<p>FWIW, several of the senior engineering VP’s at my Fortune 100 company are women. I have had the privilege of talking and working with a few of them, and it was interesting to hear how they had to work their career around their families - one in particular noted that she could not have taken her current executive position (which is typically an 80 hour week) when her children were still at home, but that when they left she enjoyed the fact that she was able to transfer much of that focus and workload into a more demanding position that the vast majority of men at the company would be reluctant to take (not guessing on that - we took a survey).</p>
<p>Anyway, I think the majority of problems facing women and minorities in the engineering workplace are either a factor of choice (like parenthood), negotiable (men can stay at home with kids too), or are slowly but surely aging themselves out of the workforce (as in the old white guys who are being replaced by progressively less bigoted people). As a new student I think things look pretty good for the OP.</p>