Are engineering programs still male dominated?

[teachermom2834]

I know it used to be true that women were underrepresented in most STEM fields and I think that is still the perception but I am wondering if that is still actually true? I know many young women that have gone into engineering programs out of high school and it seems when my dd’s school announces future plans of graduates many women are headed into STEM fields. 
 

My dd was filling out an application for a summer engineering camp (supposedly competitive but I really don’t know how much so) and she asked if she had a better shot getting in as a female. I have no idea. 20 years ago I would have said so, but does that still hold true? I realize at the highest levels (like Ivies) they are so highly rejective they have plenty of women to choose from but is there still a lopsided ratio of men to women in these programs at, say, a less competitive state school level? 
 

Just curious really. My dd isn’t going to be pursuing any colleges that she shouldn’t easily get into so I’m not really looking for any kind of advantage for her. She has just applied to a few summer programs that had me wondering what the current climate is and curious as to what experience she is likely to have if she attends.

[regentrude]

I teach at an engineering school and 25% of the undergrad students are women. (This is up from a lower percentage since the school has grown the biology department which attracts more females.)

So, definitely true here.

Edited February 18 by regentrude

[ieta_cassiopeia]

This may depend on which STEM field is involved and where one is studying.

Across the UK, women comprise 81% of the 2020-2021 intake of student vets and psychologists, about half of general biology students, 42% of physics and chemistry students, 30% of maths students and 21% of computing and engineering students.

 

The statistics for other places may be different.

[Kassia]

My dd just graduated last year from engineering school and there were very few women there.  I don't think it gave her an advantage in getting hired, though.  I can't be sure.  OTOH, I know many companies are definitely looking to hire more women.  Ds1 is involved in hiring at his company and he is really pro-Women in STEM and wants to see more women in the field.  I'm not sure if that answers any of your questions.  😛

[teachermom2834]

2 minutes ago, Kassia said:

My dd just graduated last year from engineering school and there were very few women there.  I don't think it gave her an advantage in getting hired, though.  I can't be sure.  OTOH, I know many companies are definitely looking to hire more women.  Ds1 is involved in hiring at his company and he is really pro-Women in STEM and wants to see more women in the field.  I'm not sure if that answers any of your questions.  😛

No it is helpful. I’m really just curious. I don’t really think she needs or is looking for any kind of advantage. I really didn’t even know if it was actually a reality that there is some great disparity or if it was one of those things people say or perceive but isn’t actually true. In my little slice of the world I have female friends my age who are engineers and my kids have female friends in engineering. So I didn’t know if it is real vs urban legend kind of thing. But my slice of the world is pretty limited.

My dd’s school started a robotics team this year and she is the only girl and when they picked teams she was the last one drafted and they make her keep the notebook. So, yeah, that is also her experience but she doesn’t complain because the boys did do the activity previously and know more than she does.  The boys on the team are also split between enjoying her company and being resentful of it. Interesting.

My dd isn’t even sure she wants to go into engineering. She is just exploring possibilities. 

[ScoutTN]

Definitely true at my Dd’s school with “Technological” in the name.(Though she is a liberal arts major.)

Edited February 18 by ScoutTN

[MamaSprout]

My dd is at Rose Hulman. It's around 75/25. Her program (Engineering Physics) is probably more like 60/40. Her second major is only available as an add on (International Relations), but it's 50/50. Engineering Physics is a very small program, but I think it will grow with Intel's announcement of an Ohio-based chip complex. Rose also does a good job with outreach for girls/ women, though, and Dd's physics advisor is female.

The engineering programs at my university are more like 85/15, although a majority of the math professors are women.

My kiddo wanted to be in some sort of engineering or physics since she was around 10 years old, so she had done plenty of STEM camps, Civil Air Patrol, etc, so she had no problem with the ratios. She navigates it well and has an awesome crew of friends- both male and female. Honestly this is the first time in her life that she has friends that are friends with each other instead of one from 4H, 2 from Civil Air Patrol, 1 from dual enrollment (you get the idea.) Being a minor was a bigger deal than being female, and only because she kept a lid on it for so long that it was something of big reveal when her friends found out.

She's had problems with one chauvinistic professor. He was in humanities and was eventually fired.

So yeah, STEM is still male dominated, and I don't see it changing anytime soon. Any student who works hard will do fine. I remind her of the Madeline Albright quote that "There is no room for mediocre women". It helps that she has a devilish sense of humor and is universally respectful to everyone.

