Also women prefer biomedical, chemical engineering, so schools with strong Biomed programs like Case Western will attract more women engineers than a school that is predominantly directed to mechanical or electrical engineering or computer science.
I think lack of women in college is not that bad, or even noticable if you attend a big school … but there is definitely a lack of women in industry …, I don’t think the bro comments would occur if a woman was sitting in 40% of the seats in the meeting, but it is not unusual for meetings to be 90% or higher male … especially higher level meetings, where there might be a woman manager, a single technical engineer, and a few women putting out donuts.
Retention is not good among women engineers, which is why even good years from recruiting actual women engineering graduates haven’t really changed the numbers out in industry. Women who quit engineering after 10 years are then not at the senior level meetings, are not role models and mentors for young women coming out of college. Being in a meeting with 90% old men is intimidating … and the young men may be intimidating too (and some of them are outright afraid of women … they are engineers to avoid females !).
I will say that my alma mater Rutgers had a separate campus for STEM that was probably 2/3 male. I think this accounts for having too few women friends in college, which was not great. Having women engineering friends is even better, since you can form study groups and make sis comments about all the bros …
During the earlier period of discussion, I posted a good report from AAUW that goes into a lot of the comments we are making here. Some were not obvious to me, or I had the wrong idea, or I was about 30 years behind in my thinking.
I found the idea of improving spatial reasoning by using CAD to be an excellent one … yes, I have done that (and I tested above average for human and off charts for woman in my teens). I am now an ME.
I have been to outright silly women in engineering programs …rah, rah, become an engineer. Women at high school age who can easily become engineers need some demos and some women who have excelled in their field, not the same as say a group of 3rd graders.
Math in middle school is not really the problem, there are hundreds of thousands of women who are capable and ready to study engineering in college.
I think we also need lots and I mean tens of thousands of MEs and EEs women a year to even the stats. the niche engineering fields just don’t have enough graduates to change the overall odds.