Women with an UG Engineering Degree in 2001: 19.1% -- In 2013: 19.1%

College Majors Engineering Majors
61

@boneh3ad I’m interested in that claim. You know that UCSD publishes it’s engineering GPA and graduation stats and women do better in both GPA and Grad rates in undergraduate engineering EVERY YEAR save one for the past dozen or so years. Some other schools I’ve seen, such as UC-Boulder the evidence is not as clear, but in many majors there women do better and in those they don’t the difference is slight.

Do you have studies that show Physics is a better predictor than Bio? Or that Calc BC + Studio Art is not a better combo than Calc BC + Comp Sci? Or are you just assuming that.

I know that is the “conventional wisdom” but my guess is some of the “conventional wisdom” like that is what goes into restricting female acceptance/admissions.

@Parentof2014grad there is, of course, tons of research showing that music (and art) clearly go hand-in-hand with math aptitude. Not to mention that if one is really interested in the “human engineer” versus the “human calculator” more well-rounded students would likely be more interesting.

If you look at any school’s “what we want in engineers” they claim to want creativity, ability to work in groups, social skills, leaders… the question is whether they really have developed a system that chooses for them, or do they just take 800 Math II, 5 AP Physics and figure the “human” part will work itself out?

Here are some stats for UCSD I put together. They have a large and well-respected engineering program with many international as well as CA students:

The anecdotal “girls drop out line” is proved not to be true at UCSD or UCSD engineering. Women consistently have as good or better graduation rate than men - and do it in as short if not shorter time:

2013/14 “time to degree” at UCSD engineering: Women mean: 13.4 Men mean: 13.5
2012/13 “time to degree” at UCSD engineering: Women mean: 13.6 Men mean: 13.6
2011/12 “time to degree” at UCSD engineering: Women mean: 13.3 Men mean: 13.7
2010/11 “time to degree” at UCSD engineering: Women mean: 13.6 Men mean: 13.6
2009/10 “time to degree” at UCSD engineering: Women mean: 13.3 Men mean: 13.4
2008/09 “time to degree” at UCSD engineering: Women mean: 13.5 Men mean: 13.8
2007/08 “time to degree” at UCSD engineering: Women mean: 13.3 Men mean: 13.8
2006/07 “time to degree” at UCSD engineering: Women mean: 13.9 Men mean: 13.9
2005-06 “time to degree” at UCSD engineering: Women mean: 13.3 Men mean: 13.3
2004/05 “time to degree” at UCSD engineering: Women mean: 13.0 Men mean: 13.5
2003/04 “time to degree” at UCSD engineering: Women mean: 13.5 Men mean: 13.8
2002/03 “time to degree” at UCSD engineering: Women mean: 13.8 Men mean: 13.9
2001/02 “time to degree” at UCSD engineering: Women mean: 13.2 Men mean: 14.1

Female vs. male 1 yr + 2 yr retention rate (entire school)
2014: Female: 95% Male: 94%
2013: Female: 95%/91% Male: 94%/88%
2012: Female: 94%/89% Male: 94%/89%
2011: Female: 95%/89% Male: 93%/87%
2010: Female: 96%/91% Male: 95%/90%
2009: Female: 96%/91% Male: 96%/90%
2008: Female 95%/91% Male: 96%/90%
2007: Female 94%/89% Male: 95%/88%
2006: Female: 94%/87% Male: 95%/89%
2005: Female: 94%/88% Male 95%/90%

UCSD Engineering degrees conferred by gender - GPA
2013-14: 20.9% women. Mean GPA Women: 3.25 Men: 3.13
2012-13: 22% women. Mean GPA Women 3.15. Male 3.13.
2011-2012 18% women. Mean GPA women: 3.18. Men 3.13.
2010-2011. 23.3% women. Mean GPA for women: 3.18. Men: 3.11
2009-2010 23.8% women. GPA Mean women: 3.20. Men. 3.17

I have stats for more years, but this is the general idea.

62

I did horribly in college physics, but graduated with high honors in structural engineering.

My biggest challenge has been 3D visualization. I do think, IN GENERAL, that men are better at it than women. I can think of a couple of exceptions, but that’s been my observation. I’ve managed to train myself to deal with the limitation, but it’s probably a good thing I didn’t know ahead of time how important a skill it is for engineers.