ETA- I do share more about where my Dd is than might be typical here, but she works for Rose's Admissions, complete with her own business card, so she'd be happy to have me share her experiences.

Edited February 18 by MamaSprout

[MamaSprout]

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Edited February 18 by MamaSprout
Oops.

[teachermom2834]

26 minutes ago, ScoutTN said:

Definitely true at my Dd’s school with “Technological” in the name.(Though she is a liberal arts major.)

If I had to bet now, with dd in 10th grade, I would guess she is headed to your dd’s school 😉

[Clemsondana]

It's unfortunate that STEM is all lumped together.  The bio sciences are heavily female, especially at the undergrad level.  Even 30 years ago our starting grad school class in genetics had 3 males and 10 females.  Engineering fields tend to be more male.  I also think it's somewhat dependent on the community.  We are in the middle of Science Olympiad and just tried a Science Bowl (a quiz bowl-like contest but hard core science).  On our homeschool teams, the split is usually around 50-50, with just some variation from year to year.  At other schools, the teams were sometimes highly skewed male or female, making me think it's mostly group dynamics.  

[EKS]

Yes.  You can google the school's names and "gender ratio" and see that generally females make up about 30-40% of the student body of these sorts of schools.  An exception is MIT and perhaps there are more.

Note that quite a few (understatement) liberal arts colleges skew the other way, with upwards of 60-70% of the student body being female.  Interestingly, there doesn't seem to be as much angst about this.

[Roadrunner]

UCLA I believe is 60% female overall but despite very heavy emphasis on trying to get girls into physics/engineering, girls are mostly flocking to the pre-med track. I don’t know male to female ratio exactly in engineering there, but my boy tells me physics is heavily male dominated. And so is engineering. My guess is biomes will be balanced because it’s a med school feeder program.

[OakParkOwlets]

I'm sure the ratios depend on region, what area of engineering and even what company.  I have a coworker whos wife has worked in civil engineering for decades and she said there is a definite need for more women in her field. 

This has some useful statistics:

https://swe.org/research/2024/employment/

Edited February 18 by OakParkOwlets

[EKS]

25 minutes ago, Roadrunner said:

UCLA I believe is 60% female overall but despite very heavy emphasis on trying to get girls into physics/engineering, girls are mostly flocking to the pre-med track.

I don't understand why people are so focused on getting females into engineering.  It's obvious, and it's been shown over and over scientifically, that they (as a group) prefer other things.

Susan Pinker's book The Sexual Paradox talks about this in detail.  It is excellent and I highly recommend it to anyone who is interested in this issue.

Edited February 18 by EKS

[Roadrunner]

8 minutes ago, EKS said:

I don't understand why people are so focused on getting females into engineering.  It's obvious, and it's been shown over and over scientifically, that they (as a group) prefer other things.

Susan Pinker's book The Sexual Paradox talks about this in detail.  It is excellent and I highly recommend it to anyone who is interested in this issue.

🤷‍♀️

Women in physics and CS is huge. Red carpet if you are willing to try. I think employers are struggling to hire in that field and pressure is there to show equality. So first you have to produce female engineers before you hire them. I think that’s the obsession. I mean nobody cares at all if other fields are female dominated. Nobody ever bothers to change that ratio or is bothered by imbalance. 
 

[KSera]

3 hours ago, EKS said:

Note that quite a few (understatement) liberal arts colleges skew the other way, with upwards of 60-70% of the student body being female.  Interestingly, there doesn't seem to be as much angst about this.

My guess is it’s due to the difference in earning potential and trying to make that less skewed between men and women. On average, STEM students are more readily employed in their field and earn more (on average) than people with liberal arts degrees. 

[ScoutTN]

6 hours ago, teachermom2834 said:

If I had to bet now, with dd in 10th grade, I would guess she is headed to your dd’s school 😉

The merit aid is excellent, the community and campus vibe are good, not too far from home etc. 

[freesia]

53 minutes ago, Roadrunner said:

🤷‍♀️

Women in physics and CS is huge. Red carpet if you are willing to try. I think employers are struggling to hire in that field and pressure is there to show equality. So first you have to produce female engineers before you hire them. I think that’s the obsession. I mean nobody cares at all if other fields are female dominated. Nobody ever bothers to change that ratio or is bothered by imbalance. 
 

