Few Women Choose to Become Engineers

It's no secret to anyone that professions such as engineering were never too much pursued by women, but a new statistical research shows that the trend is still diminishing to this day, despite the fact that they have long since begun to succeed in professions that were until a century ago considered to be exclusively appropriate for men. The investigation also reveals that only one in five American graduate students are females, while the others are all males, and the percentage of women has been slightly, yet constantly, decreasing.

“There has clearly been no progress in the last 10 years,” Purdue University's Engineering Program Dean Leah Jamieson said. According to the National Engineers Week Foundation (NEWF), a consortium of engineering societies, corporations and government agencies, only 20 percent of undergraduate students seeking to major in exact sciences are women. The research was conducted on 6,400 students ready to major in science, of which only 1,275 were females. A slight increase was noticed from 1994 to 1998, when the percentage went up from 19 to 20, but, since then, no change has been recorded in the trend.

The Purdue dean also offered an explanation for this worrying tendency. She told that young women mostly wanted a job through which they could help others, and give something back to society. That was one of the main reasons why so many of them chose to become doctors, Jamieson added. But, in the engineering and related fields, the immediate return is not that visible. It takes a lot of time to do groundbreaking research, and the innovations then take a lot of time to be implemented. “As a profession, we consistently talk about ourselves in ways that simply are not aligned with what young women are looking for,” the PU expert shared.

She explained that cases in which young women were the sole female participants in science and technology classes were not rare occurrences in universities around the United States. But women would participate in these classes, she was convinced, if they had role models, or if better strategies of attracting them were to be devised. The young girls also have to be made aware of the fact that exact sciences offer flexible and stable careers, which can be pursued to a high point, Cellular News reports.