I taught my daughter a lot of basics, we did some car repairs together, my dad the running joke was if he can’t fix it with his red screwdriver call a repairman. My grandfather was quite handy, I learned much from him, and ended up with many of his tools. My favorite is the old hand crank grinder I earned to sharpen? screwdrivers on at 8 years old, loved cranking it up and watching the sparks fly, though safety glasses were not in his list of tools. Just remember girl fights in high school, mostly pulling hair, wrestling and biting, not saying I don’t respect the female boxers or mma, just a random thought.
My bud did car repair on the side, taught his daughter everything, she used to work at his parttime shop and became an auto tech teacher at a community college.
We should just be mindful that there are all types and even though there might be broad characterizations we can make, there are always exceptions. We also shouldn’t try to fit square pegs in round holes either. Delicate balance without being offensive. Also remember when the kids were small a neighbor commenting about how rowdy the little boys were and it was a socialization process that we weren’t properly doing. She changed her story though when she had a boy next and he was more active than any of ours. Try as she would, there was a difference between her boy and girl.
At any rate I’ve known guys that couldn’t tell you the difference between a screwdriver and a socket wrench, let alone use them. Then I’ve known some pretty mechanically inclined women. We used to laugh about my wife’s aunt who one day just decided to expand their house by raising the roof up to get a full second story. Even though her husband managed the hardware store, he wasn’t any help. When I talked to her about the project, she just thought it was no big deal. Who would I call with a house problem, him or her?
I worked with a man-woman couple, both with mechanical engineering degrees, for a number of years. When their first child came, a girl, the woman was adamant about not “roll stereotyping” her daughter and bought her trucks as well as dolls. This woman didn’t have any brothers, BTW. When her son arrived a couple years later, she did the same to him,. Bought him dolls as well as trucks. When she came into work one morning and exclaimed that no matter how many trucks she places in front of her daughter and how many dolls in front of her son. the son went for the trucks and the daughter dollies. We had a great chuckle over that one because those of us that had opposite sex siblings and kids told her what to expect, she just didn’t believe it!
As a side note, I really appreciated working with women engineers because they look at solutions differently than the men did. Not right or wrong, just differently. In a collaborative effort, that different view is valuable. In the many decades since I graduated, the percentage of women in the field hasn’t really increased despite a LOT of effort to encourage more women into engineering. Too bad so few women choose to enter the field and fewer yet stay with it.
I’m not. Nobody’s knowledge should ever be restricted if they indicate an interest in any (legal) subject. All knowledge in the world should be open to all people regardless of gender, race, age, origin, or capacity. I worked with a woman years ago on a Cruise Missile system development program who was one of the smartest engineers I’ve ever known. Many women, Madame Curie among them, have made brilliant contributions to sciences and technology.
However, to the original question, magazines focus on the interests of the market segments that’ll generate the most revenue in their target market, and advertisers place ads in the magazines the readers of which are most likely to purchase their products. Automobile magazines promote themselves to men, because in our culture men are the most likely to enjoy working on cars. Cosmo promotes itself to women because women are the most likely to enjoy Cosmo. But any subject matter should be an open door to both men and women. If “narrowing knowledge gaps” includes not opening doors to girls because they’re girls, I’m not comfortable with that. I’ve raised both a son and a daughter, and encouraged both to pursue whatever they wanted, offering all the knowledge of the subject that I had to offer. I wish I’d had more. They may both be older than you, so generational bias isn’t an issue.
If I understood your post incorrectly, you have my sincere apology. I mean no disrespect.
LOL, we must have been posting at the same time, my edit to my post and your response!!
My edit was tied up in computer problems. My computer froze on me… again. I’ve been struggling to improve its performance, but I lack the technical skills. Ironically, you probably possess the very skills that I’d need! That is not a request, only a recognition that on this very technical subject my skills are the ones that are lacking.
I wonder… are computer technical magazines gender-neutral? Do they target both genders?
Denise McCluggage certainly went against the stereotype in her time period. She was involved in auto racing and was an automotive writer. For a while, she had a monthly feature article in Science and Mechanics just as Tom McCahill had in Nechanix Illustrated. I believe she wrote for other publications as well.
Denise was and is an awesome role model. A champion skier working as a sports writer assigned to cover motorsports. What better way to understand motorsports than to begin racing yourself? She had significant success as a racer, wining class as the 12 hours of Sebring in a Ferrari in 1961 and a class win in the 1964 Monte Carlo rally. Inducted into the Automotive Hall of Fame in 2001.
She wrote for a weekly, Competition Press, that became Autoweek magazine for decades.
Princess Elizabeth was 18 years old when she drove trucks in 1945 during WW2 and 25 when she became Queen in 1952. She appears to be quite a bit older in the photo.
I had a female colleague some years back who was on her own. She had a muffler replaced at a chain muffler shop and a guarantee came with the muffler. The muffler went out before the guarantee was up, so she took it back. She just happened to notice the technician squirting oil on the shock absorbers. A few minutes later, the manager came to her and told her that her shock absorbers were defective and needed to be replaced. She looked at the manager and said “If my shock absorbers are bad, why did your mechanic take the trouble to oil them?”. She said the manager got red in the face and walked off.
I had a female graduate student in computer science who was also an accomplished pianist. I had performed a couple of solos for horn and piano with this student as the accompanist. She drove a really old Ford Fiesta that made me nervous just to ride around the block. When she graduated, she took a job on the west coast–quite a distance from Indiana. Before she headed west, she pulled the cylinder head off the Fiesta, took the head to a machine shop and had the valves ground, and then put the engine back together and drove to the west coast. When I had occasion to talk to her on the phone a couple of years later, the subject of the Ford Fiesta came up. “I still have the Fiesta”, she said. “My first priority was to buy a grand piano”. Now there was a person who had her priorities straight. Incidentally, she was a very petite, very feminine and very becoming woman".
Yes, those are the mechanics that give the profession a bad name
If somebody were to experience that, I can’t blame them if they chose to have a negative view of the profession from that point forward, until the day they die
I agree and I long for those days, not too long ago, when “becoming woman” meant something entirely different from all the news stories I read and hear now about guys “becoming women.” CSA
A buddy of mine had the “oil trick” done to the shocks on his car at a Midas while getting his exhaust done. The service writer showed him the oil dripping off the shocks upon which he wiped a bit with his finger and smelled it. He then asked why the shock oil smelled like engine oil. The service writer hemmed and hawed that shock oil smells like engine oil… My buddy informed him that he was a shock engineer for the local GM Delco division. He knew very well that the shock oil in the Delco shocks on his GM car did NOT smell like engine oil (he’d had shock oil up to his elbows many times) and if he disagreed that maybe he’d be willing to speak with a detective from the local fraud division?
I’ll bet he was back at the next day, too. The shop was only 1 mile from the engineering offices and the factory that MADE the shocks. What are the odds someone that worked there would come in needing a muffler? Pretty darn high, I would think!
