<p>..? are females really that underrepresented in engineering? all the schools i've looked at have pretty close m/f ratios, but everyone keeps saying that i have a good chance bc i'm a girl.. it that just bs or do eng. schools actually have to admit girls to raise their ratio</p>
<p>What engineering schools do you see that are balanced? It’s usually 65/35 or so at most engineering departments.</p>
<p>Yes, being female will increase your chance of admission at most schools.</p>
<p>The universities you are looking at have similar M/F ratios, but I doubt the engineering schools do. </p>
<p>I don’t think being a girl helps you get into engineering school, and am pretty sure its affirmative action, which is illegal (at least in MI.) However, girls are much more heavily recruited in engineering. As a female entering engineering next fall, I have received numerous offers to attend campus weekends where I pay either nothing or a very small fee to fly in and visit the campus and get recruited. So basically, you have to have the stats to get in, but once you get in, you will get better treatment and more recruited.</p>
<p>Both of my Ds were/are (one has graduated) Computer Science majors in the School of Engineering at their respective colleges. Girls are very much in a minority in engineering and especially in CS. There were some engineering classes where they were the only females in the class. None of this bothered them however. </p>
<p>At least at the large universities they attend (UCLA, UCSD), there’s also a college of Letters and Sciences so there are plenty of females in the university itself and non-engineering classes, like the required GEs, will have a normal distribution. Attending a college that’s primarily an engineering college would be a different experience. There was no preference given to them for admissions due to their gender and their stats were plenty high enough to be admitted.</p>
<p>Being a female could give an edge in employment since a number of companies would like more females in their engineering departments.</p>
<p>I think it’s best not to rely too heavily on being admitted due to largely to being a desirable gender. For one thing, it’s not right. For another, you still have to do the work and compete with the other students so if one isn’t adequately prepared, they may struggle quite a bit.</p>
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<p>This is not true, particularly of the higher-caliber programs.</p>
<p>^Like what kinds of schools? I mean, I’m just wondering…</p>
<p>For example, MIT is one place where I might think there would be plenty of amazing female applicants to choose from…but then again, it is very science/math focused, so maybe that explains there higher female acceptance rate.</p>
<p>I suppose at a school like Stanford or something where you’re not applying directly into the school of engineering and it’s not a math/science focused school it isn’t that way…
but it seems like it really is at a lot of places.</p>
<p>Or is it self-selection, mostly, that explains the higher acceptance rates? Just wondering!</p>
<p>I am also a female and aspiring to do chemical engineering. I have asked this question in other threads too. I have been accepted in RHITand Purdue. I am weighing my selection with good teaching, happy students, good campus life, good coop programs, good future prospects in terms of employment or graduation after completing undergraduate degree.</p>
<p>I wonder what female chem engineers do after completing undergraduate studies. I dont seem to get the statistics anywhere? Can anyone help me with these 2 questions please?
Thanks</p>
<p>Alot of schools will say that they have a balanced students body in engineering, but sometimes those statistics are only incoming freshman. You will notice quickly when a EE class has 60 guys and 1 girl, or a a Civil class has 200 guys and 3 girls, that its not so equal.</p>
<p>I was a CS undergrad and some of the girls I had in my groups were the best programmers Ive ever met. They just tend to be quite different than the other girls who study communications and psychology.</p>
<p>Female chem engineerings do the same things that male engineerings do…get a job or go to grad school. (Or niether in this economy! ZING!)</p>
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<p>As someone who has worked in admissions at a “higher-caliber program”, it does. </p>
<p>A school with an average SAT score of 1400 isn’t going to admit a person with an 1100 score just because that person is a woman, but their more “forgiving” of being in the bottom half of the SAT range. The problem is that there’s pressure from several groups to increase the number of women in engineering. Since there are less female applicants, the only way to increase the number of women is to be a little more relaxed in admission.</p>
<p>Adcoms aren’t robots - they favor URM, and in engineering schools, that includes women.</p>
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<p>Affirmative action is banned in certain states such as Michigan for public schools. Private schools are free to do as they wish.</p>
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<p>Consider the following quote from MIT’s admissions webpage:</p>
<p>*The Institute, through its Affirmative Action Program, seeks to expand its efforts to guarantee equality of opportunity in employment and in education and to reduce underrepresentation and underutilization of minorities and women at MIT *</p>
<p>[MIT</a> Policies and Procedures](<a href=“Policies & Procedures | Policies”>Policies & Procedures | Policies)</p>
