To me girls in Engineering is like guys in nursing, always the “lesser” gender. But do colleges really want more girls to go into engineering?
Gender plays a different role in engineering and nursing. We need male nurses to take care of male patients, but in engineering, as long as the job is done, it doesn’t matter which gender did it.
I’m a female student looking to go into engineering, people kept telling me ENG majors want female students. But what good does it give them to have more girls going into the field?
For one thing, it makes the males in their engineering programs happier to have a better gender ratio. 
So… that’s it? They just want the guys to be happy? @intparent
No, I was being a little bit flippant. My D2 attends a STEM college that has upped their percentage of female students a lot in the last 10-15 years. And this does seem to make the male students happier, but it is not why the college has done it. My experience in the STEM workplace (and in talking to other STEM employees) is that women often bring better communication and partnership skills to the workplace. I know at my D’s school, the women seem to be on equal footing in terms of grades, internships, jobs, grad school, etc. It is still true that women aren’t exposed as much to STEM subjects going into college. I volunteer with FIRST Robotics, and sure enough… probably 90% of the team members are boys. My kid’s high school calc teacher made an “under the table” offer to some students to allow them to study ahead of the summer so they could move a year ahead in math and she could offer a Linear Algebra class to them - - and not one student she offered it to was female (even though my kid had a 780 SAT Math and an 800 Math II score). So women sometimes have some catching up to do for various reasons when they get to college. I thin there is nothing wrong with colleges wanting to give them the chance to be exposed to and major in subjects they may not have been aiming for since they were toddlers.
STEM schools are responding to the call for more gender diversity for multiple reasons. In any event it is good public policy to try to entice more women into STEM. Also, speaking of colleges specifically, in the main potential applicants want to see more gender balance in STEM programs (and in college in general, for that matter).
It pays to have the best people in any field. Male nurses take care of more than male patients - the best labor and delivery nurse I ever had was male. Female engineers bring a different perspective. Engineering schools want the students who are best suited to be engineers, regardless of gender. But they recognize that there is a lot of bias - either conscious or unconscious - against women in the field, so they do what they can to reach out to and recruit qualified females.
Universities and engineering epartments are practically begging for more female engineering applicants. They have been under fire for a while about not having equal numbers of male and female. The heads of the engineering departments know that their admissions data is being heavily scrutinized and don’t want to be attacked for having low ratios. They do the same thing with minorities.
Even with the external pressure, I don’t think the ratio will ever get to 50-50. I think more women will go into the field but there is also an influx of greater male interest in the engineering field keeping the ratio steady. This has to do with STEM initiatives, societal views, and wages for engineering jobs (Everybody is told to go to college but the only job that will reliably give a return on investment is engineering).
A lot of it does have to do with the fact that there is genuine desire to make the road to engineering accessible for women (in order to provide the precious American ideal of equal opportunity), but the fear of ending up on the front page as a sexist university is a much more powerful motivator. Once you’re crucified in the court of public opinion, it could take years doing damage control and compensation.
My kid’s college (Harvey Mudd) graduated more female than male engineering majors last year. It can be done. I do think that engineering is not the ONLY major that will reliably give a return on investment. I am sure that CS, Econ, Finance, Accounting, etc. also do. And certainly many students in other majors get a decent financial return on their investment, although not as consistently. My other kid with a political science & public policy major is making about $80K a year and managing a fairly large team when she is only 3 years out of undergrad.
Yes, engineering schools do strive for more diversity of gender. I saw that when I was in engineering school 30 years ago, and I saw it when touring college with my own kids.
If interested in more details, see this article from Olin (another STEM school with about 50-50 split… there are not many).
http://www.engineering.com/Education/EducationArticles/ArticleID/8993/Engineering-Education-Perspectives-Olin-College-on-Gender-Diversity.aspx
There is not a simple, clear-cut answer to this question. There are several reasons I can think of off the top of my head as to why girl engineers are in demand:
- Girls do have some unique skills and personality traits that are valuable in any field, including engineering. They tend to be good at networking, strategizing, and are dedicated/loyal.
- There is political pressure to promote women as equal workers to men.
- Diversity. Satisfaction and morale tend to be higher when there is gender diversity.
I actually think teams perform better with gender diversity. I am a project manager, and have managed probably more than 50 projects in my career. About 3/4 of them IT related, 1/4 business related. I HATE having teams of all one gender or the other. They each have different weaknesses, but you could set your watch by them – it is the same every time. Teams with all men tend to have lousy attention to detail and an inflated sense of what they have each done to contribute to the project (not much sometimes!). Those projects are often “seat of the pants” and pushed into production even when they are only partially done. Teams with all women are catty. Tons of behind the back and to the face bad behavior. If I get a team that is all one of the other, I try to swap some teammates out for some to give it a better balance.
When I was finishing my undergrad, I was asked to sit on a committee that was addressing this issue (as part of a set of enrollment and completion issues). There really did seem to be a consensus that this was a problem that they/we wanted to solve. The biggest problem was that, well, no one really knew how to do it!
As to why it is a problem, fractalmstr and intparent have good points, and I will add another: innovation. Engineering is fighting with other fields for a share of smart, innovative people, and when it comes to women, we’re losing. This isn’t about ego or getting male engineers dates, it is about getting smart women into jobs otherwise destined for less-smart men.