I have chosen No, but I feel it needs an explanation.
From a point of view of introducing women to the engineering career, and supporting them to study to become an engineer, I have to say that in many countries there is an adequate support available, and many other are making big steps forward. In fact, a very vigorous encouragement to pursue any STEM career, at least here in UK, is particularly felt, especially when the girls are any good at science or maths (going around the school with my daughter, listening to teachers pitching their subject for choosing GCSE subjects has been an eye opener!).
So, definitely a lot of pressure is put on a girl at the time of choosing to pursue a career in engineering (both because engineers are always needed and also to try to prove we live in countries of equal opportunities), which sometimes might lead to forgetting what those girls really want to do in their life. Surely, all this should point towards answering Yes to the poll question.
But actually, everything changes when it comes to support given to women entering real world job market and the working career. Despite all the big steps forward in equal opportunity, the vast majority of engineering positions are filled by men. And the more you move to the top of career ladder, the less women can be found. Sure, this is largely due to the fact the engineering world seems to be still a men realm. But I have to say, in my experience, it is not just a statistical result: only very few, and truly exceptional women, managed to progress in their career to the very top, often loosing promotion to a far less worthy man candidates. This is where the real support should be. And should start at workplace. I agree most of the disparities lie in the social and cultural background of parents, families, communities and institutions, but even in the most advanced countries we are still far from gender neutral meritocracy .
Men have a wider networks of connections, and often far more influential and powerful, which leads to men choosing other men for powerful positions, most of the time without malice or real will to discriminate, being really convinced they make the best choice. But the result is gender inequality nonetheless. It is a dog chasing its tail. So, this is where my "No" is coming from.
Ultimately I think us parents and grandparents, first of all, need to take responsibility, by teaching our children and grandchildren (both girls and boys) to recognise merit above all, as the only "just" way of organising any society. In time, this value would trickle into all layers of society...but this might turn out to be just another utopia.
Notre Dame initiated the Women in Engineering program (WIE) in 2002 to address the low enrollment and persistence of women in engineering majors. The program focuses on providing ways for women to enrich their engineering experience, while also identifying and removing any barriers to their success. WIE research has identified curricular and extracurricular changes that have enhanced the experience of women on campus and have led to tremendous success. For example, in 2002, only 45 percent of women who started in engineering persisted in the program as sophomores, compared to 62 percent of men. By 2004, more than 70 percent of both women and men persisted in the program, and today nearly 80 percent continue in engineering as sophomores. Moreover, the enrollment of women has climbed from 25 percent of each class to 33 percent. And, a unique partnership with Saint Mary’s College in Notre Dame, Indiana, provides opportunities for students at the all-women’s college to earn an engineering degree from Notre Dame while pursuing a bachelor’s degree in chemistry or mathematics at Saint Mary’s.
I suspect a lot depends upon the environment/community you grow up in. If your parents/parents friends are involved in engineering, then I suspect you are far more likely to be supported if you choose engineering career yourself. If your local community is heavily engineering based then you are also likely to get drawn in just by growing up in that area.
Things change with time and it is difficult to know how schooling has changed since we were all there, but looking back to my school days, engineering was not supported in general across the board. I think women actually had the advantage here as they were doing more 'engineering' in cookery class when baking and assembling fancy cakes than the men (who at that time were excluded from such activities).
I recall I had to sit through ten years of school before being able to pick an engineering class as an elective (against everyone else's wishes) and even then it was only something like 45-90mins a week, and almost all of it self-study. There were only three other men taking that elective that year. I know that the year above had a woman taking it as I bought her engineering study books. However even though I had shown a strong interest in engineering subjects at least five years prior to that, I still never got that oscilloscope for Xmas... My parents weren't engineers though. None of the careers guidance suggested a career in engineering either. I had to walk that path alone.
So, from that perspective, I don't think anyone was particularly supported to pursue a career in engineering.
There are a couple of interesting links about Eva Håkansson 's engineering career path here which may be of interest:
The question is probably very culture dependent. But even when society supports females to pursue engineering careers, they are not as interested in engineering as men.
They're totally not supported from what little I can tell. Probably needs a woman to tell.
In the workplace, I see groups of male engineers huddled together discussing things, forgetting their female engineers in the room. I've seen this quite a few times.
It's an uphill struggle to acquire information and progress in this manner.
Then the online forums are disgustingly sexist (not to mention xenophobic and casually racist). Thankfully we don't overtly see it here.
I fully agree. Engineering by itself is as gender neutral as it gets. History and early education are the biggest reasons for the real numbers of engineers.
I think that men and women have equal opportunities to pursue an engineering career. However, parents, kindergarten and elementary school play a crucial role in motivating them to do so.
If you hide something from a child (for example do not let them dismantle, repair, destroy things, learn how the stuff works etc.), they can loose interest in some fields. On the contrary, if the child sees parents doing engineering, they can gain much more interest. This also applies to other fields of interest.
I believe it is a job of a parent to expose their children to various fields and help them with their process of finding, what makes sense to them (but not choose for them).
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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