<p>“Even the rise from 4% (Northwestern, 1970) to 18% (overall, 2011) changes the situation for women in their undergrad courses significantly–”</p>
<p>I consider 18% low when free will is implied and most majors are closer to being gender neutral. I suggest there is nothing hard about engineering, some just have a better aptitude for Math.</p>
<p>May be medicine benefits from this disparity since many bright women gravitate toward sciences as an area of STEM and end up being doctors or researchers.</p>
<p>Bel, are you seriously saying that there should be a separate spatial section of the SAT, even though the math section already includes some spatial relations questions? Doesn’t that sound a little specific for a test whose other sections are reading, writing, and math?</p>
<p>I mean, I think it would have been fantastic if there had been a separate section on the SAT called “interpreting literature,” since most of the CR passages are non-fiction and literary interpretation is a different skill that can tell a person a lot about a student’s analytical capacity. But my personal desires aside, it is appropriate that literary analysis is covered by a subject test and is not a part of the general test, since the SAT is precisely that - a general test of a variety of skills. It isn’t claiming to be able to identify the next generation of geniuses.</p>
<p>I think that if 18% of engineering undergrads are women, that percentage is likely to be lower than the true percentage of women who would be interested in engineering, if all other things were equal. (Though it is better than 4%.)</p>
<p>Re Beliavsky’s post #221: Suppose that the SAT is a valid measure of mathematical ability relevant to engineering (not claiming that it is, just suppose). Further suppose that 700+ is the desirable score. (It’s probably lower than that.) It looks to me as though 9% of men SAT takers and 5% of women SAT takers score in that range. This would mean that among the “math eligible” students, roughly 36% are female–and that is double the actual percentage in engineering B.S. programs from the source I cited.</p>
<p>I don’t argue that half of the people in any field should be women–just that we should not assume that a current low percentage represents either ability or true interest level.</p>
<p>thumper, I have known 4 male engineers quite well-FIL, H, and both sons. All very socially capable. So, that stereotype really doesn’t hold for me. Are there engineers that are not socially capable? Of course.</p>
<p>I am really surprised by the gender distribution of the math SAT scores. There are more boys clustered at the top than women and there seem to be more women clustered at the bottom (even if you account for their higher numbers, which also surprised me). </p>
<p>Perhaps, we should not have dismissed Summers theory that there are more men (in numbers not necessarily ability) with superior math talent than women. His theory was that men are clustered at the two ends of the distribution, but looking at the SAT distribution women are the ones clustered at the lower end, and boys seem to be clustered at the top.</p>
<p>I’ve been following this topic mainly because my D is what I like to call “mathy sciencey”, meaning she enjoys and does best in those subjects. Many people say “oh, she should go into engineering” - that seems to be the default suggestion for a kid who enjoys math and science.</p>
<p>I encourage her to consider it because there are so many women with great stats applying to college that they are now at a disadvantage at most LACs and many Us, but engineering is one of the few areas where it is a plus to be female, in applying.</p>
<p>But she, and I, have concerns about including “tech” schools, schools where the vast majority of other students are men. Might be an issue at a college where her courses might be mostly men but the overall population is not, too, but less so.</p>
<p>I know a few engineers and a few engineering students, and if she is truly into it she will speak to them about it. But all are male.</p>
<p>And yet women earn higher grades in math, take more years of/higher-level math courses, attain higher class rank and could be said to be “better at math” by several measures.</p>
One plus that you and your daughter might want to consider is that sometimes the girls “stick together”. As in, create support groups within social circles. Encourage her to also look into the Women’s Society of Engineers (I don’t think that’s the actual acronym…), but that, too, will allow her to network with companies and women in her position and leave her less feeling like a fish out of water.</p>
<p>OHMomof2, MIT is reasonably close to 50/50 in terms of gender. You might check the numbers for other schools of interest.</p>
<p>A student who enjoys math and science might go into math or science, as well as engineering. Engineering tends to be seen as the safer choice in terms of a career. On the other hand, over time engineering has been more subject to boom-bust cycles than math or science. Of course, it’s difficult to tell whether this will change.</p>
<p>Engineering depends on math and science, but there are other elements of engineering that should be taken into account. Does you daughter enjoy building things? Or designing circuits? Or something similar? Is she curious about how things work? Then engineering could be an excellent choice.</p>
<p>I appreciate the advice. Even at Us that are 50-50, the college of engineering seems not to be. She did a “Women in Engineering” program at a large U this summer. The U as a whole is 55/45 - more women, but the college of engineering is only 18% women. Hence the existence of programs like the one she did.</p>
