My daughter is a freshman in engineering and sharing this thread with her generated some interesting conversation while she was back home for winter break.
Anyone considering any profession needs to consider how that job will balance with their hopes and expectations for home/family/social life. This is a more complex question for women, and engineering as it’s currently practiced seems to be less family friendly in general than some of the other STEM careers out there. We haven’t discouraged our daughter but have encouraged her to consider these things as she makes decisions and plans.
As far as the engineering school environment, my daughter has found her smallish tech focused school to have enough women for a critical mass of friends. Still, she finds she has lots of guy friends as well. The school as a whole is about 70/30 m/f. The dean of the engineering college is a woman, and her particular engineering major has a good percentage of women as students, but no women profs in her particular department. D isn’t particularly bothered by this and feels supported and encouraged by her professors.
Her math class started out with less than 10 women of 50 or so. She said half the girls dropped but nowhere near half the guys. We had an interesting discussion about why girls might drop instead of asking for help if they are struggling. I think the intimidation of having to ask a guy for help could come into play here.
D did join SWE or WISE, not sure which, but didn’t like it being all women, she’d rather be in a professional engineering society that’s not so much about being a girl. I’ve encouraged her to try the other group, but it conflicted with something else last semester.
On encouraging girls to be engineers:
I think it would be helpful to break away from associating engineering with Legos. My brother is an engineer and still loves Legos so I had that stereotype to work from. D commented that she never liked Legos because things aren’t built entirely of brightly colored cubes in real life. She had an opportunity to do a Lego machines class at one point in elementary school and chose a different option. She didn’t do robotics–no robotics club at her school, no engineering camp, none of the things you read about associating kids with engineering, except maybe doing math problems for fun, LOL. However, we took her on a construction-related service project every year since she was young. She framed, roofed, stuccoed, worked with cement. She saw how real things are built. She helped build. She also took art classes. Lots of them since she was very small. She loves art. In high school she took a year of general art and two years of metals and jewelry. She learned to solder copper and silver, but not circuit boards. Lost wax casting. Setting stones. Making chains. She did build lots of things, but not with Legos, or any other of the building sets we do have around the house. She enjoys knitting. She didn’t sew much, but I agree with a previous poster that sewing incorporates the engineering type of spatial thinking. We encouraged her to pursue her interests (even though I wasn’t entirely sure at the time about the metals class, I thought painting or ceramics was a better idea) and we can see now how these things shaped her interests. Girls going into a male dominated profession need confidence that they can do what they are passionate about, and that confidence can come from better connecting their earlier interests with what they are looking forward to in a profession. They don’t necessarily need pink Legos.