I think there needs to be a shift in making engineering as a job more family friendly. We used to live in an area with lots of engineers and it was definitely not the type of environment that would be easy to bear children and have small children ( if you wanted to ever see them.). If the work culture becomes more flexible, I would imagine it would attract more women. 

[Roadrunner]

13 minutes ago, freesia said:

I think there needs to be a shift in making engineering as a job more family friendly. We used to live in an area with lots of engineers and it was definitely not the type of environment that would be easy to bear children and have small children ( if you wanted to ever see them.). If the work culture becomes more flexible, I would imagine it would attract more women. 

I think that is true of most high paying professions. Medicine for sure as well. Women are still flocking to it.

I think it’s ok to study what one is finding interesting. Couldn’t pay me enough to be an engineer. 

[teachermom2834]

4 hours ago, Clemsondana said:

It's unfortunate that STEM is all lumped together.  The bio sciences are heavily female, especially at the undergrad level.  Even 30 years ago our starting grad school class in genetics had 3 males and 10 females.  Engineering fields tend to be more male.  I also think it's somewhat dependent on the community.  We are in the middle of Science Olympiad and just tried a Science Bowl (a quiz bowl-like contest but hard core science).  On our homeschool teams, the split is usually around 50-50, with just some variation from year to year.  At other schools, the teams were sometimes highly skewed male or female, making me think it's mostly group dynamics.  

I always think of biological sciences being more female. My dd actually applied to a biology program and I had the opposite thought- that it would be more girls.

She really doesn’t know what she wants to do. She is just trying to get exposure to a few things to see what she likes. 
 

And she has girl and guy friends but her main friend group is mostly guys so she does manage fine with guys for sure. 

[dirty ethel rackham]

Dd majored in civil engineering and it was about 50-50 for her cohort.  It didn't start out that way, but dd recruited several other girls leaning toward engineering into civil.  She was active in Society of Women Engineers and restarted the student chapter of the American Society of Civil Engineers at her school, was president, and had a mostly female e-board.  The firm she works for has a larger female percentage than the industry as a whole, but is still more men than women.  

 

[regentrude]

2 hours ago, EKS said:

I don't understand why people are so focused on getting females into engineering.  It's obvious, and it's been shown over and over scientifically, that they (as a group) prefer other things.

But the question is: is the preference nature or nurture? What does culture contribute? For example, what effect for the lack of interest stems from math-phobic elementary teachers (studies show that girls in particular inherit those attitudes since they want to emulate their female teachers), centuries of designating those professions as "male", lack of role models?

I am all for honoring women's wishes and not labeling alternative choices as less valuable. But we should examine to what degree the different interests and behaviors are created by millennia of patriarchal culture and not accept them as genetic fate.

As for why it would be desirable to have more women: as a woman in a completely male-dominated field, I see how important it is for students to have female role models.

And having women in those fields does open other perspectives and viewpoints, and would, for example, mitigate gender bias in design - which would be another good reason to have more female engineers. 

 

Edited February 18 by regentrude

[Clarita]

1 hour ago, Roadrunner said:

1 hour ago, freesia said:

I think there needs to be a shift in making engineering as a job more family friendly. We used to live in an area with lots of engineers and it was definitely not the type of environment that would be easy to bear children and have small children ( if you wanted to ever see them.). If the work culture becomes more flexible, I would imagine it would attract more women. 

I think that is true of most high paying professions. Medicine for sure as well. Women are still flocking to it.

I think it’s ok to study what one is finding interesting. Couldn’t pay me enough to be an engineer. 

Some types of Doctors and nurses can still choose to go part-time. (Surgeons have a harder time because of how long surgeries take and the need to be on-call.) Not to mention some of those umbrella term professions when you get to the highest paid levels get back to being male-dominated because of working hours.

A company I worked for did a study of why they were unable to retain female engineers. The conclusion was overwhelmingly lack of part-time options. Since a lot of engineering firms are opened to offering flexible working hours, remote work, etc.

Then as a side note (I don't think you meant anything by your statement), but I remember feeling very ostracized as a girl when other girls would say things like "couldn't pay me enough to be an engineer." I basically kept my desire to be an engineer a don't ask don't tell sort of thing since I was also very much a girly girl aside from my apparent interest in math and science. Makes me wonder how many girls would be interested if it weren't so OK to poo-poo it.

