I found this data to share in a different thread but want to hear more opinions. Why do you think the number of women receiving an undergraduate degree in Engineering has remained stagnant?
According to the American Society of Engineering Education % of bachelor degrees earned by women:
2001 19.1%
2002 20.9%
2003 20.4%
2004 20.3%
2005 19.5%
2006 19.3%
2007 18.1%
2008 18.0%
2009 17.8%
2010 18.1%
2011 18.4%
2012 18.9%
2013 19.1%
Source: (The links below provide data for master and doctorate degrees as well.)
I’d postulate that it is because efforts to try to increase that percentage are not really that old, and since the problem really lies in their young age, any recent efforts have not borne fruit yet. It seems like the biggest issue in why more women don’t go into STEM fields is because by the time they reach high school and have to make such choices, they are already turned off to it for one reason or another. You basically have to start all the way back in grade school changing the culture, and that takes quite a bit of time to really kick in.
While the % is flat, the total number has increased, as the number of overall number of engineering degrees awarded has increased. In 2005, 73,602 BS’s awarded, while in 2014 it was up to 99,173. The same with overall enrollment, from 367,576 to 569,274.
Women are also much more likely to choose STEM fields, other than engineering, such as Biology. I also agree with Boneh3ad that it’s a behavior (preference?) that’s established before they even start college. All universities can do is fight over the pool of potential engineering candidates, and try to put in policies to reduce attrition, once they are in the engineering program.
Interestingly enough, there are countries in which the trend is reversed - in which it is men that are the minority in STEM fields such as engineering and math (not just biology) and schools try to put in more effort into getting male students into their program.
My theory is that a lot of it has to do with how ineffective mathematics education is in the US. It seems to disproportionately discourage female students from pursuing highly mathematical STEM fields. That seems to push them to biology or non-STEM fields.
Does anyone have knowledge of the specific “efforts to try to increase that percentage” of girls who pursue engineering? When you do think these efforts will result in the US having a better gender balance in engineering degrees?
According to the research below, girls consistently prove they are just as capable as boys in academics throughout K-12, although you start to see the gender divide in engineering related subjects beyond math.
Per the US Department of Education:
8.1% of girls participated in gifted and talented education programs, compared to 7.4% of boys.
Girls are less likely than boys to be held back one year. Girls represented 39% of students
retained across all grade levels.
30% of the girls taking Algebra I did so in grades 7 or 8, compared to 27% of boys. Further, girls of every race/ethnicity are passing at a higher rate than their male peers.
Girls are evenly represented in biology and outnumber boys in chemistry, but are underrepresented in physics.
Girls are equitably represented in rigorous high school math courses.
Girls outnumber boys in enrollment in AP science, AP foreign languages, and several other AP subjects.
Source: http://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ocr/docs/gender-equity-in-education.pdf
Per the College Board % girls taking AP exam for:
Calculus AB: 49%
Calculus BC: 41%
Physics B: 35%
Physics C - Electricity and Magnetism: 23%
Physics C - Mechanics: 26%
Computer Science A: 19%
Source: http://apreport.collegeboard.org/
On a personal level, I know my daughter will be part of the ~20% graduating with a degree in engineering in 2020 (despite how much she loathes the “mansplaining” that currently happens in her Calculus II, Physics, and Computer Science classes). I just wish every woman with the ability felt as strongly as she does.
I am not sure that anyone can really answer your question about when and how such efforts will succeed definitively. If any of us could, this issue would likely be resolved by now.
There are colleges in the US where the trend is reversed. Harvey Mudd’s graduating class from 2 years ago had more women than men graduate with engineering degrees.
There are 7 women out out of 16 co-ops at my D’s current co-op term. She said that’s the highest percentage of her three terms so far. She said it’s noticeable. I think women in engineering are pretty strongly supported with organizations like SWE and such. I know she is has tutored young women through SWE and also during her summer semesters at Purdue works at Purdue’s STEP (seminar for Top Engineering Prospects) Camp. Somehow, and I’m not sure why, she has wanted to be an engineer since 8th grade and chose Chem E as her path her sophomore year in HS. Her younger sister with similar aptitudes has never been interested in engineering.
@palm715 I had to laugh I never heard the term mansplaining until my D went to college. It looks like from your stats that physics becomes the barrier to engineering not math. My D loved physics and got a 5 on both portions of her physics C AP course. Perhaps that is an area they could work on.
@intparent Small, elite private schools that can select students based on gender, don’t really represent an overall trend.
I agree with @Palm715 point that women are winning the overall education game. In 1994, 66% of women HS graduates enrolled in college, compared to 62% of men. In 2012, it’s 72% of women HS graduates that enroll, while men are still at 62%. For whatever reason it’s Engineering (and physics) where they still don’t have a preference to enroll.
While the overall rate may be less than 20%, in some majors it’s much higher. It’s 48% in Environmental, 40.6% in Biomedical, 36.3% in Chemical, 31.2% in Industrial, etc. No one thinks Chemical Engineering is one of the “easy” programs, so I don’t think rigor plays much roll in which major is selected.
