<p>I suggest you read, carefully, this article from the Chronicle of Higher Learning regarding the persistence, or lack thereof, of many women who start college intending to become engineers. </p>
<p>Lack of Confidence as Professionals Spurs Women to Leave Engineering, Study Finds</p>
<p>Specifically, women lack “professional role confidence,” a term that describes, loosely, a person’s sense that he or she belongs in a certain field. The term encompasses more than mastery of core intellectual skills. It also touches on a person’s confidence that he or she has the right expertise for a given profession, and that the corresponding career path meshes with his or her interests and values.</p>
<p>As one of the most sex-segregated professions outside the military, engineering carries ingrained notions and biases about men being more naturally suited to the field, which can have self-reinforcing effects, notes the paper’s lead author, Erin Cech, a postdoctoral fellow in sociology at Stanford University’s Clayman Institute for Gender Research.</p>
<p>“The more confident students are in their professional expertise, the more likely they are to persist in an engineering major. However, women have significantly less of this expertise confidence than do men,” Ms. Cech writes, with her co-authors, Brian Rubineau of Cornell University, Susan Silbey of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Caroll Seron of the University of California at Irvine.</p>
<p>[Lack</a> of Confidence as Professionals Spurs Women to Leave Engineering, Study Finds - Faculty - The Chronicle of Higher Education](<a href=“Lack of Confidence as Professionals Spurs Women to Leave Engineering, Study Finds”>Lack of Confidence as Professionals Spurs Women to Leave Engineering, Study Finds)</p>
<p>now of course, you can blow this off, as you have blown off lots of good advice from other parents, or you can step back and think about your continued efforts to try to force a “square peg”- your D, into a round hole. Your mindset re: engineering seems be hindering your ability to “think differently” about your daughter’s strengths and weaknesses.</p>