In discussing this with my daughter (3rd year College student) she feels that many girls start college thinking they will major in engineering and then switch in their first or second year - would love to see statistics to see if this is true. Although not an engineering major, she was required to take the calc for engineers classes and said a noticeable number of girls dropped the class after a few weeks - since those classes are required for engineering they must have changed their major also.
More than 50% of the engineering majors graduating from Harvey Mudd last year were women. Mudd has cracked the code…
In a post someone wondered why it was a problem with only 18% women in engineering. Another mentioned sexism. It DOES matter. I majored in Chemistry, not Chem E and so did not contribute to women in engineering populations (science people will understand the differences in the two). My medical school class was 20 out of 120- close to that 18% above (the year ahead had 10 of 120). Unlike engineering with its many subdivisions all of us were taking the same classes together at the same time together so we at least had other women to be with. There was still a lot of sexism et al back in the mid- late 1970’s; I can understand what others report. It was after my time there finally enough women physicians to change things in private practice- too bad I missed those days due to discrimination… (long story).
Math and computer science also are suffering. It matters socially to men in these fields, such as my son. Hard to meet women peers in classes and/or the workplace. They may not be interested in dating the peers but they do not even get exposed to a different way of viewing the world, or the various strengths with different backgrounds. I still remember being on a residency rotation that happened to have mostly women one month- quite a switch for that male staff who wandered into the staff room to find himself a minority. I and the few other women physicians had to “integrate” various surgical doctors’ lounges in hospitals- ie separate the locker room from the sitting area. “A woman is aggressive while a man is assertive.” I also recall that men physicians do as much gossiping and discuss equally inane things (football, cars, boats, hunting) in physician lounges.
My Indian friends and my kids’ Indian friends tell us independently that in their cultures boys are supposed to be engineers and girls are supposed to be doctors. There isn’t a choice.
Our friend’s D who did ultimately get a CS degree from the engineering school was originally thinking of quitting and switching to nursing (like her mom). Her folks told her that if she switched, she’d be finishing at her in-state flagship instead of price private U, so she stayed the course. Not sure why she was going to switch. I will try to ask her and her folks some time soon.
Law schools and med schools went from being predominantly men to nowadays about 50% or higher women in the class these days. I think perhaps there are more males in engineering with asberger’s tendencies which make it a more uncomfortable environment? Dunno but think it would be great to have more female engineers and STEM folks. To me, it’s clear that men and women do think and solve problems differently and I’d love for teams of men and women to be involved in solving engineering puzzles for the benefit of all of us.
Sad, but not surprised to hear this. As a female mechanical engineering PhD student (mechanical being one of the disciplines with an especially low percentage of women), I am completely surrounded by men. I’m the first and only female PhD student in my (fairly large) lab group, and our rather large department (large, top 3 engineering school) only has 2 female professors. At my undergrad (similar institution), there was only one at the time.
I also (sadly) agree that engineering is still one of the few places where more overt sexism can be found.
I think it’s a complex issue, and there are many reasons why. A few I might try to address first would be the way engineering is typically presented in intro classes. I think it’s often presented in a way that doesn’t make it seem very interesting or, perhaps more importantly, accessible to those who haven’t spent a lot of time tinkering/building things for fun before. Oftentimes there’s a lot of (usually male) students in these intro courses who have already done things like work in a machine shop, use CAD software etc., and I think that can be intimidating to students of all genders, but especially women (in my experience). I think Harvey Mudd had a lot of success in increasing the number of women in CS simply by separation out freshman with some experience coding and those with no experience into two separate classes, which meshes with my theory.
The second thing, and this is of course a complete catch-22, is that working with only men can start to feel somewhat isolating. I find that working in nearly all-male group (i.e. as the only female engineer) has a very different dynamic from a mixed gender group, and even though I work with wonderful people, most of my friends are from school and I miss having female friends! I also hate going everywhere (classes, lectures, meetings) and being the ONLY woman EVERY time. It constantly makes you feel like an outsider, which isn’t necessarily a great feeling.
That’s not a universal rule when it comes to Indian culture. Perhaps how it is in some Indian families, but nowhere near all Indian families. I’m Bengali and Indian, and I’ve only ever been exposed to such an idea in one Bollywood movie (3 Idiots, if anyone was wondering).
It’s really sad to hear that there’s so much sexism that women in engineering counter. I’m a female studying physics which is male-dominated, but I haven’t faced any issues so far.
