<p>My son, a second year civil engineering student, is quite good-looking and something of a clothes horse (always a button-down shirt, preferably with cufflinks, and a blazer). He has a girlfriend who is also a civil engineering student (in a different school) and she’s pretty cute herself. I guess they don’t fit the mold, or maybe they just got lucky?</p>
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It depends a lot on which engineering program you do, CivE, ChemE and the bio ones are much more popular among the girls which means that more mainstream girls get there so they also get better quality, not just quantity.</p>
<p>Like, I would say that your average waitress looks better than 95% of compE women but for chem it would be very different.</p>
<p>Most I have seen are physically unattractive. If they are attractive, they aren’t very smart and rely on copying work, or have to have step by step examples.</p>
<p>And I said most, not all.</p>
<p>Defending your generalizations as applying to “most, not all” doesn’t make them any less offensive to the group of people that you’re generalizing.</p>
<p>your right. I am generalizing. I am basing it off of what i see at my school. This whole thread is generalized topic.</p>
<p>so, silverbllet, since we’ve decided this applies to both males and females… how do you feel about having that statement made about you too?</p>
<p>Gentlemen: this thread smacks of ■■■■■■■■ jokes and is offensive and not appropriate. Stop.</p>
<p>Not sure where you are going to school, but maybe you are seeing women in your engineering classes as just “one of the guys” or “she is just a friend”. Take a look at this social sorority for women in engineering: [Phi</a> Sigma Rho National Sorority](<a href=“http://www.phisigmarho.org%5DPhi”>http://www.phisigmarho.org) . </p>
<p>The vast majority of the women do not have the streotypical “geeky” engineering look. There are even a few evening gown-type pictures where I would have never guessed any of the women were in engineering! :)</p>
<p>The female freindly engineering subjects such as chem, bio and civ got better girls, but try finding them in electro or com…</p>
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<p>Something I’ve always wondered… perhaps somebody has a theory about this… .why are these disciplines more popular among females than the other ones?</p>
<p>Ken, it is because chem is like cooking and bio is about babies.</p>
<p>And history is so popular with men because it’s mostly about societies senselessly beating the crap out of one another. Go bake your mother some cookies.</p>
<p>No theory from me, Ken… I’m confused by it. All I know is that the structural subset doesn’t apply. All my female civ friends went into site development or water resources. It was bizarre… I had tons of women friends in college, and half-expected to have the same when I went to grad school in structures, and then the bottom dropped out, and the ratio was something like 10 guys to 1 woman in the structural department.</p>
<p>Maybe we were never encouraged to like cars or circuits. I’m not sure. I always coveted my little brother’s blocks and Legos, and I thought that it was woefully unfair when everyone would give him Lego sets for Christmas and I’d get something sparkly (which I liked, but… dude… Legos!) so I just kind of gave up on it and started drawing. In fourth grade, I started drawing building facades. Then I discovered science. Then I discovered that you can design buildings using science when you grow up, and I thought that was amazing. (They almost lost me there, for a while, though… Discouraged at age eight, I decided I wanted to be a poet.)</p>
<p>I’m doing ME and CS and wanted to do CompEng (except the curriculum was almost identical to CS and seemed redundant to pick it up.) and am female. Gasp.</p>
<p>I think I inherited my interest in engineering from my father, though.</p>
<p>You see even less women in theoretical physics than at engineering places, and theoretical physics have nothing to do with anything you do when you are small.</p>
<p>^ I am trying so hard to be a sexist :(</p>
<p>I was joking when I said that about cooking and babies, but I usually take the “forbidden” stance in discussions since I feel that when people get no opposition they tend to go way overboard with their claims.</p>
<p>But usually I base most of my claims on scientific papers and statistics.</p>
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<p>Completely understandable. You should still bake your mother some cookies, though. It would be nice of you, and she would appreciate it.</p>
<p>I can understand seeing more women in Bio or Chem engineering, but Civil? I’m in civil engineering and almost all of the women in this major are here for environmental engineering, which I consider almost a seperate major (at some colleges it is). There are very few women in the other parts of civil engineering. Is this normal?</p>
<p>Yes, it is. There’ve always only been a handful of women in civil and structural engineering wherever I’ve gone, but there were a higher percentage of women in civil than there were in structural at the undergrad level. In undergrad, I was the only woman my year whose civil engineering concentration was structural engineering.</p>
<p>Of the 10 women in civil engineering I knew from undergrad who I knew what they did afterwards, 1 went into construction management, 3 went into structural engineering, 3 went into geotechnical, 1 into site development, 1 into architecture, and 1 went to an unrelated field. None went into environmental. I didn’t count those who I met because of my graduate degree concentration, nor did I include any who I met due to work/networking as that would obviously skew the numbers.</p>
<p>Wherever I’ve gone, there’s always been a somewhat balanced male/female percentage in civil engineering (maybe about 40% female).</p>