63

I am not sure that there have even been studies are something like that. I am basing my statements based on knowing what goes into an engineering curriculum. The two things that essentially all engineering curricula have in common are calculus (or relatively high-level math in general) and physics. Even chemical engineering is based at least in as much physics as it is chemistry. Biomedical engineering is at least as much physics as biology.

Like I said in my last post (I think I posted it while you were typing), I think making the case that someone with both a calculus and an art background would be a good match for engineering is probably valid, but I don’t think art in and of itself is a great predictor.

I don’t find this surprising at all. In fact, I’d argue that it supports my claims at least as well as it supports yours. Consider that women are, from a young age, subtly (usually) pushed in a direction that leads away from STEM careers. By the time they reach the age of selecting a course of study in college, it is quite likely that the group of women who feel both interested in and confident in pursuing engineering is going to skew more toward the higher-achieving students than in men. In that sense, I am not at all surprised when statistics show women doing, on average, better than men in those sorts of fields.

To me, the question isn’t about trying to admit more women into STEM fields. The real question is about getting more women to be interested in STEM fields so that there is a larger pool of them to admit in the first place.

64

@boneh3ad The kid who took art and calc is the kid I’m talking about. That kid is 75% most likely to be a woman (like my kid! no surprise.) She took college level engineering summer of HS. AP studio art. AP AB calc (got a 4). AP Bio (got a 5) AP scholar with distinction. Taking AP physics (getting an A), AP BC calc (getting an A), AP Comp Sci, Engineering, took engineering design courses at local world class design school. Did 2 years of research at a world class (top 5) university… But she’s “only” a 750 SAT math kid.

And I know many schools she applied to took 800 Math men over her. But are those 800’s actually better choices? Time will tell, but my guess is for schools that claim they want creativity, ability to work in a team, social skills etc. are still choosing the human calculators over the human engineers too often. And I would guess that is part of what is keeping the lid on female applications and yields in the engineering majors.

65

That’s a tough call. I’d imagine that it highly depends on the admissions philosophy of a given school (e.g. holistic versus based on an algorithm). For schools whose process is more quantitative, the test scores likely carry an outsized amount of weight. This is one reason (among many) that you see schools shifting to more of a holistic approach to admissions. I would imagine that in those schools, a student with your daughter’s credentials would land on the top of the pile along with those 800s.

There’s also the issue of the availability of opportunity. For example, my high school’s highest math class was AP Calculus AB, and it didn’t offer AP Biology, AP Studio Art, or AP Computer Science, and there were no available extracurricular activities with an engineering focus. In other words, I simply didn’t have the opportunity to have those sorts of experiences (and I wasn’t even in a traditionally low-income, struggling school, where the problems are worse). The same is true for many other students around the country.

The really tough question, then, is how do you balance people who didn’t have the same breadth of preparatory opportunities but excelled in those that they were afforded (i.e. have that basic calculus background and got very high test scores) against those who had a wider array of opportunities and excelled in them but didn’t test quite as well, particularly when the test is the only point of commonality between them. I don’t have an answer to that, to be honest.

66

I personally believe that if two people achieved the same results but person A had less favorable conditions than person B, then person A is the better student. A lot of what you are capable of achieving is based a lot on what opportunities you were given - person A would have to have really gone out of their way to get what person B would have probably been able to have simply by virtue of being part of a well-structured program. Whether this is substantial research results in an undergrad or good AP scores in high school, I think that person A is clearly doing the more impressive task and should get a huge amount of credit for doing so. After all, if A could do what they did under unfavorable conditions, it’s a fair bet that they’d go even further beyond under favorable conditions.

67

True, though what about when person A didn’t achieve the same results as person B, but that difference is likely due to not having the opportunity to attempt to achieve those results. That is where the real problems arise, in my opinion. Choosing between someone who does well in each of their limited opportunities versus someone who does well in most of their myriad opportunities seems to be much less simple. Even worse is when the second person does well in all of their myriad opportunities.

68

@boneh3ad Agree with everything you wrote. My guess is that at schools like the UC engineering schools (which have among the worst female and URM enrollment and yield rates around) a big part of the problem is that they are excessively rigid/lack creativity in their admissions parameters.

MIT, Mudd, CIT, Olin, Cooper Union and others are having way more success and my guess it is because they are way more “creative” in how they assess applicants - and also are part of a “positive feedback loop” where they encourage female applicants, show they have more women enrolled and they re committed to enrolling them.

i believe that some systems, like the UCs and some other big state systems, are “deep down” perfectly happy with the numbers they have. The top-line administration give lip-service to change, because that is what industry, the legislature and public wants to hear, but deep down, among the “lifers” they really don’t want to broaden the applicant pool.