[freesia]

14 minutes ago, Clarita said:

Some types of Doctors and nurses can still choose to go part-time. (Surgeons have a harder time because of how long surgeries take and the need to be on-call.) Not to mention some of those umbrella term professions when you get to the highest paid levels get back to being male-dominated because of working hours.

A company I worked for did a study of why they were unable to retain female engineers. The conclusion was overwhelmingly lack of part-time options. Since a lot of engineering firms are opened to offering flexible working hours, remote work, etc.

Then as a side note (I don't think you meant anything by your statement), but I remember feeling very ostracized as a girl when other girls would say things like "couldn't pay me enough to be an engineer." I basically kept my desire to be an engineer a don't ask don't tell sort of thing since I was also very much a girly girl aside from my apparent interest in math and science. Makes me wonder how many girls would be interested if it weren't so OK to poo-poo it.

I was just going to post this. I know several doctors who’ve been able to work part time. Or, work in rehab or other places with set hours. The engineers—at least where I was—were expected to work many hours and go back after dinner. There just was a lack of flexibility. I’m sure you could point out other careers with a lack of flexibility. I’m just saying what I see and what I’ve heard women in the field say. I think heading into many careers one can perceive a way to make it work. Engineering school is too intense a commitment to try when you are being told by women in the field that it is hard to balance it with a family. I think that’s something that needs to change in the culture if the profession much as I’ve seen medicine flex. 

[regentrude]

And once the woman has arrived in a work environment, the stereotypes are alive and well. Highly competent female engineers, software developers, and scientists are more often asked to do the "soft" tasks that are seen as traditionally female tasks than their male colleagues. And those tasks take up time that they cannot use on their core activities that contribute to their performance evaluations.
 

[Roadrunner]

If women are going to dominate medical field and if we prefer to work part time, then we need to really massively increase the number of residency spots and medical school spots in this country. What we have now doesn’t seem to factor in part time work. It’s already hard to get appointments locally. 
 

I will say that most jobs are not that friendly to part time work. I was expected to be in the office and put in more than 8 hours per day. I wasn’t in the male dominated profession. In fact most of us in the office were women. 

Edited February 19 by Roadrunner

[freesia]

21 minutes ago, Roadrunner said:

If women are going to dominate medical field and if we prefer to work part time, then we need to really massively increase the number of residency spots and medical school spots in this country. What we have now doesn’t seem to factor in part time work. It’s already hard to get an appointments locally. 
 

I will say that most jobs are not that friendly to part time work. I was expected to be in the office put in more than 8 hours per day. I wasn’t on the male dominated profession. In fact most of us in the office were women. 

But was there a place you could have done similar work on a part time basis? Is that still true? 

[Roadrunner]

48 minutes ago, freesia said:

But was there a place you could have done similar work on a part time basis? Is that still true? 

No. 
 

[madteaparty]

8 hours ago, EKS said:

Yes.  You can google the school's names and "gender ratio" and see that generally females make up about 30-40% of the student body of these sorts of schools.  An exception is MIT and perhaps there are more.

Note that quite a few (understatement) liberal arts colleges skew the other way, with upwards of 60-70% of the student body being female.  Interestingly, there doesn't seem to be as much angst about this.

My DS’s LAC has more girls than boys but not upwards of 60-70%. Certainly not enough of a gap to cause angst 😉 

[madteaparty]

3 hours ago, regentrude said:

But the question is: is the preference nature or nurture? What does culture contribute? For example, what effect for the lack of interest stems from math-phobic elementary teachers (studies show that girls in particular inherit those attitudes since they want to emulate their female teachers), centuries of designating those professions as "male", lack of role models?

I am all for honoring women's wishes and not labeling alternative choices as less valuable. But we should examine to what degree the different interests and behaviors are created by millennia of patriarchal culture and not accept them as genetic fate.

As for why it would be desirable to have more women: as a woman in a completely male-dominated field, I see how important it is for students to have female role models.

And having women in those fields does open other perspectives and viewpoints, and would, for example, mitigate gender bias in design - which would be another good reason to have more female engineers. 

 

Representation also matters in that it changes the culture of institutions. I don’t know why corporations care about certain things but they seem to care about this. Nothing amazing ever came from places with enhanced  “bro” cultures for example. There have been harassment and pay disparity scandals in video game companies for example. 

