<p>Although all the admissions data I have been able to find supports the idea that there is generally a higher acceptance rate for women than for men in engineering schools, I have not been able to find the cause.</p>
<p>Is there an Affirmative Action thing going on here or is it that the women whom DO choose to go into the field are all extremely well-qualified as a whole?</p>
<p>To elaborate, are the scores and qualifications of women who are accepted comparable to or lower than those of their male counterparts?</p>
<p>If it helps, I'm most interested in attending Carnegie Mellon University, where about 1/4 of male applicants and 1/3 of female applicants are accepted into the engineering program.</p>
<p>i think maybe its because less women are applying? that would make sense why it seems their acceptance rates are higher simply because there are less of them to choose from…maybe?</p>
<p>Fewer unqualified women apply. There is no affirmative action thing going on (at least for the most part). The average academic qualifications of female engineering applicants is just higher because only the very top female students ever really consider engineering.</p>
<p>I wouldn’t be surprised if there is a bias in accepting URMs, including women, into STEM fields. You’d be surprised how many emails I get about scholarships, travel reimbursement to conferences, special lectures, etc. which are specifically for URMs. If I didn’t have opportunities through other means I’d probably be pretty p!ssed off about what really seems to me to be discrimination in STEM.</p>
<p>That being said, I’m sure being a white American helped in my applications to CS graduate programs, so maybe I should just shut up.</p>
<p>I honetly don’t believe they are necessarily lowerig the standards to admit more women. They want more women so the schools launch campaigns to convince more to apply, but lowering admissions standards hurts the school’s reputation too much for me to believe they do it to any meaningful degree.</p>
<p>Take a look at the preference categories in the Gates scholarships or the preference categories in many of the NSF-funded internships in the Boston area this summer.</p>
<p>Son’s school has a club for women in CS and they announced a scholarship. I guess that noone applied as they moved back the deadline. I tell my daughter that there’s money out there if she wants to go into engineering (she does not want to).</p>
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<p>Americans are underrepresented in US grad schools now?</p>
<p>In many US engineering grad schools, yes. It is actually kind of funny, but I have heard of several white Americans who have gotten diversity fellowships at their grad programs because of the level of underrepresentation.</p>
<p>I am a female student who will be attending CMU for engineering in the fall, and I believe that there is definitely some affirmative action for women, but not as much as some people think. There are some schools where I’m pretty sure the fact that I’m female helped, and there are some where it really didn’t seem to matter. And when I say that being female helped, I simply mean that being female helped me stand out from all the other qualified applicants, not that they overlooked a lack of math/science ability or anything like that. </p>
<p>I don’t think that I was unqualified/under-qualified for any of the schools I was accepted to. I definitely consider myself a strong math/science student - I was one of the very top students in my AP Calc class and my AP Computer Science class, and so on. But, the thing is, if you’re male, there are so many qualified applicants that they can’t all be accepted. With female applicants, there aren’t nearly as many qualified applicants. Therefore, if you’re qualified, there’s a much higher chance that you’ll be accepted. </p>
<p>So yes, I think that being female can definitely help at CMU, but only if you’re qualified. I’m pretty sure that being a female student interested in engineering is what got me waitlisted at Princeton and Columbia. There are some schools where it didn’t help at all.
