Number of women in engineering 7

[caluna]

Hello, just wondering what your take is on this-Why is only a small percent of engineers made up of women?
I am writing an article for our PE newsletter. From my viewpoint here, in Canada, as a 1980 mech eng. graduate (female), it looks like that the national average on numbers of women - as percent of total undergraduates- is decreasing since 2000. Now it is less than 20%. Less than 10% registered engineers in Canada are women. I would assume figures for USA may be a bit better. What are the barriers for women or the discouraging aspects of the profession? I would have hoped that with passing years there would be more women in the field, but not so. The profession has been good to me and my female colleagues from university and work.

Thank you.

Heather in NWT Canada

 

[GSTeng]

I went to college in Canada and there was maybe 10-15% of my graduating class were women, that was gaduating in 2001. Now in working in oil and Gas and in the US maybe 10-15% of the engineers I meet are women. I have only met 5 female enigneers here since I started working in Engineering, one moved out of Field Engineering into Sales to have a baby and one is moving positions to have a baby right now, since the engineering role she is in requires a lot of travel, the later one is a PE, but the rest are not and are not persuing a PE to my knowlege.

I don't know why there are not more Women in engineering, but these are the stats from my point of view.

 

[reidh]

I read an interesting paper about this subject not too long ago, and found a copy of the paper at the link below:

http://people.mills.edu/spertus/Gender/EKNU.html

The "Barriers to Entry" section about a fifth of the way down on the webpage is probably the most relevant to this discussion.

Reidh

 

[KENAT]

In the UK, not sure if it's of interest, in my Aero course only about 10% were female. This was late 90s.

In aerospace defence in UK I met fairly few women engineers, probably less than 10%. That said the field I was in was fairly small and a lot of the people in it were ex armed forces which again, tended to be mostly male.

Where I currently work in the US there are a few more women but not by much. There seem to be more in the software side than in electrical or mechanical engineering. Also a lot of them here may be scientists rather than engineers as such, I'm not totally sure though.

 

[mshimko]

My daughter gratuated about three years ago as an aerospace engineer. Only about 10% of her class were female.

She spoke often of her non-engineering courses, where the other females just couldn't believe that my daughter would want to work in such a male dominated field.

Since graduation, the ratio has been about the same.

At my company (consulting engineering), only about 5% of the technical workforce are female, and most (three) work for me!

Part of the reason, I suppose, was mentioned above by kenat, that is some engineering fields are heavily military oriented, and have a large number of ex military and government folks, both of which also tend to be male dominated.

 

[MikeHalloran]

Women are too smart to stay in engineering.



Mike Halloran
Pembroke Pines, FL, USA

 

[rholder98]

Females were a predictably small percentage of my classmates in Civil, fewer still that focused on Structural. However, my first job was working for a female sole proprietor. I left that job for one where I briefly worked under a female, who later went on to start her own firm. Now, at my current job, my department manager is a female. One of our EITs is female, and we have a female student intern working for us. I guess that makes us approximately 30% female in the department, not counting support staff. So while the industry as a whole is male-dominated, my limited experience has seen an inordinately large number of women. I admire all of them for braving the male-dominated field, not so much in engineering, but in having to deal with good-ol' boy contractors.

 

[IRstuff]

The answer to this question is not to be found in college or the workplace.

It's to be found in the toy aisle at Walmart. My second son, when he was younger, would always head to the toy section, but shunned the "pink" aisle, since that was for "girls."

The bottom line is that in the 40 years since bra burning began, girls and boys still are playing with different toys. Girls are getting more into video and portable gaming, but only with "their" games.

Until all kids play the same games equally, I wouldn't expect there to be much change in the workplace demographics.

TTFN

Eng-Tips Policies FAQ731-376

 

[Senselessticker]

This is so simple.... Women are graceful, interesting, and fun. Engineers are awkward, boring, and dull.

I'm mostly just joking. However, I do think there is some truth to the fact above. Most of the women who I've known in engineering have moved on to better paying jobs outside of technical engineering (mostly to sales) And who can blame them when considering pay?

I was recently at a conference. Guess which vendors I remember the most? The vendors with the geeky guy "software/application engineer type" wearing wrinkled pants and a worn out knit shirt sporting sweaty armpits who is capable of telling you everything already contained within the operations manual? Or the vendor with the super model gal dressed to kill doing a sales pitch? Both probably have the same degree... Who is more profitable to their respective company?

 

[lz5pl]

Women are too smart to stay in engineering.
---------------
Mike, !

I always joke that a female engineer is a mistake of educational system. But in fact it is only a joke of course. According to me the point of IRstuff is very good. Roles in the society dictate our choice of profession. How many male kindergarten nurses have you seen? I cannot remember even one.
I have worked with several female engineers and most of them were good or very good. But only one of them was really interested in the profession. Normally they have a scope of personal interests, hobbies, etc. different from engineering. Also their family obligations are higher than ours. Never mind how much we want to help them in housework - it remains only help.
The opposite for the men - profession is our game, and accept we this or not, often it is more important for us than everything other. Because of that men engineers spent more time and efforts for continuous increasing of professional skills. Sorry girls, but that is the life!

There are also some small things which don't encourage women to go into engineering. Field engineers are very seldom female. For men it is easier to live long time far from the home, in worse living conditions, to work in dirty environment. In some countries (Middle East, Africa, from my experience) female engineers simply are not taken seriously.