<p>The “building things” question…no, she wasn’t taking apart toasters as a kid. And our school robotics clubs/teams are all male and that in and of itself turns her off, though it may also be that she isn’t interested in robotics. This is a kid who was invited to take Algebra in 7th grade and declined because she’d be the only girl in the class. She’s older now and may be over that type of thing, but that’s where she was when she was younger.</p>
<p>I’m not looking for specific suggestions so much here (though they are certainly appreciated), but sharing what one HS girl is thinking about certain STEM fields and how it is/might be explore them.</p>
<p>Your daughter may want to consider Cornell. The engineering school is one of 7 colleges at Cornell. She would have a chance of living/mingling with women from other schools. D1 was a math major. Sometimes she was a select few women in some of her classes, but she was able to join a sorority, continue her dance at a club and was very active at other ECs. D2’s roommate at her sorority is in engineering. She is a beautiful, blond haired young lady.</p>
<p>I can definitely sympathize with the situation, OHMomof2. When my daughter was in 7th grade, there were roughly 6 girls in an advanced math class of 20-24 at the middle school. The boys interacted with the girls poorly–several boys in particular. It got to the point that the girls hid out in the teacher’s office, rather than the classroom, until the teacher arrived each day. It is tough to be in a minority.</p>
<p>Incidentally, I have my grandmother’s diary from the year she was 12. One day she came home from school and recorded, “The boys act terrible.”</p>
<p>A lot of the skills that young men learn by building things can be learned without great difficulty by young women, if they have some hands-on experience. </p>
<p>What aspects of science/math appeal to your daughter, OHMomof2?</p>
<p>Although my D2 is planning to major in physics, a couple of years ago she was thinking about engineering. She went to an engineering summer camp – came back saying she didn’t think she wanted to be an engineer. She said she was sure she could do the work academically, but “then I would have to spend all day every day with engineers… yech”. Now… will she like physicists better? Not completely sure. But thought it was an interesting comment.</p>
<p>To answer the OP, it seems that forcing women away from STEM was in place for years but that a concerted effort has been been recently to rectify that. Doesn’t mean that there isn’t a long ways yet to go but progress has definitely been made.</p>
<p>On another note I find it amusing all the hatred towards STEM from people who aren’t inclined to be in it or his kids are not in it. No one is saying its for everyone, but for parents who kids might have that skill set and who are undecided on what field to pursue there are lots worse choices. No less than Bill Gates has discussed the need to find more qualified candidates in the tech industry from this country.</p>
It’s funny you mention this, intparent. A couple of my past STEM teachers were once engineering students and they all shared how many of the students were “hard to socialize” with. They told me to heed caution. :p</p>
<p>At orientation, I spoke (if you could call it that) with a mechanical engineering major and it was pulling teeth. I was trying so hard to get new than one sentence out of him. Needless to say, I was relieved when the bell rang for us to change partners.</p>
<p>Maybe at least part of the issue is not what is wrong with the environment of Physics, math and engineering fields for women, but rather that there are attractive features in other “softer” fields, such psychology and sociology that that lead to so many women going into them? There seems to be a lot more potential fields in modern universities that seemed to be structured to market specifically to women and hence divide up the female student population. The most obvious areas coming to mind are departments such as women’s and gender studies, but also many psychology courses such as positive psychology and health psychology courses. These are comparatively small enrollment courses at most universities but perhaps they play a roll in drawing away the female student population from the hard sciences and engineering? </p>
<p>Maybe the reason engineering and math fields are so male dominated in terms of student distribution is that there is a much wider spread of female students throughout different faculties whereas male students are concentrated in a comparatively fewer number of areas? Therefore perhaps this gender disparity in many STEM fields is an artifact of different chosen academic focuses between the genders rather than an institutional problem in the math/physics/engineering communities. </p>
<p>As to female students suffering by not having enough female faculty, in these areas, frankly I believe these concerns may be a bit overrated. In my experience the gender of the teacher has little to no impact on the learning experience at an undergraduate level. I did an undergraduate degree with a double major in Human biology and Psychology (both areas where the student population was a majority female and the faculty population was about even in bio and much more female in psych), and as a male, two of my favorite professors and 2 of my three graduate school references where female. In addition my current graduate supervisor (in a molecular biology focused laboratory) is female. At least in my experience the gender of the teacher made very little difference to me, or any of my friends whether male or female. I saw my professors as researchers and teachers of the subject material and I really cant understand how their gender affected the quality my or anyone else’s learning experience in their courses.</p>