Engineering gender gap widens

By Ben Rogers

June 20, 2000 Web posted at: 10:29 AM EDT (1429 GMT)

In this story: "Fighting a system" Female faculty Beyond the glass ceiling RELATED STORIES

LAS VEGAS, Nevada (Las Vegas Review Journal) -- Seventeen.

An engineering student will tell you it's a rare prime number whose only factors are one and itself.

Female engineering students in Nevada are more familiar with the number, or at least its effects: women make up a mere 17 percent of the undergraduate engineering students at both the University of Nevada-Las Vegas and the University of Nevada-Reno.

The gender gap exists at other universities, but Nevada falls below the national average. According to the Engineering Workforce Commission of the American Association of Engineering Societies, women made up only 20 percent of undergraduate engineering students in the United States for the 1998-99 academic year, and received only 19 percent of the engineering bachelor's degrees awarded for the same period.

Nevada also ranks well below prominent engineering departments at U.S. colleges. The University of California-Berkeley is 22 percent female. The California Institute of Technology, 30 percent. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 34 percent.

What is UNLV doing to recruit female engineers?

"Not very much," said Walter Vodrazka, associate dean of the College of Engineering at UNLV. "It's a mystery to me. In 1998, 40 percent of graduates in civil engineering were women. And now we're lucky to have 20 in the entire college. It fluctuates."

Walter Johnson, associate dean at UNR's engineering college, has two daughters who have pursued engineering careers. He said that UNR is "trying as hard as it can" to boost their number of female engineers but that it isn't easy.

"We are fighting a system that is determined to have these women take other jobs," he said.

This fall, 27 percent of all engineering scholarships at UNR were awarded to women. Both UNR and UNLV have more female undergraduates than men overall.

"Heck, I can't understand it," Vodrazka said. "I don't know what we can do. Whenever we go out into the community, we talk to (women) at college fairs and things like that."

In 1969, Purdue University launched the nation's first women-in-engineering program, boosting its percentage of female engineering graduates from one percent to 25 percent today.

Many other universities since have instituted similar programs. The University of Washington's engineering department is 24 percent women. The Center for Women in Science and Engineering was created there in 1989 to "increase the retention of women of all ethnic backgrounds in science and engineering."

The organization's efforts have upped the percentage of women engineering students by three percent in the past three years. It has also increased the percentage of degrees granted to undergraduate women. The University of Colorado's women-in-engineering program, one of 45 such programs nationwide, boasts similar results.

UNR and UNLV each play host to a chapter of the Society of Women Engineers. UNR's chapter has 30 members, UNLV's has 12.

Deb Willems, a mechanical engineering major at UNR, served as the chapter's president in 1999 and earned the university's Outstanding Student Leader of the Year award.

The organization exists, she said, "so current females in engineering don't feel so alone. It's kind of a support group."

Willems said the chapter helps with UNR's recruitment and plays host to an annual job fair and dinner at which students and employers nationwide can meet and discuss careers in engineering. UNLV's chapter participates in Expanding Your Horizons, a program that encourages high school girls into science.

However, Janelle Hubbard, the chapter's vice president at UNLV, said a recent decline in membership has made participation in such programs difficult.

"Right now it is hard to do anything with (the organization) because there's so few members to do it," Hubbard said. "Honestly, we haven't done much this whole last year. If there was more help from professors, and the school and students, maybe."

Nationally, many engineering departments have recruited female professors in an effort to make their departments more female friendly. Still, only four percent of tenured engineering professors in the United States are women, according to a recent study in U.S. News and World Report.

Several schools have seen progress, including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology School of Engineering, where the number of female faculty members doubled to 10 percent in the last decade.

The mechanical engineering department at UNR has no female faculty, but Willems, a mechanical engineering major, does not see that as an obstacle for a fair education.

"The professors we do have see us as equals," she said.

Overall, UNR's engineering department has four female faculty members, and UNLV's has five.

Johnson said that females win a tie if there's competition with a prospective male hire.

"I wouldn't say that we're giving preference or that we have established quotas, but if all other things are equal, certainly the woman would have the advantage."

Stephanie Beban, American Society of Mechanical Engineers student representative for Nevada, California, and Hawaii, said that engineering "is not a subject that explores different views on life topics, like many other subjects do. It is very black and white; therefore it really wouldn't matter who was teaching because class discussions usually do not include topics that can be biased towards groups of people."

As for the day-to-day educational environment, Willems said things aren't always quite so level.

"There are still a lot of barriers, but it's just one of the things you take on," she said. "There's still comments like 'girls only go in to engineering to find husbands.' We take it with a grain of salt because we know why we're here."

Johnson said success stories are the rule and not the exception with female engineers.

"Women who choose to go into computer science and engineering are usually better prepared than the men," he said, explaining that because both fields are male dominated, only those women who feel extremely capable even attempt to study scientific subjects.

"Women whose math and physical science skills are marginal would choose to go into another school, whereas the women who are really strong in those areas are very confident and know they can compete," Johnson said. "An awful lot of the glass ceiling is because women choose to stay away from the fields where they could excel. I think sometimes they might feel like they're going to fail and they don't want to set themselves up for that."

"There's more pressure (in engineering) than the other majors, and you have to be determined to go through it," said Zlatina Jeleza, senior civil engineering student at UNLV. "It's more of a guys' profession. Maybe girls don't feel confident in their knowledge."

Willems points out the sky beyond the glass ceiling: "The percentage of women studying engineering in college is higher than the percentage of women in the workforce," she said. "That's what we're up against. But there are still a lot of firsts. The first female commander of space shuttle was just this year."

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