(Lack of)Sex in engineering
Male-saturated environments and what they do to your libido
STEVE BORN STAFF
Let me begin with a confession: I am an engineering student.
Yes, I come from that strange place with the red lion and all the noisy, boisterous young men who drink too much and always seem to be doing homework.
But there is something else about engineering that many people don’t really understand. There are very few females in the faculty, and this leads to many of the problems that people tend to associate with engineers.
The numbers are staggering. Departments range from 40 per cent female to 17 per cent, and although it may not sound that bad, it is noticeable in the “hangout” spots in the engineering building.
The difference becomes even more noticeable when you decide to attend one of the classes. In the first-year courses, I was always hard-pressed to find a seat within 15 feet of a member of the opposite sex.
Group projects are even worse. It is not at all uncommon for a randomly selected design team to be made up of five or six guys.
But enough of all that, what the heck does that do to the psyche of the male engineering student? Perhaps more importantly, what does that do to the female engineering student?
Well I hate to take the stereotypical engineering approach, but I am only going to look at how it has changed me.
When I came to engineering straight out of high school, I was the typical first-year engineer. I was kind of quiet, decent with math, and a bit of a loser when it came to the ladies.
Nearly two years later, not a lot has changed on the outside. I am still quiet (kind of), I struggle to keep up with some of the math, and really haven’t made too much headway when it comes to the opposite sex.
But there have been some drastic changes in the way that I look at girls. I have noticed that anytime I meet with my design team, which is comprised entirely of guys, our conversation consists of a good chunk of time talking about how much we drank last weekend. Then we move on to talking about that girl in our class and how great it would be to hook up with her. (At the end we might talk about the project we are working on . . . sometimes.)
Conversations with other guys stop so that we can all check out the girl who walked by, even though we have probably both checked her out a hundred times before.
But the real damage doesn’t show up until you are under the influence of alcohol. In a transformation like that of Bruce Wayne or Clarke Kent, the quiet engineer becomes the sex-deprived maniac that has been dying to get out all week.
The only problem is, that it doesn’t know what to do. All that time locked up in classes with guys has it confused and the laughing with teammates about women has as much of a connection with reality as a corny porno. So, now the maniac is out of the cage and whatever logical reasoning was left has been completely forgotten.
Thankfully the monster’s bark is worse than its bite. The drunken engineer will usually do a lot of yelling, possibly make a fool of himself, but generally after the majority of the tension has been released, he will pass out, leaving behind only a few offended members of the opposite sex.
The next day, the engineer will wake up and only a faint memory of what happened remains, and life goes back to the way it was before.
Unfortunately, it is usually the monster that most people outside the faculty see, so this is what they assume all engineering students are like all the time. It is stereotyping in its purest, ugliest form.
And by default, stereotypes are bad. Just like we can forgive other victims of prejudice, so can society forgive engineering students. Take this from one of them, I have seen the best and worst of engineering, and cling to my sexual sanity tightly.