[EKS]

50 minutes ago, madteaparty said:

My DS’s LAC has more girls than boys but not upwards of 60-70%. Certainly not enough of a gap to cause angst 😉 

60% is extremely common.

[madteaparty]

5 minutes ago, EKS said:

60% is extremely common.

The LACs I’m familiar with have a gender ratio that is closer to the 4 year college enrollment ratio in the US now, which skews female.
So, more girls yes, but not massively so, couple percentage points 🤷‍♀️

[Roadrunner]

36 minutes ago, EKS said:

60% is extremely common.

And that gap is increasing overall. It’s extremely concerning for  many reasons. If the gap were reversing and worsening for girls, people would be screaming bloody murder and rightfully so. 
 

The gap in engineering seems to be 75% in favor of boys. Stubbornly consistent. And yes, within the department there are differences. I will say that CS culture is so toxic that it turned my programming loving  boy away. But it’s very Bay Area toxic. 
Math/physics has no such vibe it seems at the university. Although my boy says it’s very racially segregated. Most girls are of East Asian descent.
And biology is completely female dominated. Doesn’t raise eyebrows. 

Edited February 19 by Roadrunner

[ScoutTN]

My female friends (in their 50’s) who are engineers had to choose between staying in their career full time or staying home with kids. There were no part time or flexible options in their disciplines, in their locations. If this is still true, it surely has an impact on overall numbers.

Edited February 19 by ScoutTN

[Roadrunner]

1 hour ago, ScoutTN said:

My female friends (in their 50’s) who are engineers had to choose between staying in their career full time or staying home with kids. There were no part time or flexible options in their disciplines, in their locations. If this is still true, it surely has an impact on overall numbers.

I walked out because there was no part time option too. Not an engineer. I do wonder though if things changed overall because back in my day most well paid corporate jobs didn’t have part time options. In fact the only people we knew who could do that were doctors who owned their own practices. 

[Arcadia]

21 hours ago, Roadrunner said:

UCLA I believe is 60% female overall but despite very heavy emphasis on trying to get girls into physics/engineering, girls are mostly flocking to the pre-med track.

People in my region still believes medical specialists are paid more than typical engineerings so pre-med is still favored for their daughters. My engineering school ex-schoolmates’ daughters are flocking to medical school or law school primarily because it pays more than a typical engineer. 

[Arcadia]

On 2/18/2024 at 3:46 AM, teachermom2834 said:

My dd was filling out an application for a summer engineering camp (supposedly competitive but I really don’t know how much so) and she asked if she had a better shot getting in as a female.

It depends on the camp quota and also the region they are taking from. If it is a camp in my general region, there are more than enough females to compete for spots especially if it is known to be competitive because it may look good for college applications. If it is a camp that says priority is given to first gen, low income, underrepresented minorities, then the competition is less stiff. 

[Roadrunner]

36 minutes ago, Arcadia said:

People in my region still believes medical specialists are paid more than typical engineerings so pre-med is still favored for their daughters. My engineering school ex-schoolmates’ daughters are flocking to medical school or law school primarily because it pays more than a typical engineer. 

And not just money. Prestige and respect factor in I think as well. 

[Arcadia]

18 minutes ago, Roadrunner said:

And not just money. Prestige and respect factor in I think as well. 

In my friends’ cases, long term potential income was the main factor. Some are from old wealth and already have the prestige and respect even if they don’t work.
For the younger healthcare staff that I interact with during my medical appointments, it is also about job stability because healthcare always have a staff shortage. My former oncologist was tired of the bureaucracy and went to work for a much smaller healthcare group. He doesn’t need to worry about being retrenched or about taking more than a year to land a new job. 

Edited February 19 by Arcadia
typo

[Roadrunner]

12 minutes ago, Arcadia said:

In my friends’ cases, long term potential income was the main factor. Some are from old wealth and already have the prestige and respect even if they don’t work.
For the younger healthcare staff that I interact with during my medical appointments, it is also about job stability because healthcare always have a staff shortage. My former oncologist was tired of the bureaucracy and went to work for a much smaller healthcaregroup. He doesn’t need to worry about being retrenched and taking more than a year to land a new job. 

Makes sense.

