I wanted to answer Yes and No to this question. I was a lecturer for 35 years in engineering (or Electronics as I like to call it) and myself, all my colleagues and my University had no problem with female engineers, in fact we were desperate to encourage more to join us. We knew that nearly 50% of the population were not choosing engineering and we wanted them to. We tried everything we could think of such as trying to appoint as many female lecturers as we could find, promoting non-male centric assignments and teaching styles (which is a lot harder than it sounds - when is an Arduino project male-centric? or non male-centric), lots of secondary schools work and so on. In those 35 years I do not think I saw any significant increase in the percentage of female students. The best I ever experienced was on the MSc Programmes when in one heady year we managed 20% females in a class of 40 students and these were all overseas where female participation in engineering education is much greater than in the UK.
I wanted to answer Yes and No to this question. I was a lecturer for 35 years in engineering (or Electronics as I like to call it) and myself, all my colleagues and my University had no problem with female engineers, in fact we were desperate to encourage more to join us. We knew that nearly 50% of the population were not choosing engineering and we wanted them to. We tried everything we could think of such as trying to appoint as many female lecturers as we could find, promoting non-male centric assignments and teaching styles (which is a lot harder than it sounds - when is an Arduino project male-centric? or non male-centric), lots of secondary schools work and so on. In those 35 years I do not think I saw any significant increase in the percentage of female students. The best I ever experienced was on the MSc Programmes when in one heady year we managed 20% females in a class of 40 students and these were all overseas where female participation in engineering education is much greater than in the UK.
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