Essay About Committee Assignments And Faculty Of Engineering Programs

The Challenges of Women in Engineering
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Susan McCalib
December 2, 2003
The Challenges of Women in Engineering
“The application of scientific principles to practical ends as the design,
construction, and operation of efficient and economical structures, equipment, and
systems.”(1) This is a dictionary definition of engineering. Engineering is a noble
profession that touches nearly every facet of daily life. It is also a profession
that has historically been difficult for women to enter into and be successful at.
What are the challenges facing women in engineering? The most prevalent
challenge is a result of gender discrimination. Societies of the world have typically
channeled females into roles that are traditionally “female”. Some traditional
female roles would include careers in teaching, art (culinary, design, etc.), history,
and homemaking. Math and science are traditionally male areas of study, even in k-
12 education. Girls have not been encouraged to enter these areas and when they
have, they have been evaluated more critically than their male counterparts.
Statistics indicate that in 1991, 17% of first year entrants to engineering
degree courses were women.(2) Other studies cite that only 9% of American
engineers are women and only 20% of engineering degrees are earned by women.(3)
Studies from Ireland indicate a similar low trend where 20% of female students
are in engineering, but they have high drop rates, low retention, and low promotion
rates in later careers.(4)
Discrimination of females in engineering is not limited to students, but also
to faculty of engineering programs. A large study completed by the Massachuset
Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1996 and amended in 1997 and 1998 indicates
that discrimination was high within the faculty of the MIT. In 1994, there were
only 22 tenured female faculty at MIT versus male tenured faculty of 252.(5)
Female faculty were found to have endured a wide disparity with their male
counterparts in salary, space, resources for research, named chairs, prizes,
awards, amount of salary paid from individual grants, teach obligations and
assignments, committee assignments (department, institute, outside professional
activities and committees, pipeline data), numbers of women/men students, and
faculty overtime. Steps have been implemented to resolve this discrimination and
more recent findings have indicated an increase in number of tenured women
faculty in addition to improvements in the other areas mentioned.
Competent engineers need to have several key areas of skill: 1) critical and
creative thinking, 2) aptitude in the math and science disciplines, 3) the ability to
work together with others (team player), and 4) being able to ask questions and
solve problems. Gender discrimination has kept women from engineering because
of the bias that women can’t excel at math or science, that they can’t think
critically, or can’t solve problems. Culture projects engineering as a male career