OMGeee! You’re totally right, we don’t know everything, but thanks to you I know so much more. Of course, I’m a woman and not a smart scientist like you, so I had to read your post a couple times to understand.
Thanks to you, I remembered my daughter has always liked faces more than icky mechanical things and all that extra education would be a real bummer if it got in the way of her baby making. Instead on working hard on all that engineering stuff, maybe she can catch the eye of a young man who biologically deserves to be an engineer and get a MRS degree instead. Yep, I totally see now the best bet is her getting “rewarded” by snagging an aggressive male and getting down to some “fitness” in hopes of passing along some of his genes. Why be an engineer when you can marry and birth engineers all while looking at faces and wearing pretty dresses and enjoying being feminine?
Sure, there are probably biological differences. Guys are generally bigger; guys are generally stronger; they may be able to visualize in 3D better. But that doesn’t mean you accept those differences as rigid rules with which you constrain people’s lives. So you encourage interest in “male” subjects (heavy on the sarcasm) and show girls that that’s a valid option for them. You support them when they feel like dropping out. Because that’s also a biological difference I read about – that boys, when faced with a setback, think “Well, that was bad.” Girls think “Well, I must be bad.” (Check out articles on impostor syndrome. Many of them are aimed at women. Maybe it’s because girls suck, biologically. Right?)
That stereotype is complete bull, as far as I can tell. Engineers often work in teams. Nothing would ever get done if they were unable to communicate and collaborate.
I feel like there as been a decline since the 1980s (I graduated from a private STEM school in 1984. In classes ahead of me, there were under 20% female. My class was around 25% and it went closer to 30% in the younger classes.)
My personal theory is that really bright girls with high Math SAT often have high Verbal SATs too… So they can now instead head into medicine and law, where there is gender balance and more tangible benefits for the hard schoolwork.
Hmmm… looked up recenf figures for my school - 20% of the engineering undergraduate students (and 29.5% of the undergraduate students, are women. Since the school has mostly engineering students, I don’t recall which 1980s stat I was quoting in the prior post.
The split is interesting (reminder - this is just a sample of one school): .
Major women
Aeronautical 10%
Chemical 38%
Civil 25%
Computer 9%
Electrical 15%
Eng. Studies 25%
Environmental 58%
Mechanical 11%
Software 6%
ALL ENG 20%
Personally I think it has a lot to do with how women are treated in fields like engineering. Unfortunately the engineering culture is seldom particularly inclusive and women there will often feel marginalized. That might steer women more towards paths that have more inclusive gender relations, like law and medicine.
Software especially has a habit of being remarkably sexist.
@jjwinkle There is ONE key gender difference when it comes to women being admitted to engineering schools: The key decision makers in admissions are men.
That is the gender difference. But it’s got about 10 years max to the tipping point.
My mom likes to tell the story of her high school and college. The girls were only allowed to play 1/2 court basketball because full-court was too much for their delicate selves. And she had to go into teaching despite loving engineering because “girls don’t build bridges, honey.”
Now her grand daughter is going to study mechanical engineering on scholarship. It took 2 generations. It may not even take one more for it to get the point, like it is with every other college major, where educators are starting to say… wait a second, how do we keep the male student population above 40%.
The “human computer” is being replaced by real computers. The “human engineer” is increasingly in demand.
Broadening this a bit: My wife holds a PhD in engineering, and the firm she works in has near-parity among male and female engineers. Her company achieved this by doing things like offering short-term disability benefits (which are incredibly rare in local engineering workplaces), and thus removing a disincentive to working during childbearing years; allowing shifts to part-time schedules while retaining benefits, since society places more of the burden of caring for ill or disabled children and parents on women; basically having a corporate culture where sexual harassment is never, ever tolerated; consulting with female employees to make sure management decisions don’t have unanticipated consequences that would negatively affect women; and so on.
Engineering (and most other STEM fields, in fact) has a problem in that yes, ~20% of its degree recipients are female, but there’s a leaky pipeline after that—lots of companies aren’t remotely female-friendly.
@bodangles your post reminds me of a “quip” I heard from a UCIC engineering graduate I was talking to recently.
He was talking about engineering career paths and said “you know, an engineer without people skills is called a human calculator, an engineer with people skills is called CEO.”
An even more upsetting statistic is that the number of women graduating with CS degrees peaked in approximately 1984 - and I thought things would be getting better after I graduated. There are many theories, but one theory links the rise in home computers to the decrease in women in CS. More boys started to have exposure to programming than girls, leading the girls to feel more behind when they started.
If you look at current enrollment statistics, most girls are in ChemE, BioEngineering - few in EE. As an EE (with a D studying Computer Engineering), I think this is a shame. I’m not sure how we turn it around, but I refuse to believe it’s innate ability or any nonsense like that. I do believe a lot is exposure at a younger age. It concerns me that many of my D’s friends who excelled in the sciences, went to college in physics and biology, but wouldn’t consider engineering. It’s not the inability to handle physics.
The current “brogrammer” culture in CS and software companies isn’t helping.
The issue with women staying in engineering is another issue altogether.
@krnBoston my D has taken a number of programming and engineering courses. Often she is the only girl, or one of a few. And none have had a woman as primary instructor (perhaps more important?) She’s more drawn to Mech than EE or CS, but you can see from her experience that you have to be really committed to sign up for a life as the “15%.”
