Ryan ChartrandIt’s no secret that few women study engineering at Cal Poly. The most recent statistics released by the school showed that women make up only 15 percent of engineering majors.
The National Science Foundation’s Advance program recently awarded four Cal Poly professors nearly $200,000 to study the experiences of female faculty in fields including engineering.
Nilgun Sungar, professor for the College of Science and Mathematics; The team includes Mary A. Armstrong and Jasna Jovanovic, both professors in the College of Liberal Arts; and Daniel Walsh, a faculty member in the College of Engineering.
Sungar said that the number of women graduating with degrees in engineering is higher than the number of female engineers teaching at higher institutions of learning.
“Something we’re possibly trying to identify are barriers that prevent women from getting jobs or retaining teaching positions relating to STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) fields at Cal Poly,” Sungar said.
That study is currently in the planning stages and little is presently known why there is a shortage of women engineers teaching at Cal Poly.
Sungar and the team want to avoid making assumptions. “We’re trying to enter this with an open mind,” she said.
Julie Workman, a software engineering lecturer at Cal Poly, said she became interested in engineering only after taking a computer science support course for her mathematics major at Cal Poly.
“I just happened to take a course that I found interesting, and I didn’t care that it was all men,” she said.
Workman thinks that perhaps some women are uninterested in studying engineering and suggested that an increased focus on math courses targeted towards young women could possibly change this.
Students like biomedical engineering junior Lesley Telford hold similar views.
“It’s shown that students lose interest in math and science in the fourth or fifth grade level,” Telford said.
Telford, a member of the Society of Women Engineers, said the club exists to expose young women to female role models. She thinks having female professors is unnecessary as long as professors are supportive of women in engineering.
Another trend some SWE members noted is the high number of female biomedical engineering majors compared to women in other engineering concentrations.
Telford credits her concentration in biomedical engineering to her interest in both biology and engineering.
Mechanical engineering senior and SWE member Brian Hill thinks gender stereotyping is a possible factor in a women’s decision to study biomedical engineering instead of other areas, such as mechanical engineering.
“The content is probably more geared to what they’re used to,” he said. “Whereas mechanical engineering is more like a ‘cold’ major; there isn’t really a human factor when we design things like a gear box.”
However, a 2007 estimate of employed engineers in the U.S. released by the U.S. Department of Labor said that women are employed in mostly civil, mechanical and industrial engineering fields.
The latest survey data released by the Engineering Workforce Connection showed that although the number of female enrollment in engineering majors has increased, the percentage compared to males has slightly decreased.
Hill considers himself lucky for having an average of one to two women in his mechanical engineering classes.
“I’ve heard of classes where it’s just guys,” Hill said. “When you have one or two women, and max out at four in classes of 20 or 30 students, the percentage is really low.”
He speculated that women don’t aspire to teach for reasons similar to why men don’t; desire for a higher income or desire to put their education to work in a commercial field.
Software engineering junior Alyssa Daw said she would like to teach one day, but only after years working in the industry. She credits some of her professors for this new ambition.
“Before I did not see teaching as an option, but after speaking with some professors, I now would like to take some classes on teaching,” she said.