@palm715 Agree to a point, but it has to start somewhere and the numbers at the top 20 or so private engineering schools are changing quickly. Our D was heavily courted by the engineering schools she got into, with strong contact from WIE current students etc. (and 2 of those schools were good engineering state schools.) I think most of them are starting to see the need to adapt the culture.)
The 1st big step, I think, is getting more female instructors at early stages. My D was heavily influenced by a couple of top female science instructors at her HS. They were really top notch and caring. In her Engineering courses (AP Physics B + C, AP CS, Engineering, JHU Engineering innovation summer course, numerous coding courses/camps) they have been almost all male “main” instructors. Most of them really good, by the way, but she still heard, from one of her Math instructors (who was also very good and a really nice, caring guy) - who knew she was one of the top math students at her school “It’s amazing you’re so pretty and so good at math…” He was completely unaware of the irony. As that changes the culture will slowly change.
But you are right that at the end of the day, it will require the UCs having more than 15% undergrad female MEs enrollment, along with Mich and Penn State and Cal State Poly and Pomona etc. etc. to flip it for good.
“being odd-man-out (bad joke intended) is the reality you accept if you want to study engineering.” - True. But for me (a female minority, but admittedly in a corporate culture very accepting of women) it was not a big deal.
It should be noted that even if all engineering schools were 50/50, it would take a long time to make a dent except in companies with mostly younger workers.
I personally think how women are treated in the workplace has a lot more to do with how much they like engineering than how many female teachers they have. Most people don’t need their role models to be the same gender that they are, but they do need to be treated well.
@NeoDymium I’m sure that workplace culture plays into it, but few girls (consciously at least) are aware of engineering workplace culture when they are deciding on college applications. They do know, however, how their school’s Science Olympiad team, Robotics Team, AP Physics, Engineering class, AP Comp Sci, etc. are staffed and what that “vibe” is. They might have some experience of “work place culture” through research or job opportunities, and that will color their thinking as well, but their most immediate interaction will be at school. Encouraging male teachers exist, of course, but seeing mostly male teachers in those courses and clubs still gives the impression that engineering will be a “boys club” and more than a few girls don’t want to put themselves into that world.
In 1985, about 37% of CS undergrads were women. Today it is around 19%. Roughly half.
Forcing it on the colleges probably in engineering language is a kludge - an inelegant and brittle hack.
A far better way is to figure out motivations and impediments and how to target those.
In our local public school district, based on the teachers I’ve had parent teacher meetings with, I suspect it begins in elementary school. Some of our teachers chose education because it didn’t need a lot of math, and so the early role models my daughter had 1) didn’t understand math, and 2) convinced her that she “had no talent for it.” By the start of middle school she was in math despair.
They taught her to fear math rather to rejoice in it, and I’ll remember that for a very long time.
Thankfully, DD had one (female) math teacher who had transitioned from engineering, and who made an ENORMOUS difference (>700 math SAT)
DD is enrolled to study computer science this fall.
We need more elementary, jr hi, and high school teachers who “get” math.
We cannot allow education majors - even elementary ed - to skate on math. It’s too important to our economy to remove about half the prospective engineers from the pool before they turn 12.
There are a few Career Switcher programs to bring mid to late career engineers and scientists back as credentialed teachers to teach science and math classes in middle and secondary schools. They should broaden these programs and let more technical and math professionals know about this.
@CAmom2020 the UC engineering schools are some of the worst “good” state schools in the nation for female admit rates. They hide behind 209 but I believe there are deep structural blocks in the admission and recruitment process (leading to a poor yield for accepted women) that the schools are perfectly fine with, despite continued quotes to the contrary.
We will see if the new dean does anything for UCLA’s admissions and SIRs this year or next. I am not optimistic.
The dramatic rise and fall in women’s enrollment and graduation in computer science is an even more peculiar phenomenon than women’s minimal overall involvement with engineering. It prompts even more intriguing questions.
Regarding transition to teaching programs … I’ve thought about it a couple times…
It’s one thing as an engineer to deal with people who want to go into management immediately. Because deep down everyone gets that without product we all go away.
I subbed math for a charter school once and it was a blast, but that’s a different topic.
I wonder how much of this simply the entrenched prejudices of the engineering Adcoms. Engineering brochures, for instance, say their schools want “creative” individuals, yet AP studio art classes/test takers are 75% women. How much does an engineering school value an AP Studio Art/AP BC calc student over an 800 Math applicant? More girls take AP Bio than boys, more boys take AP Physics. Is Physics a better indicator of engineering success at college than Bio? AP Bio has a much lower rate of 5’s. Do those students do just as well?
Do Adcoms need to rethink their “key” stats?
I’ve posted this before, but to me it’s striking that I stumbled over some stats for UCSD - a very well-respected public university. And in its engineering program (which as the typical UC low level of female enrollment) the GPA and Graduation rate for women in engineering was better than for men every year except one, going back over a dozen years.
So whatever UCSD is doing to select their female admits is working great as far as results. But they are unable to increase the % (in fact it decreased quite a bit.) I would love to get access to those numbers and applications and see why that is. My guess is it is not because they did not get qualified applicants.