<p>The extent to which this may ‘help’ a female applicant gain admission is a topic of significant debate. You are free to peruse that debate at the MIT section of CC.</p>
<p>In fairness, it should be said that the reverse is now happening at non-engineering programs: due to the ever-increasing imbalance of girls academically outperforming boys in high school, colleges are now enacting affirmative action in favor of the boys.</p>
<p>*…many universities now are rejecting women at higher rates than men. Facing more applications from women than men, many of the selective, “second tier” universities are trying to achieve gender balance by, in effect, practicing affirmative action. For men.</p>
<p>While in the last year, I had read suggestions that this “gender balancing” was going on, US News, using data from its infamous annual college rankings survey, actually produced the hard numbers. And the statistics are appalling. At the College of William and Mary, admission rates for men were 40 percent in 2006, compared to just 26 percent for women. At Pomona College, the admissions rate for women was an average of 9 percent lower than that of men, while at Wheaton, it was a staggering 21 percent lower, U.S. News found.</p>
<p>What that means is young women who have worked hard to achieve may be passed over by lesser-qualified male applicants – simply because of their gender. *</p>
<p>[Pamela</a> Kruger: Affirmative Action – For Men](<a href=“HuffPost - Breaking News, U.S. and World News | HuffPost”>Affirmative Action -- For Men | HuffPost Latest News)</p>
<p>*What does all of this mean for applicants? For girls, making the cut might come down to something as simple as the expected field of study. As an admissions officer from a small midwestern liberal arts college puts it: “God help the female English majors who apply to this school.”…</p>
<p>Some colleges, like Lake Erie College in Ohio and Husson College in Maine, are making extra efforts to attract male applicants by creating football teams. Others are emphasizing hands-on learning on college tours, tweaking their advertising brochures, and reaching out to all-male high schools. Common recruiting practices like writing personalized notes or having alumni call interested students are not as effective at landing students with a Y chromosome, schools have found.</p>
<p>Male applicants are often in an advantaged position—so much so that college counselors have begun advising some boys to “emphasize their maleness,” says Steve Goodman, a longtime independent college counselor. He encourages male students to submit pictures or trumpet their sports activities. “Anything to catch an admissions officer’s eye.” *</p>
<p>[Education:</a> Many Colleges Reject Women at Higher Rates Than for Men - US News and World Report](<a href=“http://www.usnews.com/usnews/edu/articles/070617/25gender_4.htm]Education:”>http://www.usnews.com/usnews/edu/articles/070617/25gender_4.htm)</p>
<p>What can I say? Life is not fair. Some women may be enjoying admissions preference at engineering programs. On the other hand, some men may be enjoying preference at non-engineering programs. </p>
<p>But of course the ones who seem to always get screwed over the most when it comes to affirmative action are the Asians and the Jews. They never get preference for anything.</p>
<p>At most colleges, women are given a favorable factor as an under-represented minority for admission to engineering. Thus, it helps. How much is debatable. For example, I recall one admission officer from MIT once noting that it was like having an extra 20 points on your SAT but since the average SAT score for MIT is somewhere in the 2300 range, you can see how having 20 extra points doesn’t mean the favorable factor is a big thing. </p>
<p>Universally, women are a minority in the engineering programs at colleges, often less than 20%, except Chemical/biologic engineering fields are generally higher and often 30-40% even when at the same school the total may be under 20%.</p>
<p>Working conditions after graduation are not favorable to women engineers. There is still plenty of discriminating factors against women in engineering departments.</p>
<p>^^^ I haven’t found that be true at all, at least in structural engineering. I’m a woman who has been in the field for 23 years now.</p>
<p>As another woman in structural engineering, I <em>have</em> found it to be true, even though I’ve only been in the field for four years now. Not so much in college, but it was true in grad school, and it’s true working for larger firms and doing field work on sites.</p>
<p>MIT 08-09 admit rate was 22.4 percent for women and 8 percent for men. I’m sure they were all highly qualified, but it does help to be a woman for admissions.</p>
<p>To play a little bit of devil’s advocate here, women self-select a lot more in terms of applying to reaches. There are studies that have shown that women are much less likely to apply to a college that they don’t think they have a chance of being admitted to.</p>
<p>We actually see this in hiring here at the firm I work for. A ridiculously high percentage of the women who submit their resumes had 4.0s in college and grad school, much more so than the men. Women who think they don’t have a shot at being hired here usually don’t send in their resumes.</p>
<p>The MIT female applicant pool is also more self-selected. Admissions says this repeatedly and people still don’t believe them.</p>
<p>In general, like so many things, the answer to this question depends on the school.</p>