So your comment about “more applicants” has its roots in the culture of the institution, I believe. I think that if you look at surveys, women tend to move to L&S/LibArts STEM majors: L&S Comp Sci versus Engineering EE&CS for example, or Bio versus Bioengineering because they see the educational opportunities as broader and the student body as more inclusive.

My D, for instance, would not even consider the tech schools that had no LibAarts college - she knew she wanted to have friends who were studying French Lit and Art History and Astronomy. She still chose an engineering school - but one with strong undergrad Arts school as well as a strong undergrad Lib Arts school.

My guess is that if women applicants did not fear they were going to be “condemned” (rightly or wrongly) to a male-dominated educational fortress, you could easily see that pool broaden very quickly.

69

I don’t think it is so much about them being perfectly happy with the status quo in this case so much as it is the view that it is largely out of their control at this point. Personally, I think that is largely true. I think there are relatively few things that universities can do to attract more women into STEM that aren’t already interested, and the rest of what they can do is to implement changes that try to improve retention among female students. The rest of the solution lies at an early age when female students are subtly (or not so subtly at times) pushed in directions other than STEM through various societal pressures. You do see some universities trying to get involved in this stage through outreach programs, but there is some massive cultural inertia that has to get moving to fix the problem.

70

Indeed. Usually by the time someone reaches their first day college, all that could be done to help them has already been done and the most you can do is try to help them on their way. If their education (both academic and social) was not enough by then, then it’s usually too late to do anything about it.

71

@boneh3ad Except that at UCLA samueli, UCB COE, and UCSD Jacobs, they only accept about 15% of the female undergrad applicants and only have a <50% yield/SIR rate. The applicants are there, they just aren’t admitting them and when they do are having trouble attracting them.

Now, some will point out that there is a smaller % of men admitted - but, if you assume the UCSD stats carry across to UCLA and UCB (and UCSB as well) - then the pool of women applicants is slightly stronger than that of men - at least in terms of outcome. That may be due to @boneh3ad’s suggestion that since women are culturally discourage from applying to engineering those that persevere are strong students. But if that is true then a school would benefit from admitting more women and working harder to get a higher yield.

UC schools are a bit contrained/hide behind 209. But ultimately, I think they find it easier to admit the 800 SAT Math 1/800 SAT Math II (who are usually going to be male as men have, on average, a 30 point higher math SAT) and when the female applicants get more attention from their admissions officers at MIT, Mudd, Penn, Princeton, Stanford, etc. the top women go there.

It is a lack of “retention focus” I believe - and having seen the outreach from various schools with my own D, UMichigan, UWashington and USC, for example were way more aggressive in their attempts to get my D and her friends to attend than the UCs are.

I think the “cultural inertia” is in engineering itself, not the society at large. If UCLA samueli got 20,000 engineering applicants in 2014-15 and only SIRed 700 women, even if their applications broke out 20% female, that is 4000 applicants - and they only got 700 women to SIR. That leaves 3300 women out there who thought they had the stuff to apply to one of the most competitive schools around. These applicants likely found a home as well, but it seems absurd to me to suggest that another 100 or so of those 3300 +/- applicants were not able to contribute at UCLA Samueli - not to mention the women that said "forget it, I’ll apply to UCLA L&S and do comp sci or advanced math - so I actually have a chance to get in. That is a systemic problem, not a raw numbers problem.

72

Well I won’t comment on issues specific to the UCs, as I have precisely zero firsthand experience with that (I don’t have any idea what 209 is, for example). The UCs deal with their own odd set of challenges so it may change their calculus a bit on the issue.

That said, I am neither a female engineer, nor have I had any daughters go through the process, so I am sure there are some issues to which I am not yet privy. I have mostly seen the issue from the institutional side of the problem.

73

I’d agree that getting more girls into engineering will require changes well before the college admissions process.
A student who hasn’t even taken calculus and physics in high school is already behind in engineering, and fewer girls than boys are taking those classes. Even fewer are taking those classes in order to pursue engineering. It’s not because girls are dumber or can’t do math. At least not in my experience.
If the best engineers have aptitude in art and math and physics, maybe we need to tell little girls that love art that there’s a connection between those things and help them see and explore it from all angles.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/ct-math-art-students-met-20150329-story.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/02/education/edlife/putting-art-in-stem.html?_r=0

The programs in the linked articles are connecting art and science/engineering at the college level. I think engineering would be much more interesting to girls in particular if they were encouraged to see the connection sooner.

