[PaulHoule]

What if awkward men are discriminated against in fields other than engineering?

I know a woman who works in HR at a large engineering adjacent organization and I'd say (in my experience dealing with her outside of work) she consistently makes mistakes in dealing with awkward people (such as attempting flattery and making people feel worse.) Since non-awkward people get to define what "empathy" means and because awkward people are defined deficient fundamentally, she and people in her profession systematically erase these mistakes. (We did what we were told to do in school, what is on the checklist, what the diversity plan says "empathy" is, ...)

She probably gets good performance reviews but she finds her job really stressful. It might be intrinsic that the job is stressful (it is dealing with other people's bullshit after all) but it might be that she's not really that good at it. She follows the checklists that other people give her, but nobody really asked her customers what they think.

It could be that professions like that could use a good dose of awkward people or at least people who can have real empathy for awkward people instead of a show of empathy that's directed at impressing somebody else.