@wis75 How was your (surgical?) residency in this respect?
Sorry, I didn’t mean to present it as universal, just anecdotal. It could be where I live, a stone’s throw from Microsoft, where there are a lot of male software engineers with family in tow. It is likely not a representative sample.
Click on the gender button here http://stanfordvisualized.soraven.com and see the mix in each major. You can also change years.
When I was working in the States, I watched many female engineers quit to be SAHMs or be mommy-tracked. It was even worse in Europe. I knew not a single European mother working full-time. How could they when schools closed at lunch time for children to go home to eat lunch?
Fast forward to Asia. In Asia, mothers work. Many engineers in my office are mothers-- I’ve not met a single part-timer. Domestic help is cheap, and having a live-in maid/nanny is the norm. Working women in Asia don’t beat themselves up for being bad mothers if they are not personally wiping their kids butts.
@Parent1337 - interesting chart - the smallest female group I could find was math at 16%
A few of things I wanted to mention
Many of my daughter’s friends who are engineering majors now (these are the kids she went to school with whom I have known basically all their school lives), are those boys who tinkered with legos all their lives (yes even into high school). I wonder about this correlation - do you know any little girls who are lego crazed like that - I only know boys. Is this a genetic thing or a cultural one (parents only buy intricate lego sets for boys?)
I think the current nerd stereotype (think big bang theory) works against attracting girls to be engineers or computer science majors. Not many girls want to be that kind of geek or spend all their time in college with those kinds of geeks.
Lastly, I think the engineering number is closely related to the math number (as the stanford chart indicates no women in math even worse than in engineering). The “hard” math associated with engineering probably discourages girls from that major (and I have the anecdotal evidence I mentioned earlier in this thread of my daughter seeing many girls dropping out of the harder calc for engineers classes she has been in during college.)
A lot of people have commented on engineering women and the baby/mommy effect - the stats I brought up are about girls majoring in engineering - so the mommy effect should not have a big effect on the percent.
Purely anecdotal here, but FWIW, my engineer D was a Lego-maniac and is still. She displays several huge Star Wars Lego sets in her home, including a 3000+ piece Death Star that she treated herself to after her last bonus. 
We homeschooled and I placed an emphasis on math and science for our kids since I was discouraged from both as a child. Tessellation blocks, Legos, K’nex, Rube Goldberg-like ball runs, and a wide variety of math edutainment software were enjoyed regardless of gender. Starting at an early age, our kids attended day camps at various science museums and later went to every Space Camp and Aviation Challenge program offered by NASA. Our kids are proud to be “geeks” although only D1 became an engineer.
It took D1 an extra semester to graduate, in part because she opted for a math minor after struggling with her first college math course. Her employer then paid for her Master’s degree, and she was often the only female in those classes. Most of the women who work at her location have clerical or administrative jobs, but she’s unaware of any bias against the women engineers. D1 believes that the rare times she’s encountered negativity from a few older males has been due to her youth and not gender. Those attitudes disappeared once they got to know her and her work.
My D is a mechanical engineer. Much of what California Dancer said is true for my D. She is not in graduate school but what CD says is true for undergrad also.
D loved Knex as a kid and she loved building things. D is a very girly girl. A tiny petite girl. Who has trouble getting people to take her seriously. I remember in undergrad being in group projects, it was very hard being the only girl in her groups, the boys wanted to take over and not listen to the shy girl. D felt that the boys felt that since it was harder for them to be admitted that the girls were less intelligent than them. A lot of alpha dog mentalitity. She also heard comments when she was interviewing. The boys gave comments that they should be getting the interviews because they were obviously more intelligent and qualified than her.
Now that D is in the workforce, I think things are better. Her company gives the young women engineers a mentor to help the navigate the work environment. But she does mostly work with men. She’s use to it now.
I don’t know what will happen when D gets married and has children. I have the feeling she will transition to another profession. My H is an engineer. He and the other engineers work more than 40 hours/week and travel. Not very conducive to being a mother. And D’s bf is also an engineer, they will be able to support one being home or part time. Most of the female engineer managers in my H’s company are the primary wage earner. Not all, but it does seem to be a trend.
D never wanted to be anything but an engineer. But i felt that we found opposition along the way, including math placement in primary school. Had to fight to get her in advanced math. For a girl who never got a B in HS math and a 5 on AP Calc. We did not find this with my S, even though D was a much better student.