^^ Not to mention that evolutionary psychology (at least the pop-culture side of it as reflected in what @GMTplus7 quoted, but possibly most or all of it) has been—rightly, I would say—criticized for basically giving post-hoc rationalizations of bad behavior by appealing to unfalsifiable but scientific-sounding pseudo-theories.
In case you couldn’t tell, I’m a skeptic of such claims.
It may play some role (more at some schools versus others), but the main driver is the preference, of High School women graduates.
Lets use the University of Florida as an example of the role preferences can play. Like many other states, Florida has a law against using race or sex in admissions. Freshman admissions are to the university and not the college. Your choice of major plays no role in freshman admissions. Of the 7,106 enrolled Freshman in 2015, 58.8% are women (which is in line with the national average).
Freshman students can pick any major, including engineering majors (it’s also fairly easy to switch majors, until you’re a junior). Yet, at the end of the day, UF only awarded 23.7% of it’s BSE degrees to women (288 out of 1,217). UF has close to 17 or 18 degree programs, including very large ones in Chemical, Environmental and Industrial (very popular disciplines for women), yet women are not enrolling and completing at rates much more than 4% of the national average.
The only way UF will significantly grow the % of degrees awarded to women, is if women decide to choose engineering over other options.
Engineering is one of the majors that is more difficult to transfer into than others. It requires a lot more math and science (and specific math and science, just because you were a business major and had calculus doesn’t mean that course is the same for engineering) and there are fewer non engineering electives. Engineering is very sequential. Transferring into engineering can almost mean starting over in some instances.
I doubt that accounts for much of it at all, these days. Most admissions committees seem to really want to increase gender diversity in their programs. I really do think it comes down to the number of qualified female applicants for all of the aforementioned reasons.
AP Calculus and AP Physics are far better predictors of success in engineering than AP Biology or AP Studio Art. When engineering departments say they want someone creative, it is about creative problem solving, not creating a painting. It really comes back to culture, at that point. Young boys and girls are typically exposed from a very young age to very different toys, Halloween costumes, advertising strategies, and more, all tending to reinforce more traditional gender norms (see [this article in NYT](http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/31/upshot/boys-and-girls-constrained-by-toys-and-costumes.html?_r=0)). By the time qualified women get to the point that they are choosing what to study in college, it likely that many of them have already decided on other things.
I’d argue that aptitude in art and aptitude in math and physics are closely related. Art is not just creativity, it’s being able to visualize how things work and move and fit together, and how shapes and objects are related in space, and understanding distance and perspective, volume and curves, angles of light.
I have a daughter in engineering. She had high SAT and ACT math scores, 5 on Calc BC. Won the math award given to two students in every graduating class at her high school. She also took three years of art and four years of music in high school. She had her work displayed in district art shows every year. Everyone expected her to be an artist. She never showed any interest in legos or robotics or taking things apart to see how they work. None of the things you hear that future engineers like to do. We did have legos around the house. I asked her a while back why she didn’t like them, and she said they are dumb and the world isn’t made of cubes. My engineer brother played with legos all the time as a kid. She did draw and paint and sculpt and create jewelry. When she was about eight years old she made an incredibly realistic sculpture of a bat (animal, not sports equipment) for a school project. She surprised us all when she said she wanted to be an engineer. She’s in her second year at a tech school and has a 4.0. She’s well into the engineering curriculum due to the AP credit she came in with, and is on track to graduate at least a semester early. She had three internship offers for this summer. She tutors in physics. She helps CS students with their homework, even though she isn’t a CS major. I can see now some of the more “engineer-y” characteristics in her, but in high school and prior, she appeared to be a very smart artist. Her college application had no engineering ECs. She did join math club and participated in some math competitions but only starting junior year and only because her sister made her. She could have submitted an art portfolio though.
Younger daughter (senior in high school) is also a top math student. She was teased by boys in elementary school when the teacher moved them into a higher math group and not her. Teacher figured out her mistake and moved D up as well. By the end of the year she had blown past the boys and was far ahead of everyone. Same to higher test scores as her older sister. She’s another year ahead in math. Breezed through calc BC as a junior, and has an easy A in Calc III/diff EQ now (only girl in the class of 8). She’s president of math club and has a part time job as a math tutor. Also gifted as an artist but never took art classes. In high school had two years of music (she can play four instruments) and four years of theatre. She has zero interest in engineering.
We could use to expand the stereotype of an engineer a bit if we want to attract more women. And I don’t mean by making an engineering Barbie or pink legos. Lets do a better job of describing to girls what engineers do. They might just find it interesting.
They certainly can be, but that doesn’t mean that everyone who takes one or the other or even both will make the mental connections between the two. Some may, but most won’t. If you had a list of students to admit to your engineering program with limited space available and you wanted to maximize the chance of the admitted students succeeding, it is a much safer bet to choose the kid who took only AP Calculus over the kid who took only AP Art. If you had a third kid who had both art and calculus, there is probably a decent argument that they would be the best bet of the three.
To be fair, while I did play with Legos as a kid, I never dabbled in robotics or took things apart aside from every pen and mechanical pencil I owned, which was as much out of boredom during school as it was about exploring their parts. Not every engineer conforms to a stereotype. In fact, I’d argue that most don’t.
Unless you are trying to get into MIT or a place like it, then the value of these sorts of things are dramatically overblown on this site. The majority of students don’t even have the opportunity for any sort of engineering-related ECs.