She is inexplicably fine with it, but more than one of her female friends veered to math or physics at an LibA/L+S school rather than get “isolated” in an Eng programing.
I would also really encourage female engineers to teach/mentor - would be great of the males and females in the Middle School and HS programs.
“Personally I think it has a lot to do with how women are treated in fields like engineering.” - Maybe. But I’m not convinced that high school students have much deep knowledge of a field when they decide on a college major. I
@gator88NE “I also agree with Boneh3ad that it’s a behavior (preference?) that’s established before they even start college.”
Yes, it begins in elementary school math and science.
@gator88NE “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.”
This seems to be true, but is only partially true. Programs like MIT’s Women in Technology Program are trying to actually change to pool. The girls invited to WTP are the total package academically, but with no prior technology experience. It is during the summer after their junior year in high school.
Essentially MIT is trying to reroute some of the most talented girls who would otherwise probably go on to be Dr.s, scientists, or business people. The percentage of these girls who end up majoring in ME, EE, or CS is very high. It has been a big success. They work their tails off for a month in the summer. The vast majority of the girls love it, and discover that they can do things that they had never even considered before. They live in a dorm at MIT, have about 6 hours per day of class, and maybe another 6 hours of homework. It is amazing what they can teach these kids in a month.
I have a niece who graduated with a CS degree from Drexel about 10 years ago. She always marched to the beat of a different drummer. When she outgrew her Barbies, she got interested in programming and was her family’s “IT person.”
She got involved with Women in Engineering at Drexel, co-oped for a few companies, and has done very well for herself. She moved to San Francisco from Seattle a few years ago.
I don’t think anybody in her family did anything in particular to push her in that direction (and she attended a HUGE inner-ring public high school with a lot of immigrants). She gravitated there on her own.
While never a terribly “girly-girl” or particularly artistic, she’s very into fashion and nice things, so I think CS provided a creative outlet for her. I do think CS may hold more appeal than traditional engineering disciplines to many young women, especially since it’s such a hot field right now.
@Much2learn While I think these summer programs (women or co-ed) are great, I don’t think they are enough to “move the dial”. Currently about 20,000 engineering undergraduate degrees a year are awarded to Women. We would need to double that number 40,000 a year (while not growing the number of male graduates) before women make up 33% of the degrees awarded.
MIT’s program has 60 participants (40 for EECS and 20 for ME). It’s a wonderful program, but much more needs to be done, and like you said, it starts in elementary school.
It also starts in our culture. How often do we see strong, intelligent female doctors on TV? How often Engineers? Think we can sale anyone on replacing all of those medical dramas with a new TV genre, the Engineering Drama?
Every week, on LA Engineering, the firm, lead by engineering super star, Beyoncé, must solve their client’s vexing engineering problems, while dealing with the every day challenges of love, romance and family…
Why am I not in Hollywood?!! Anyone know Beyoncé’s agent’s number?
@gator88NE “MIT’s program has 60 participants (40 for EECS and 20 for ME). It’s a wonderful program, but much more needs to be done…”
I completely agree that a lot more needs to be done. I really had two main points about that program:
MIT has shown other top schools that to get girls into engineering you don't have to go further down the bottom of the list of girls interested in engineering. If you do it right, you can steal them from the top of every other potential majors list instead.
Once talented girls are properly exposed to engineering, they overwhelmingly like it, and are very good at it. Many of them have just never been exposed to it.
I am really grateful for all the thoughtful comments. I also apologize for my sarcastic post earlier. It did not help propel the conversation.
For my D it is mostly about the money. Yes, she is very good in math and science and is dogged in her approach to solving problems but being an engineer at this point is not her “dream.” In the research she did, she realized with just an undergraduate degree engineering is her “best bet” for potential salary. She has flirted with the idea of being a physician, but we don’t have the money to contribute to her education beyond undergraduate. So the majors with the best ROI and opportunity for financial independence just happen to have the lowest percentage of women graduates. Coincidence?
As for role models for young girls, here is one that makes me grit my teeth:
Of the 130 careers Barbie has had, only one is in engineering. She is a “computer engineer” in the gaming industry. In the book that accompanies the doll, she says crap like, “I’m only creating the design ideas. I’ll need Steven and Brian’s help to turn it into a real game!” Then, crashes her laptop and needs the fellas to fix it.
@much2learn USC Viterbi claims it will be close to if not over 40% women in this year’s freshman class. At many schools it would not be difficult to migrate many of the L&S/LibArts female CS majors to “pure” EE&CS, especially if the make up of the overall school were more interesting.
Mudd, Mit, CIT, CMU, Viterbi, Brown, Georgia, Rice, Princeton, Yale, Olin, Howard, Tuskegee, Cooper Union all claim to be getting close to (and many already over) that 40% mark.
I have a feeling it will be changing quickly in the next 10 years.
The real next issue is URMs. Low URM, and especially female URM admit rates have been even more difficult to change.
@NoVADad99 with an admitted class of around 85, Olin’s success is not going to move the 19.1% needle (admittedly sore spot for me because D got rejected after attending the CW).
Only when colleges for “the rest of us” make a quantifiable change, can we collectively claim success. The success at Olin, Mudd, MIT, etc just says a certain type of woman is worthy of being an engineer. Your daughter is one of those women, congratulations. For the rest, being odd-man-out (bad joke intended) is the reality you accept if you want to study engineering.