Harvey Mudd has a 50/50 ratio because they can, they are selective enough. So can Olin and MIT. But the lower ranked schools don’t have that luxury. And I suspect that even at the higher ranked schools find more of the women majoring in chemical or biomed. And less in electrical and mechanical.
D still likes to put things together. She and her bf got matching coveralls as a gift so they can work on cars together :). She loves puzzles and is really good at them.
I’m a female structural engineer. I got my master’s degree in 1986. There were actually several women in my graduate program. I never felt outnumbered. When I sat in on one of my dad’s engineering classes a couple of years ago, I was surprised at the number of women - about 30% of the class. So maybe UT is having more luck attracting women.
I just had a discouraging conversation with a young woman who got her BS in mechanical engineering last year. She works for a large engineering firm. She is totally disenchanted. She HAS encountered sexism and unfriendliness from the guys. She is planning on working there only a year or so, then getting out of engineering altogether to become an event planner.
When I attend local engineering meetings, it’s usually me and one other woman, even older than I am, among a sea of men. But I don’t feel out of place - the men are always friendly and treat us the same as anybody else.
deb922 is correct. Engineering is a HARD field for mothers. In structural design, codes change constantly and technology improves quickly. Your skills also atrophy pretty fast, because structural engineering is tough! Taking two years off to raise little ones is almost impossible. Full disclosure - the only reason I was able to continue was that my husband and I started our own consulting engineering business in 1999, so it was a very forgiving environment. When I was rusty, we could just not charge the client for all of my time. And I could ask my husband dumb questions and know I wouldn’t get blasted!
That chart is a bit depressing understanding that is Stanford programs. Stanford strives for equality. If they could find enough equally qualified young women interested in EE and Math to make those majors 50/50 they would.
And yes, look at chem and biology. There are qualified women, not running from “hard” math. They just are not interested in the boys club engineering has remained. My daughters both scored 800 on their math SATs and finished calc BC in high school. One started in engineering, and dropped not because the classes were too hard, but the atmosphere was not what she was looking for. The other is a stem major, in bio chem.
I know more than a few girls that loved building things, either with legos or blocks. I remember coming home one evening to find my high school daughter and her girl friends had built a wooden train track and town that took up the entire 20x14 foot family room. A friend has a daughter that worked her way through college by buying large stocks of plain legos, creating her own projects out of them, and selling the kits for the projects, including pictures of the completed project and instructions, internationally on ebay.
But this is not a new phenomena. When I was young women sewed. Fabric measurement meant women did fractions. Then placing patterns and figuring adjustments for size brought in spacial intelligence, and visualizing 3D projects from 2D patterns. Anyone who was familiar with making pants from scratch was not surprised by saddle points in calculus. “Building” a suit jacket could be hundreds of steps with precise measurements.
I don’t think young women were ever not ready for the rigor of engineering programs.
My youngest daughter started out majoring in engineering. She too grew up playing with Legos and puzzles (and still enjoys them). In high school she was on her school’s engineering team all four years and captained it her senior year. National merit scholar. Strong strong SAT score in math (and reading and writing). Did fine with her entry level engineering classes.
And then she changed her major. Why?
She decided it was not the direction she wanted to head in life - something along the lines of I can graduate with the degree but doubt I want to work as an engineer. Her three closest friends from high school did graduate with engineering degrees. They like their current employment in varying degree (three different companies) - in other words, one more than the other two. Daughter remains content with her decision.
Was it the rigor of the program? I don’t think so. Basically, she moved away from engineering and toward her other strengths and interests.
I’ve found this discussion interesting because of daughter’s decision. My son, on the other hand, graduated with a degree in engineering. Seems we’re perpetuating stereotypes here.
D1 is a Sophomore ChemE major. She has a 5 term co-op position. Out of 17 co-ops in her term 5 were women, about 30%. I do know when she interviewed for co-op positions she was offered 5 interviews and got 4 job offers. Opportunities are out there.
GMT - you say “in Asia, mothers work” - I haven’t found that to be the case in Japan specifically, which is very hostile to working mothers, IME.
"Math and computer science also are suffering. It matters socially to men in these fields, such as my son. Hard to meet women peers in classes and/or the workplace. "
That is one of the arguments for an all-women’s college like where my D attends - because all your math / science classes ARE all women.