Saw this in a news article this morning and it thought - why are there still no women in engineering?
Rosalind L. Hudnell, Intel’s chief diversity officer, cited statistics showing that just 18 percent of undergraduate engineering degrees go to women. That makes it especially difficult to improve diversity at Intel, which leans more heavily on technical employees than other tech companies.
The real question should be: Is this a problem and if so why? IMHO it’s not.
Diversity should be allowed and encouraged, but not instated at all costs. If only 18% of engineers are women, then they should expect to make up approximately that amount in the workforce. To try to make it 50/50 in the workforce would be to purposely hire women because of their gender, and that would be discriminating against men, which I do NOT condone.
18% may be inadequate numbers to many, but it is not the same as “no women.”
Agreed, @Nrdsb4, also, engineering is not the most male dominated field. Aviation has to be pretty close to that - only 6% of pilots are women.
The numbers continue to climb, too. The 18% cited in this article is actually a few years old.
Are the numbers climbing? A quick google brings up many articles that say the number of female engineering students and graduates is falling.
Given my experience as a woman in engineering, I did not recommend it to my daughters, as it does seem to be one of the last bastions of overt and covert sexism in the business world. There are so many other careers where women are taken seriously and given the opportunity to do as well or as poorly as their male counterparts, why chose one with an uphill battle. Unless engineering is your passion, it is not worth it.
I have a niece in Engineering at the University of Toronto, where more than 1/5 of the undergraduates and 1/4 of the grad students are female. The department also has a female Dean.
@UCDAlum82 For Engineering, a little up or a little down, it depends on the definitions, but for STEM as a whole, women are doing better.
Sadly the number of women in Computer Science has plummeted since I got my degree.
Well there seems to be a war on women in that particular area.
I’ve worked in engineering for 30 some odd years as a mechanical designer. For the majority of that time, I’ve been the only female in the department. If anything, I’m seeing fewer females in the field. I would advise any female going into the field to develop a thick skin and get ready to work harder than your male co-workers. On the surface, everything looks like a positive environment, underneath in subtle ways, you’ll be undermined and have to be very careful. It can be quite a nasty surprise when it happens and sometimes it comes from unexpected sources. I don’t want to discourage, but I’ve seen female engineers quit or fired too soon. So I want more coming in but coming in with a realistic view so they will stick the course.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/cafe/things-people-say-to-blond-engineers-at-mit cannot help matters.
I am not an engineer but D2 had many female friends that graduated in STEM majors who were very well educated. They all basically dropped out and got their masters instead of PhD. There is seriously something wrong with the system. One did graduate this year with a PhD and another after a forced break came back and is trying to continue. I recently saw several of them, they just looked worn down. I think preironic is right and may have the more inside info to this. My D did pursue a professional masters but in a totally different pathway than the STEM undergrad degree.
I know of a female family member who recent worked at Intel as an engineer. She left after changing roles there. She could not take or did not choose to continue in what she described as the male dominated environment .
Depends on the major to some extent. My major was half women half men when I was in school.
I live in a town where many women have college degrees and do not work. I would say there are fewer women in engineering in the workplace than in engineering majors in college.
I’m now officially depressed! All I know is that 50 years ago there were hardly any women architects and now most architectures schools are half women. When I started out people were often surprised that I wasn’t the secretary (and generally very apologetic if they had made the assumption), now no one thinks twice about it. There still is a bit of a Mommy track with fewer women principals at big firms and a lot of women like me who are solo practitioners because it was easy to work part time when the kids were small and grow the business as the kids got older. Engineering won’t change unless you get a critical mass of young women entering the field. A lot of old timers saying that engineers are misogynists is not going to help things.
USC does have a WISE program, designed to help support females in the engineering school. When S graduated from USoCal in 2010, all the top awards in the engineering school went to women. The woman who worked with him went to grad school instead of heading out to a job like S. A young woman we know who got her CS degree from USC engineering in 2.5 years has just accepted a job at Cisco, where she was an intern last summer. She was also offered a job at Boeing. A video was shown at her grad party with lots and lots of women friends wishing her well–don’t know how many of them were in engineering with her.
Medical schools now have more females in them than males at a lot of places. Not sure what’s up with engineering. S was always happy to have women in his study group and to work with for the professors in the engineering school.
Very Saddened to hear this. The universities are really enticing middle school girls with their Techy Girls are cool type camps.
I choose nursing ages ago and have been excited that my daughter wanted more the CS type career. I sure don’t want her to hate her profession.
Also sort of surprised and bummed. One of my D’s top choices is a very good engineering school where she didn’t expect to be admitted. Wish engineering had made the gains for women that have occurred in other professions. When I entered accounting in the early 1980’s it was male dominated, but it’s now the reverse. I remember the glass ceilings and other impediments and I would prefer she not have those barriers.
I think the big question remains: why are so few women studying engineering? If women are being pushed away from engineering by some groups or demographics then I think that is a real problem. If women are, for some unknown reason, simply not interested in engineering then I do not think that this anything that can or should be done.