FWIW, I also got into Berkeley, which isn’t supposed to use any kind of affirmative action, so, like I said - you do have to be qualified in the first place.</p>
<p>I agree with the people saying more qualified females apply. At my highschool, only the valedictorian and a few other top ranking girls pursued engineering, while plenty of guys from high to low intellect wanted to pursue engineering.<br>
But in the end, I don’t think I had any advantage being a girl and applying to engineering schools. </p>
<p>When I visited an engineering orinetation, a dean said that I’d have an advantage getting co-ops/jobs because I’m a female. Is this true?<br>
I’m also bi-racial, so would being asian or white be better to put on applications? Asians are a minority, but maybe not in engineering.</p>
<p>I think the degree to which this occurs varies at different schools, obviously with some giving no preference to females. Personally, I don’t think I’ve seen any class performance difference between different genders. </p>
<p>As for Co-ops, I imagine the ones which mention that they are “Equal opportunity employers” favor URMs and Females (whom I guess are URMs in Engineering), but most that I’ve seen don’t say that. Other than that I don’t know. I with Women in Science and Engineering organization helps people, but other than that, I don’t think so. </p>
<p>Yeah, at CMUs engineering deal one woman (who was something big in engineering there, can’t remember) was saying that she writes triple the recommendations for females than males applying to internships, just that they’re usually offered a lot more jobs or something was her point. Also she gave stats at CMU on starting salary and she said the higher end stats are usually given to women. My old uncle who’s an engineer said he always preferred to hire women because they generally were better at social skills? Like better at communication and such in engineering.</p>
<p>It’s a bonus, but not anything crazy more. You still need to be very qualified.</p>
<p>And yes, it is easier for a girl to get into an engineering program than a girl. That isn’t to say that a horribly qualified girl will get in over a well qualified guy, but if it comes down to two people with similar stats the girl is going to have the advantage. There’s a certain profile that colleges want their entering classes to have.</p>
<p>Regarding the representation of Americans in US graduate schools, one of my professors commented to me that since the 1900s the US higher education system has always been propped up by immigrants, first by Europeans (mostly Germans, and specifically German Jews) and nowadays by Indian and Chinese immigrants. To be frank, Americans in general tend to be anti-intellectual (less than 30% of the US population has a college degree after all); it seems we tend to value big dudes toting guns and chicks with big boobs over people reading books.</p>
<p>But, more women in engineering and college is only a good thing. Well, as long as the next Sex and the City movie features discussions about neutrinos.</p>
<p>I believe much of the disparity between immigrants and Americans obtaining higher degrees lies in what is valued more. I feel within many Asian and Indian communities education is held in much higher regards than with Americans. I think Americans are less impressed with the level of education and more impressed with the income and material wealth. </p>
<p>Many of my friends even forgoed bachelor’s degrees to start their own businesses right after high school. These were students who definitely had the capability (many of them were in my AP classes), but just didn’t care if they had a degree as long as they were successful doing something.</p>
<p>Some of the disparity is just that education is so expensive in the US that half of the students who start College drop out. Often they drop out because they don’t have the money. Many immigrants come with the equivalent of a bachelors already and start at grad school. They are often in funded engineering programs.</p>
<p>…As for women having a higher acceptance rate. I’d say it’s weird…women probably have a higher acceptance rate applying for undergrad, but some woman in engineering swear that they have a disadvantage applying to grad school, applying for fellowships, graduating from grad school, & getting academic positions. The higher acceptance rate into undergrad might be a way to compensate for possible problems down the road…at least this is the way some look at it.</p>
<p>Personally, I think it is really complicated and I really don’t know. I’d like to see more woman in engineering personally.</p>
<p>Regarding your first point, I think it’s a sad state of affairs if money is the most difficult challenge preventing American students from obtaining a college education.</p>
<p>Concerning your second point, I think you are on the correct path. Males still dominate above the undergrad level but eventually those barriers will crash down.</p>
<p>“Personally, I think it is really complicated and I really don’t know. I’d like to see more woman in engineering personally.”
This has prompted me to advance a controversial thought.</p>
<p>I would like to see only people who want to be in engineering (or anything else) in engineering (or anything else), without special incentives of any kind. If no woman on earth wanted to be in engineering for her own sake, I would rather it just be guys. If girls are being driven away from engineering, fix that problem. Don’t artificially draw them back to achieve some sort of PC balance. I just get so tired sometimes.</p>
<p>I’d like to see more woman in engineering for purely selfish reasons…not for any ideal.</p>
<p>They’re pretty…Men aren’t</p>
<p>My personally experience is that having women who are solid workers or researchers on a team makes the team function better than it ever would if there were just men on the team.</p>
<p>…As to whether or not women face problems or discrimination past undergrad, whether it’s a barrier, and whether the barrier will crash…man I wish I knew. Posters comment often about the difficulties in the engineering profession, and there some truth behind it. I think there would be more woman past the undergrad level in engineering if there were more opportunities and fewer problems with the engineering profession as a whole.</p>