What I find interesting though is medicine was so male dominated and also very condescending towards women. Basically women were only good for nursing and attitudes and work environment weren’t good for women. Yet we managed to completely hold our noises and not just break into the field but dominate. 
This success is not being replicated in engineering despite many efforts. 
 

I will say one of the reasons we eliminated Rose Hulman from consideration was their male/female ratio. I wanted my boy to have a fighting chance of finding a girlfriend. 

[Arcadia]

22 minutes ago, Roadrunner said:

This success is not being replicated in engineering despite many efforts. 

Chemical engineering and bioengineering are dominated by females in my country of origin all along even before I entered college in early 90s. The oil industry like Shell paid chemical engineers well and had a four day work week. My ex-schoolmates were working Monday to Friday with Wednesday off. Computer science were I am from is also female dominated and hosted by the science faculty. My high school ex-classmates who were computer science majors has a hard time finding a boyfriend.

I graduated from civil engineering which had a 4:1 ratio. However, my tech job paid higher compared to my ex-classmates (including males) in civil engineering jobs. My cousins own manufacturing factories and for liability reason they can’t allow employees to bring their kids to work though they can give paid time off. When my mom was working as a nurse, I could go to the hospital lobby or cafeteria and stay there if I wanted to. As things are more or less automated, there are more ladies in mechanical engineering and robotics engineering, don’t need to get your hands dirty and drone related stuff are seen as fun. My husband’s department (mainly electrical engineering hardware work) has a pretty even gender split but the lab technicians do almost all of the hands on work. 

[Roadrunner]

@Arcadiafunny. Are you telling me it’s only a problem in this country? 😂
 

I read somewhere that more restrictive the society, less gender imbalance in engineering. I can’t remember if it was Saudi Arabia or another country equally misogynistic towards woman that  had a stronger female presence in those fields than the freest ones like in Northern Europe. 

[Arcadia]

13 minutes ago, Roadrunner said:

@Arcadiafunny. Are you telling me it’s only a problem in this country? 😂
 

In my country of origin, most people did not have the luxury of choosing majors based on interest. You know what I mean when you look at my area. If you can’t get into medical school or law school, being an engineer was a ticket out of poverty. 
 

Another reason for picking a medical profession versus engineering was for migration purposes. My friends who are doctors have an easier migration path to the states, Canada, Australia and that was also a push factor towards healthcare professions. 

[ieta_cassiopeia]

22 hours ago, freesia said:

I think there needs to be a shift in making engineering as a job more family friendly. We used to live in an area with lots of engineers and it was definitely not the type of environment that would be easy to bear children and have small children ( if you wanted to ever see them.). If the work culture becomes more flexible, I would imagine it would attract more women. 

Not just workplaces, but the education establishments as well.

Open University has an Open STEM course which allows free access to engineering courses (provided module pre-requisites are met) in addition to its conventional engineering degree. It found that in October 2019, the gender imbalance in the engineering introductory unit almost halved in the Open STEM version compared to the conventional engineering degree (33% women in the Open STEM route compared to 16% in the conventional route). Prominent reasons cited by students for this include:

- the ability to substitute one or two disliked modules for something else, including from a completely different subject (a common complaint was that some modules just weren't desirable to study)
- breadth of study (for example, some women wanted to combine engineering and mathematics, to an extent the conventional engineering course did not permit)
- confidence

I'd like to see a follow-up study, since mathematically most of the students in that cohort would be over halfway through their degrees, and some would have completed them. However, a couple of other studies indicate that multi-discipline scientific courses are attractive to women in ways that single-subject engineering is not.

It's possible that colleges/universities that only allow one fixed route through their engineering degree could be losing a large number of women that would otherwise at least give studying engineering a try. It would also go some way towards explaining why liberal arts colleges have a greater proportion of women doing engineering - they typically have ways of integrating some breadth into studies and a cultural expectation that the breadth be taken at least somewhat seriously.

Scotland cares if some fields are female-dominated - it requires those of its universities with courses in any field where Scottish student gender bias is at/above 25%/75% in favour of either men or women to take measures to reduce the bias, known as the Gender Action Plan. (Currently, fields classed as male-dominated are Architecture, Building/Planning, Engineering, Technologies and Computer Science, and those classed as female-dominated fields are Social Sciences, Nursing, Teaching and Psychology. The statistics will be reviews, and focus subjects changed as appropriate, when people get round to it - this was meant to happen last year but COVID led to an indefinite delay).

