I've been noticing a trend that's been developing more and more and have finally decided to write about it.
Simply put, young men face a big disadvantage both in Education (Primary School, Secondary School and University) and in the work place, specifically when it comes to being hired.
The simple truth about it is that going to University and studying STEM in a field that is sure to have a relatively high starting salary, is far riskier for men than it is for women. This all harks back to the long term trend of women choosing not to stay in the engineering field for their own personal reasons, so HR is forever chasing its tail by hiring women over men time and again.
When I graduated from University I saw something amazing happen, 100% of the female graduates got jobs in their respective fields and a little over half of the male ones did. I attribute this to the fact that big engineering companies are trying to meet an invisible gender diversity target that means if they've got two positions to fill and they have ten males and two females applying for the roles they'll hire the two female applicants for the two positions because the department that has the positions is 80% male already (forgetting the fact that most of those males are over 50).
What happens to those ten applicants who get passed over? Well, some of them end up in remote areas working in FIFO positions, some of them end up in small towns away from their families for not a whole lot of money and some of them give up and work in an unrelated field after remaining unemployed for a while.
So, given that women seem to be the top pick for any company, either a man has to demonstrate incredible ability, be very persuasive or have contacts in order to get a foot in the door.
Starting an Engineering company of your own really only works once you've got 5-10 years experience (who'd pay contracting rates to a recent graduate?) you've got the problem most graduates face which is you can have the job if you've got 5 years experience, but you can't GET the experience until you get a job. A possible solution could be for an enterprising consultancy to offer Engineer internships that pay low rates but offer training, but the risk you run there is that the interns may walk off with your client base once they finish their internship, either by striking out on their own as a contracting company or by getting hired by the companies you're doing designs for, thus negating the need to contract you in the first place.
The reality is that, even though there's a shortage of engineers in the long term (currently there's a glut of unemployed experienced engineers, but once the economy picks up it'll disappear) males, for the most part, will always be second choice to female engineers, especially when organisations like Engineers Australia keep plugging how awesome female Engineers are and ignoring their male members completely.
The thing that bothers me is that there's such a focus on getting women into Engineering and keeping them interested for the duration of their studies. This is then followed by companies having to be seen to be trying to retain female engineers. It just seems that so much more effort must be expended to try to keep them when the truth is that if they're not interested enough to stay without all of the extra incentives, why are we supposed to bother? If a male engineer has lost interest nobody says "but we need to make sure he's using the skills we've spent money on training him with", the response is usually "he's decided to follow another path".
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