74

It seems like the message more often than not is along the lines of “why would you ever want to be an engineer? You are such a gifted artist!” There was a thread in this forum not too long ago posted by someone who wanted to do engineering and whose art teacher in high school lambasted them for it. That is the sort of thing that has to end.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say that the best engineers have aptitude in art (or that you have to have such an aptitude to be a good engineer), but I do think that there ought to be more effort made to make it clear that the two can be complementary (in either direction, for that matter).

75

@boneh3ad @Parentof2014grad agree on the art/design/engineering side. But I will still argue that knife cuts both ways. My D took a course at a top Engineering design college and it blew her away. She was already into engineering and wanting to “make things” but seeing it from an art/design side really grabbed her in that excitement/passion way that I was afraid had been missing from a “practical” choice. (She’s got a really strong natural math aptitude and I think she read that engineering was the “best” ie. $$ use of that skill…) Now she has a real gut-level excitement that I think is critical to true career happiness+success.

But I think the Adcoms and eggheads in the engineering departments don’t have the same understanding of the value of those kind of kids that they could/should have - and as a result those kids end up at design school. Or In the Lib Arts schools doing CS/game design or graphic design.

Anyway, I do think the world is changing. Stanford and the D-school have woke a lot of folks up to this concept. I can say that USC has some really exciting art minors in 3-D design and game design and even start-up technology that allows a lot of design study, and the 1st two are run through Roski. UMich was excited by the idea of combining the two, but had not yet really figured out how to make it easy on engineers. UWash has a “human design” program that looks really cool. And UPenn’s Digital Media Design is combining the two in really exciting ways as well.

But at the end of the day, I still think the core culture is resistant. Perhaps simply passively resistant. But when you open up this subject, even on these boards, the number of folks who clearly believe that men, because they tend to score higher on SAT math, make better engineering students and therefore better engineers, runs pretty deep. Their posts are not hard to find and I would guess they represent the prevailing engineering culture more than some of us would like it to be, or like to admit it is.

76

“It seems like the message more often than not is along the lines of “why would you ever want to be an engineer? You are such a gifted artist!” There was a thread in this forum not too long ago posted by someone who wanted to do engineering and whose art teacher in high school lambasted them for it. That is the sort of thing that has to end.”

^^Yes this exactly.

I was just chatting with my engineering daughter. I asked her about why she thinks more women don’t choose engineering. Her most interesting comment was that the people most likely to question her choice of engineering are other girls. This includes other smart, science oriented girls at her tech school. They view engineering as a guy thing, as boring. They want to know why she didn’t choose science, or medicine. It’s not that engineering is too hard, or girls aren’t capable enough, it’s that the boys can have this one. I don’t know why, but that surprised me.

77

It seems like we are all advocating different ingredients to make the same bowl of slop. And of course, all those ingredients are needed to make a truly nasty bowl of slop. This reminds me, my daughter loves creating her own vegan recipes. A girly pursuit or indicative of an engineering mindset or is it okay to recognize it as both?

My “favorite” ingredient is patriarchal emphasis on male qualities being worth more monetarily than female qualities. Unless we are speaking of attractiveness, in which case the monetary value is in how it can attract a man – with money. My most progressive friends still can’t seem to help themselves when my daughter’s academic prowess is discussed by finishing their praise with, “and she’s so pretty!”

I have no answers, just frustration that the best salary potential with an undergraduate degree has the lowest percentage of women. I want to skywrite across the whole dang country: freedom is dependent on financial independence. For a more grassroots version of this phenomenon, check out a microloan service like Kiva. Empowering a woman’s ability to earn a decent income helps all boats rise.

78

See, for example, the history of the job market in the life sciences (both in academia and elsewhere). The tracking between the strength of that job market and the feminization of the field may only be a correlation, but it’s a pretty good one…

79

It will change because the make-up of income in society is changing.

The worst really is the URM numbers. Those are horrifying - esp. female URMs and result real societal issues with long term effects. If there is one place schools like the UCs are doing a great disservice to the us, it is there. But again 209 is an easy “get out of jail free” card. And they play it all the time.

80

The Real Reason Most Women Don’t Go Into Tech

http://www.forbes.com/sites/quickerbettertech/2015/03/16/the-real-reason-most-women-dont-go-into-tech/#3fcd9fd331c3