[Clemsondana]

I don't tend to think it's a crisis if every field doesn't have equal male-female representation.  I don't want artificial barriers to entry for either sex, but even if all things were equal I don't think that there is likely to be an equal division among career paths.  All it takes is a few skewing events - if more women choose to be stay-at-home parents than men, and also more women choose careers involving children (such as teachers), then there are fewer women, relative to the number of men, who are left to work in engineering.  And there are many fields where women outnumber men.  One kid did a lot of speech therapy at a university where students were trained, and females outnumbered males by a wide margin in every class over the years that we were there.  

I would love to see more part-time opportunities, but there are also fields where I struggle to see how it would work.  My college dorm room had 3 of us, and all 3 have STEM PhDs.  All of us teach in varying capacities, because the hours are the easiest for working around with a family.  When I left academic research after my postdoc, I thought about ways that research jobs could be turned to part-time, and I couldn't really see how it would work in most situations.  People work long hours, and the job is hard to share.  The physical work is easy enough - I often shared that with undergrads in training - but without somebody to spend time daily to assimilate all of the information into one brain, it would have been challenging to keep the project moving forward and catch all of the observations that need to be made (usually at least 1/4 of my time as a bench scientist was spent thinking and reading, and had I worked 1/2 of the hours and shared the job, we would both need to spend the same amount of time reading and thinking that I was doing).  I feel like some areas of engineering tend to be that way, too.  Many engineers spend a lot of time working to produce a product ASAP for a customer, and somebody working 1/2 time would take longer to do that.  But, it's hard to spread the work out between people because one person has to know all of it to catch mistakes.  It's not much different than a household in some ways - for any given 'project' at the house, either spouse and I are in charge of it because otherwise it would be challenging to get it all done.  Usually only one of us plans a meal - we may leave directions for the other to put something in the oven at a particular time, but we aren't both just doing things at different times to work towards preparation with neither of us having planned and coordinated it. 

There may be solutions that work in some situations, but spouse and I have spent a lot of time talking about it in our different fields, and it would be hard.  I do wonder if there could be openings for part-time work that is more erratic - hourly or 'by the piece' work, rather than a salaried part-time job.  That might allow for part-time to mean 'work on this short-term project and then have a break when it's over' which could work better with the ebb and flow of schedules and also work for an engineering company's priorities.  Or an hourly worker whose job didn't have a lot of promotion potential but could do certain parts of a project in a predictable amount of time so that the company could work around it and nobody else would be dependent on daily interactions - they're just waiting for a specific finished product.  

It also probably depends heavily on the type of engineering that one does.  Spouse works on things that tend to be multi-year projects involving teams scattered across the country (and sometimes world).  Lots of coordination, lots of travel and/or conference calls at odd hours across time zones, and no real 'end' to a project.  On the other hand, a structural engineer can be working over a much shorter time frame.  They may work on a big building project, or they may be assessing a house that was damaged by a fire.  The fire might involve a day of a local visit and then however long it takes to crunch some numbers and write a report.  It would be a lot easier to have that kind of work be part-time than what spouse does.  

[Clarita]

12 hours ago, Roadrunner said:

14 hours ago, ScoutTN said:

My female friends (in their 50’s) who are engineers had to choose between staying in their career full time or staying home with kids. There were no part time or flexible options in their disciplines, in their locations. If this is still true, it surely has an impact on overall numbers.

I walked out because there was no part time option too. Not an engineer. I do wonder though if things changed overall because back in my day most well paid corporate jobs didn’t have part time options. In fact the only people we knew who could do that were doctors who owned their own practices. 

I was offered flexible hours and part remote but still they wanted 40 hours/week. (This was to me like a unicorn job because my previous job I felt I was leaving early when I worked a  9-10 hour day, my typical was 11-12 hours/day and during push time 12-14 hours and occasionally was going for 15-17 hours 3-6 days straight. Logistically, they fed me at work.) 

4 hours ago, Clemsondana said:

There may be solutions that work in some situations, but spouse and I have spent a lot of time talking about it in our different fields, and it would be hard.  I do wonder if there could be openings for part-time work that is more erratic - hourly or 'by the piece' work, rather than a salaried part-time job.  That might allow for part-time to mean 'work on this short-term project and then have a break when it's over' which could work better with the ebb and flow of schedules and also work for an engineering company's priorities.  Or an hourly worker whose job didn't have a lot of promotion potential but could do certain parts of a project in a predictable amount of time so that the company could work around it and nobody else would be dependent on daily interactions - they're just waiting for a specific finished product.  