According to me female engineers are good for design work. They are usually more precise than most of male engineers. Especially in my field - control and relay protection systems - in my country the male/female ratio is about 50/50. In primary connection design probably it is 70/30 or more, but still there are lot of female designers. Female field engineers are rare, not more than 5-10%.

------------------------
It may be like this in theory and practice, but in real life it is completely different.
The favourite sentence of my army sergeant

 

[reidh]

I am sure this may start a heated debate, but I believe that the "toy aisle effect" is overstated. I think that there are intrinsic differences that cause more men to gravitate towards the engineering field, and women to gravitate towards other fields.

Before I continue, I would also like to make perfectly clear that I am in no way putting down either gender, but I believe there are differences that need to be discussed.

On a similar topic, males that work in pre-schools are few and far between. Is this because they didn't play with dolls growing up, or because females (on average, of course there will be exceptions) are usually the primary nurturers for our children. So possibly the "toy aisle effect" is just that, an effect and not a cause.

My wife works at a day care, and they accept children starting at 18 months of age. By the age of two, she has noted that more boys are playing with blocks and legos during their free time, while the girls often carry around teddy bears or dolls while they do their daily activities. The argument can be made that the parents may push their children one way or the other (such as not buying their son dolls or their daughter legos), but in a preschool where any toy can be played with by anybody who want to, the gender bias of various toys is indisputable.

I'm sure there are many other influences as to why there aren't more women in engineering, but I think it would be erroneous to dismiss the biological differences as we discuss other reasons.

I apologize in advance if I have offended anyone, it was not the purpose of my post.

Reidh

 

[JStephen]

My daughter has done plenty of playing with Legos, but doesn't seem to have any interest in engineering, for what that is worth. Then again, the same is true of my son.

 

[prohammy]

JStephen (and others),

I've never understood why we have all bought into the myth that Lego (or any other toy) creates a mindset that is somehow a pointer to the child having an engineering leaning. If Lego was that powerful it would be the mainstay of all engineering courses and I certainly didn't have to take Lego101. I do remember things like Engineering Matematics 403 however turning out to be pretty useful


Kevin Hammond

Mechanical Design Engineer
Derbyshire, UK

 

[KENAT]

prohammy,

You obviously didn't attend Cerro Coso college in Ridgecrest CA, they actually do have something like lego 101! I think it's more about using the mindstorm robots but none the less I wish I could have taken that class, even at High School.

I'm pretty sure I've seen mention of studies where even when left to their own devices young children tended toward 'gender specific' toys in the expected direction. Now of course whether this is them copying what they see around them etc is a different matter.

I suppose part of it is the nature V nurture debate which I doubt any of us will solve here!

Taking it a step further back than Engineering at university I seem to recall the following in my last couple of years at university. My math class for 'Pure' math was about pretty even, slightly more boys than girls but not by much maybe 60/40 ish. My math class for 'mechanics' was a bit more skewed, maybe 65/35 perhaps 70/30. Physics was mostly guys, perhaps 75/15 and Design Technology (kind of high school Engineering/shop with math) had only 2 girls out of around 20, so 90/10.

Given that math & physics are pre-requisits for most Engineering programs it seems that maybe the process of there being less women in Engineering starts before university. Perhaps 'in the cradle' as with the toy aisle arguement or perhaps before that, maybe in the DNA.

One slightly off the wall idea, I've heard talk that a lot of engineers are on the autistic side of the 'autistic spectrum' with aspergers syndrome etc. Is there any link between autism and sex?

 

[SomptingGuy]

KENAT: Was your arithmetic class also skewed 75/15? ;-)

 

[KENAT]

Apparantly, can I play the dyslexic card? Make it 85/15. Or there was that one weird student so maybe 75/15/10 is more like it.;-)

 

[SomptingGuy]

... just pulling your leg, it was a bit exposed.

My daughter has been exposed to the whole spectrum of traditional male and female toys with no intended pushing in any direction. She has settled firmly on the dolls and home-roll-playing side. Bummer! Still it's her life.

 

[graybeach]

Its not just legos and such that can point a kid toward engineering. I was hugely into sewing my own clothes as a kid. It was only after becoming an engineer that I realized that a sewing pattern was essentially a set of plans, not a whole lot different than plans for building. A sewing pattern tells you how to make a 3-d object from 2-d (the fabric) and 1-d (the thread) materials and, if they are any good, patterns don't leave anything out. Sewing was just as good a preparation for engineering as any typical boy things like building models or rockets.
It seems that fewer girls and boys are into building things - be it clothes or cars. Hopefully that will change.
As previous posters pointed out - there are a number of factors leading to fewer women in engineering. Too bad - its a great career.

 

[KENAT]

graybeach, my mum was keen on sewing and I partook on occasion. I never thought of it that way but maybe you’re right.

Certainly although my son plays with Lego he only seems able to follow the instructions. He never just builds something from the blocks. I always built more either from my imagination or based on pictures in books etc. than to the set plans in the kits.

Maybe it’s not so much having the Lego/blocks/mechano/knex… but how you use them.

 

[kchayfie]

I guess we are the exception to the rule - maybe we're skewing all the results for the rest of you...

Since August last year, we've hired 5 chemical engineering graduates. 4 female, 1 male. I think the mechanical engineering department took on 2 male graduates but that still puts the balance towards the women.

It might just be our industry though - there are a lot of female process engineers working in water treatment in the UK.