Only men can see the dirtiness inside the men clubs.
In so many formerly traditionally male-only fields, even after 40 years of increasing participation by women, you rarely see the glass ceiling crack. This is even when you discount for some women taking time off or declining track-to-the-top opportunities. The proportion of qualified women in those fields reaching the top is lower due to discrimination. Just an aside.
I only know civil engineers, but there are a number of husband and wife teams where they could be flexible about hours and who worked when.
I’m an architect. I worked part time when my kids were small. My long term babysitter quit when my youngest was six, so I quit work and started my own company. I did some drafting for a friend, and a deck the first year. Two small additions the second, now I have more work than I know what to do with. I was lucky that dh’s work provided health insurance and enough to live off of.
Architecture schools used to have very few women, but at least when I was at Columbia the class was 50/50.
H is an engineer and has worked in government contracting for many years. He has done very well and for the most part he has worked a regular 40 hour week except for some travel. His job has frequently had more flexibility than mine has. Over the years he has worked with several women engineers most of whom have families.
It’s easier for a selective private college like Harvey Mudd or MIT to increase their female/male ratio . Such colleges can improve M/F ratio by admitting students in something closer to the M/F ratio they want the class to be and take steps to reduce the rate of dropout (as an example, one study found that having a female professor or other role models in intro classes greatly reduced the rate of women dropping out of the major). However, such an admission based gender selection is not possible at less selective colleges that admit most applicants, and some public colleges also have rules that limit such policies. The UT system that was the focus of the story would probably be one of the more difficult groups, with their class rank based admission.
That said, in the ASEE report from a few years ago, there were a couple dozen colleges with >30% female engineering, when you count CS as engineering, so it isn’t extremely rare. In addition to the selective privates touched on above, there were 2 publics in the top 15 – both schools in Tennessee.
I have a Jr girl in BC Calc. I think there are 3 in her class of 30. The teacher is female and also teaches the dual enrollment multi-var/Matrix Algebra class she will take Sr year. Even with lots of quality support I do notice subtle things discouraging my girl in the class. One thing is that they do an in school and take home test for each unit. They are required to work with at least one other person on the take home test which has more of the unconventional problems and truly challenging problems that some years no one can solve. It was very hard for my daughter to find people to work with when the majority of the class is seniors and so few girls. She eventually did but being shy it was like pulling teeth for her to ask others for their cell phone numbers but a good life lesson too. My son took the class last year and had a great group to work with where there was far more interaction (and learning). Her engineering class has almost no girls and the few girls in her AP Chem class aren’t doing well so she doesn’t want to be in lab groups with them and always having to be the one teaching everyone else. She is OK with being with boys as long as they include her which is hit or miss. Usually once they see her skill level they are happy to have her.
My two advanced math teachers in high school were female PhDs. I’m Facebook friends with one of them! 
One TD is taking Calc 3 in high school and she says her class is about 50% female with a class of 30 students. She is in class with 2 other female students she has known since 2nd grade which I know makes it easier for support as they also text each other when they have issues.
My sons went to a HS that had a lot of girls in advanced math classes, but I know that’s not the norm. One of ds2’s friends is in CS, a Turing Scholar at UT, and when I saw him for the first time freshman year and asked how classes were going, the first thing he said is, “There aren’t girls in my classes!”
I know lots of dual-earner, women engineers who took time off to have kids. One of them even has THREE kids and is a senior manager in a Global 100 company. I know a few who work part time, and are very highly regarded contributors. They all had to juggle child care.
I also have a male engineer colleague who took 18 months off for a sabbatical to go backpacking around the world. He didn’t have problem, either, coming back.
My D is an engineer, my S’s gf is also. In my D’s case, her employer tries very hard to keep her. They’ve laid off people but she’s never been in danger. They gave her a mentor and she’s been asked to be in groups for her input.
My S’s gf has been asked to go into management. When she wanted to relocate to be closer to my S, she found a job in no time.
I think that most employers who employ engineers, try everything they can to find and keep women. It helps them employ more women. My H’s company is big into diversity and does everything they can to find and keep minority employees in the engineering department.
It’s easy for a place like Texas to have more women in engineering, they are very selective and can admit more women to the COE. Where it gets harder is for the technical universities and regional universities to attract more women. When that happens, that will be great. (Not that this isn’t great, but I am sure that UT admits are more lenient towards women).
the good news is that the % of females is climbing – now 41% in Calc BC. (It wasn’t too long ago that is was 33-35%.)
Many of the women top schools are adding to engineering are not at the margin. Instead, they are getting top girls who would have probably gone to premed, business, or humanities.
At some schools, the women have better gpas and test scores than the boys.
What is stopping any college from doing this? I will say that one reason my D picked Mudd is because of a couple of the female physics professors she met at accepted student days during open lab tours. There is nothing stopping other universities from having female profs and TAs teaching intro classes, or being available to students during accepted student visits. Unless, of course, they don’t have any… I know at one prominent university where pictures of the Physics department staff are on the wall of the Physics building, and my D inspected them during her accepted student visit there. There were something like 90 men, and 3 women pictured. My D was not impressed. She may end up at a school like that as a grad student, but she figured she might as well go to an environment that was more supportive of women in the undergrad years. And I know this is a Physics example and not engineer, but it is pretty similar in terms of gender metrics.
At my daughter 's school, more white males in the tutoring group from 2010-2014, maybe 50-60%, not so much anymore, 80-90% female the tutoring group for CS.
But there will still be the glass ceiling. Women have made up more than half of law graduates for 20+ years, but there are still very few who are partners in big firms, who are the general counsel at big companies or banks, or who run the departments at government offices. There were probably more women attorneys in my government office then men, but the management was majority male. There are some, there are a few who are DAs or Senators or hold other top office, but there is always a ‘ding’ for having taken off time to raise children. My sister was a partner at a Wall Street firm, one of only 2 women who made partner her year. She now teaches 4th grade because she tired of all the politics of the firm.
There is a Woman’s Bar association here, and it has some male members because the biggest agenda issue is really the part time practice of law. A lot of the big firms would only allow part time, for associates or partners, for child raising matters. Not for politics, not for writing a book or teaching a class, not just because the lawyer wanted to work only part time. Oh, and part time was usually 40 hours per week rather than 60.
When women engineers start owning the firms, then change will have come to the profession.
Post #35, Yeap, that’s what I told my kids. After a few years, start your own company with friends of course. Be your own boss.
“there is always a ‘ding’ for having taken off time to raise children.”
That is not the same as a glass ceiling. Taking time away is being dinged not being a woman. Men who take time away to raise children are dinged way more than women.
Not sure I agree that men get dinged more. We are just used to seeing it happen to women.
Nothing other than the complete lack of available women PhDs in those fields.