IEEE names 28-year-old woman its new 'Face of Engineering'

And there was I...

...expecting a pic of Computer Engineer Barbie :)

Sexism aside, good on her.

Bunny?

The IEEE pick a black female role model, and her employers describe her as a "Bunny"?

Class. You couldn't make this stuff up.

Prefer Veronica Cedillos

or Melody Ablola out of the full list of new faces.

Oh pleeeeease.... not this AGAIN

The reason there are no women in engineering is that there are no women in engineering.

And any and every attempt to chivvy more women into engineering by pushing a token woman or two into everyone's faces is going to have precisely the same effect it has had every single time it's been done before - it is going to make the problem worse. When are these people going to learn?

There is a way to get more women into engineering. Quite simply, it is to just shut up about it, and instead concentrate on getting more of the right kind of men into engineering - i.e. those without personal hygiene problems or Star Trek obsessions.

Simples.

Who was the last face of IEEE?

I really do hope that she deserved this accolade (sounds like she did), because it does look as though they've just stuck a woman out there who is more than halfway attractive and who also happens to be black, for all the media to make them look progressive and multicultural etc and all the other modern, in vogue buzz words.

I think that perhaps she could have done without this 'honour' and just been allowed to do her job.

Gaaarrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr

I spend way to much time on private forums ....

Judging by them amount i am having to hold back fire comments !!!!!

*icon, it slipped out a little !!!? !

Wimmin, eh?

So now any woman considering a career in engineering not only has to put up with the blokey environment where she'll be patronised and encounter institutionalised sexism ("Right then lads, today I'm going to teach you all about the elementary principles of the Wankel rotary engine, and to do this I'd like Tracey to come up here and demonstrate with this hula-hoop..."), but now she also has to compete with other lookers with better hair, teeth and skin than her too!

Meow!

Paris, because of her existing familiarity with the PorkSword™ family of tunnel boring machine.

So...

One can't win, eh?

Bunch of sexist racists in here.

I mean, how many posts more will imply that the person was only chosen because of gender and race and looks? Could it have been the case? Of course. But the instant jump here to say that by you guys, the automatic "oh, just a token" response, says more about the posters than it could ever say about the lady in question (whom and whose qualities I don't know, by the way).

Very sad, but so is the world.

Token?

I wouldn't have such a gut reaction to this - if the press release actually said what she's done, what she's doing, what she wants to do.

Instead it just reads like: "Hey, we've found a woman, and she's BLACK! We gave her a title!"

IEEE Meritocracy

Other than being a black woman from Trinidad who's rather clever, what was the selection criteria? Nobody is saying that she's not qualified because she's a BWFT, just that all we know about her achievements are that she's just another bright young thing from Carnegie Mellon. Oh, and she's energetic. Is she on the verge of a breakthrough regarding quantum computing technology? Cancer cure? Rubiks Cube champ? Does good impressions of Gordon Brown? Anything?!

The reason we're cynical is, we all work at jobs where minority status is prized above merit and we're all bloody sick of it. We DONT know what, if anything, she has achieved. We DO know that she's a politically motivated CEO's wet dream. If she changed her PhD to something to do with how climate change is driving black women engineers from poor countries to use web 2.0 mashups, she'd win next year's Nobel Peace Prize.

Logic and reason are burning to the ground and this smells a lot like smoke.

Runing sarahs post through my personal babel fish,....

"sends a message" means "presents a warning"

"progressive" reads as "fascist"

"marketting" reads as "manipulation"

"giving an impression" reads as "taking a position"

Good luck to the girl, but if we are really that "progressive" why are we having to suffer these "faces-of" in the first place?

Expected better of Reg readers

Is El-Reg now becoming subjected to the same bunch of moaning right wingers that have effectively destroyed the BBC's HYS and infest most other comments sections out there?

Just because you haven't made as much of your life as you hoped you would is your fault, no-one elses, just accept it.

Good luck to the woman, it is evident from the comments here that there is a still a battle to win.

True, Sooooo True

One hit in several hundred thousand does indeed establish a trend and make a significant event. Yeah right, and one "Oh sh*t !" no longer wipes out a thousand "Atta boys" either.

Gissa chance

When I had to fight for formal International Standards in my sector, "I-triple-E" was a long way off, but always seemed to have a slicker and more reliable process - good on 'em for raising the game still further. Oh, but notice that the new CEN-CENELEC supremo is a wimmin too- and a Latino at that. Then check who really rules the roost in ISO committees...

Sigh...

So to all you people crying tokenism, political motivation and all the other pointless FUD arguments i ask you this:

Would you have preferred if some anonymous chubby white male with glasses was the new "Face of Engineering"? Does it somehow make it all less of an honour, less of a recognition of her abilities and more of a political statement because she has an african heritage and her sexual organs are on the inside? Or are you just thick?

No doubt she must have sucked her way to the top or used her drug-dealing, hood-rat, fried chicken-eating bro's to threaten the IEEE board into giving her this recognition. Because obviously anything else would just be preposterous...

Let me ask you a question and i would actually really like an answer to this: Exactly when will a black woman's success in a traditionally white male dominated field be seen as some thing other than politically movitated tokenism?

I'm not normally a PC-ish person...

...but the general tenor of the posts on here, implying that the only reason Gaspard was selected is because she's black and female is so overtly both racist and sexist that it's sickening. Looking at the utter bollocks posted by people like Rather Notsay ("If she changed her PhD to something to do with how climate change is driving black women engineers from poor countries to use web 2.0 mashups, she'd win next year's Nobel Peace Prize." - great, she's actually doing stuff which has direct real world applications and could help save peoples' lives through more accurate medical diagnosis, but let's pretend she's associated somehow with something else that winds you up and then use that association that YOU HAVE PULLED OUT OF YOUR LARDY BIGOTED ARSE to have a pop at her too), I'm utterly disgusted. I'm with sed gawk, J 3, Stephen 1 and David Harrison 1. Yes, she's black, yes, she's female, and equally yes, she's also obviously bloody smart (and probably a lot smarter than most of the 'tards on here who are attacking her) - these are not mutually exclusive. Get the fuck over it.

And another thing...

I find it very interesting that all those racist bigots posting here are too scared to post with their real name. Obviously putting your name to your pissant little opinions makes your already shrunken balls shrivel a bit more.

Quite simply - Racist...

...these people assume, [overly] simply, that this Black Woman is unable to compete with them. They do not know her, have not met her, but somehow they just 'know' this.

Please tell me, who amongst you has come up with a cure for cancer recently? What's that, nobody? Who says she has to either, she just needs to be good at what she does, hey, she got into Carnegie Mellon, didn't she?

The world's changing my friends, go ask China and India. You're going to be seeing some rather different looking faces in the media during the next couple of decades, no need to feel down hearted, that's just the way it is, get used to it (everyone else had to).

Cheers

Keep your chins up