My mom was an accountant, part-time work existed for her. My dad could get contracting work as an engineer, but it seems you can only do that when you fully established yourself as an expert and if you want consistent work that way you have to have a lot of connections (my dad did those as side hustles).  One of my co-workers was originally hired as an hourly employee, they had moved him to salary because he clocked in too much overtime all the time. 

4 hours ago, Clemsondana said:

All it takes is a few skewing events - if more women choose to be stay-at-home parents than men, and also more women choose careers involving children (such as teachers), then there are fewer women, relative to the number of men, who are left to work in engineering. 

This was us. I mean I chose to stay home with the kids instead of my husband. It was a discussion we had and it could have gone either way. In fact it was 100% my choice that it was me based on my own wants (even though I loved my job I wanted to snuggle my babies more and it was an option for us)

 

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[regentrude]

Sure, more part time options would be wonderful, for both women and men.

However,  I am not sure the lack of part-time jobs is the main factor behind the interest gap, because interests split many years before girls consider that as a significant factor.

I think a crucial issue is the attitude towatds math. When you're bullied for being interested in math, when being math-illiterate is something to be proud of, it's hard for a girl to pursue that interest. 

The typically female dominated majors are all the ones that don't require significant math. Some of the preference for those may stem from  math phobia. I teach intro physics courses for engineers and for biologists, and the difference in average attitude towards math is huge.

[regentrude]

Re part time research jobs:

I am in physics,  so slightly different but adjacent. You're surrounded by people who love what they do and spend long hours because doing research is their great joy.

So a part-time person, or even one who only works regular 8 hour days, would always compete with people who go above and beyond and who will have more results, more publications,  more grant applications. There is no way to even that out because you can't forbid people from working.

I don't see a solution to that. You can have part-time teaching jobs; that's what I did after my career-ending SAHM period. But as a researcher, you'll never be on even footing with folks who can pursue their passion full- and over-time.

To clarify: I fully embrace that decision I made, and it was the best for our family. But the reality is also that, after 22 years (12 years part-time + another ten years full-time), my income is finally at the level of the *entry* salary for a brand-new full-time assistant professor who just completed his postdoc.

Edited February 20 by regentrude

[SanDiegoMom]

6 hours ago, regentrude said:

 

I think a crucial issue is the attitude towatds math. When you're bullied for being interested in math, when being math-illiterate is something to be proud of, it's hard for a girl to pursue that interest. 

The typically female dominated majors are all the ones that don't require significant math. Some of the preference for those may stem from  math phobia. I teach intro physics courses for engineers and for biologists, and the difference in average attitude towards math is huge.

I don't see this a ton in my area at least -- there is a LOT of STEM focus all around, and most of the AP bubble that my kids are in is pretty balanced male/female.   It is very common to at least have finished AP Calc by 11th grade in this particular subset of kids.  Many of the girls took through MV Calc and Linear Algebra at the CC.  The high school girls through I meet through my kids' EC's  are extremely focused and driven and know what they want. And for the most part they want humanities or biology related majors.  One went all in Chemistry (and is at MIT now) and we know one who wants to go CS, but MANY of them are drawn to the biological sciences, or bioengineering at most.   

Right now the girls are doing better in school overall, so it's hard to imagine that it's still gender bias within the k-12 setting. 

https://www.brookings.edu/articles/boys-left-behind-education-gender-gaps-across-the-us/#:~:text=The education gender gap emerges,about as well in math).

[SanDiegoMom]

6 hours ago, regentrude said:

 

I don't see a solution to that. You can have part-time teaching jobs; that's what I did after my career-ending SAHM period. But as a researcher, you'll never be on even footing with folks who can pursue their passion full- and over-time.

To clarify: I fully embrace that decision I made, and it was the best for our family. But the reality is also that, after 22 years (12 years part-time + another ten years full-time), my income is finally at the level of the *entry* salary for a brand-new full-time assistant professor who just completed his postdoc.

Mother Nature is the biggest misogynist, and I wish we had better solutions.  So many women make these choices (I made the SAHM choice and am incredibly luck after 18 years at home to come back to my field and find work).