Interesting thread! I think the more important statistic is to see how many of these women are “still” engineers 10-15 years after college (ages 32-37) and after children. Three of my female first cousins graduated as engineers. One is a former EE and now SAHM with a hubby who is an engineer. The second is married with no children. The third is 50yo and recently married with no children (one stepchild). The later two picked their careers and not children.
I got my engineering BS in 1984. I have worked on and off since I graduated. I was fortunate that my husband is also an engineer. We run our company from our house, so I can work part-time. Now that our youngest is graduating from high school this year, I hope to be able to focus more on my career. I’m 53.
When I go to structural engineering meetings, there are usually only 2 or 3 women out of 20 to 30 engineers.
On a slight tangent, it seems like efforts to get more black and Hispanics to go into engineering haven’t been all that successful, either.
I’ve never been impressed with the programs meant to get more students from unrepresented groups into engineering. Those typically tend to be along the lines of mentoring program that only reach a small percentage of students. While doing a video conference with a female astronaut may be interesting to young girls, it’s hard to imagine that’s going to be enough to inspire them to go into engineering. I don’t see those limited programs being effective in overcoming the overpowering cultural norms that keep women/blacks/Hispanics away from fields like engineering and CS.
Right. That’s the thing is that you have to address the societal issues that prevent said groups from entering these fields in the first place if you want to address the under-representation issue. Most of the efforts that universities put forth now are either going to be only slightly effective or else more designed to increase retention once they do enroll.
That’s really where all the effort, at the university level, has gone. Otherwise, I’ve seen student lead efforts to reach out to under-represented groups in local elementary and middle schools. Sometimes with the support of the university. These include organizing “engineering” fairs on campus, or holding events at the local elementary/middle schools.
The retention efforts can be successful. Often they are targeted at low SES students and are centered around additional advising (which is always at a premium at large public universities).
Edit: I read somewhere about Tuft’s retention programs being particularly successful in engineering:
Well, for the California UCs, it’s because they simply don’t admit many women and have a poor yield among those they do.
USC Viterbi hopes to admit 40% women this year. MIT, MUDD and CMU are also raising their numbers.
There is a pretty big structural issue in admissions if schools don’t want to change their gender split. If schools use SAT math score as the primary consideration, women, on average, score 30 pts. lower. If they want to change their gender split, they do smart things like weigh GPA higher, which levels the field for women, and perhaps even look to communication skills, something supposedly important for the modern “Human Engineer” (as opposed to the traditional “Human Calculator”) - like SAT Writing, where women traditionally outscore men by about 20 points.
And, of course, it is a negative feedback loop. Girls look at colleges and see that 15% of the UCLA ME department is female, or 16% of the UCLA CS&E dept. is female and decide they’ll study CS at the LA&S school instead, where the gender differential reflects the general population more closely.
I have heard anecdotally that studies suggest the “Tipping point” for UG enrollment is 30% (ie. when a program’s enrollment passes 30% the women applications and yield spike and it moves toward parity more organically - dunno if that’s true. Just something I was told by engineering education folks.)
We need to let observations speak to us (such I learned in my science education and career). We need to be open to multiple explanations for what we see. At no point do we know everything; we can always learn more.
That there is some biological difference in how young women and men look at the prospect of a career as an engineer is an obvious possible explanation for some of the gap between male and female enrollment in engineering.
It’s reasonable to suppose that significantly different roles for female and male humans have been around for at least tens of thousands of years. The different roles mean somewhat different traits make the respective genders successful in the classic biological sense of carrying genes to the next generation. Traits will have been differently selected for.
Aside from culture, there is the fundamental fact that men can be much more successful in that sense than women can be through promiscuity simply because the number of children a woman can have is much more limited. It may be that because males who fought to mate with lots of women were “rewarded” by great gene transmission, the trait of aggressiveness became “fitness” for the male, as it did not for the female.
While usually it isn’t possible to separate nurture from nature as possible causation of gender behavior differences, there have been studies/events which have made nurture absent or opposite from nature.
For instance, there was a study with newborn babies (http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0163638300000321): “102 human neonates, who by definition have not yet been influenced by social and cultural factors, were tested to see if there was a difference in looking time at a face (social object) and a mobile (physical-mechanical object). Results showed that the male infants showed a stronger interest in the physical-mechanical mobile while the female infants showed a stronger interest in the face.” (Note that engineers have the reputation of being, of course, mechanically-oriented, but not being particularly people-oriented (http://seviourbooks.com/articles/engineer-personality.htm)).
There are cases of boys raised as girls (http://secondnexus.com/social-commentary-and-trends/the-intersex-children-of-salinas/). Male genitals don’t arise until puberty in children with a mutation known as 5-Alpha Reductase Deficiency. These children are assigned a female identity, but as they near puberty “many of these children have already begun to rebel against their assigned femininity, by eschewing “girls” dresses and toys.”
