calculations.
By the end of her year, working hard and learning, she was focused. I knew she would never find her confidence staying because people knew her and had pegged her.She relocated to another city because of her husband's job. She applied for a job, with her portfolio of calculations and got a job straight away with more money in a senior role. That gave her confidence!
She just wrote to tell me how happy she was and that she loves doing calculations. good for her. She did the hard work, she listened.
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