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Women
in engineering, continued
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Patricia Daniels, whose
face graces the 30-year-old brochure’s cover, credits her
motivation to a competitive drive to "show that I could do
it." As one of only two women undergraduates, and later,
one of only two women graduate students in Berkeley’s electrical
engineering department, Daniels felt conspicuous but accepted
by her male peers, even when she became a graduate teaching assistant.
As she put it in the 1973 brochure, "Women in engineering
still have to be better than average. They’ll be watching
for that first mistake."
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| In 1973, Pat Daniels
was a graduate student in EECS, writing her thesis on eye
movement neurophysiology. "If you can work through a
problem with the same interest as you would read a novel,
chances are you ’ll like engineering and will do well,"
said Daniels in the College’s brochure, "Meet These
Engineers." |
A Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics
Engineers (IEEE), on whose Committee on Women she has served,
Daniels is now associate dean and director of Seattle University’s
Engineering and Science Project Center. As an educator she has
seen female students’ confidence rise, and has been pleased
to "hear my colleagues talk about their women colleagues
and students in complimentary terms. I see a net change in attitudes."
Yet today’s female students would still like
more company. Allison Faris, a doctoral student in the GeoEngineering
program of Berkeley’s department of civil and environmental
engineering, turned down a scholarship to UCLA’s GeoEngineering
Department. "I would have been the only woman, and that made
me really uncomfortable," she says.
The prevailing attitude toward the isolation seems to be stoicism.
"For two or three years, I was the only woman in my research
group," says Megan Thomas, a sixth-year doctoral student
active in Berkeley’s Women in Computer Science and Engineering
(WICSE) graduate student group. "It was fine, but it is nice
to go to a WICSE meeting and hear high-pitched voices occasionally.
It winds up being a useful forum for women to build the illusion
that there are more of us around than there really are."
Women’s lack of confidence in academic environments is well
documented, but it seems particularly acute in engineering. In
1998 the Women in Engineering Programs and Advocates Network (WEPAN),
a non-profit group, published a pilot climate survey called "Exploring
the Environment for Undergraduate Engineering Students."
Drawing on previous studies plus 8,000 responses from men and
women engineering students, WEPAN found that women felt markedly
less confident about their choice of a major and their work in
the lab or classroom than did men. Daniels sees this in her Seattle
University students.
"A woman student will come in with an A- and she’s
convinced she should drop out of engineering because she feels
she isn’t understanding it," Daniels says. "And
she thinks her lab partner is just the genius of the world. Meanwhile,
he could be getting a C – but he’s forging ahead with
confidence."
WEPAN’s report recommends more research focusing on single-sex
colleges, as "the minority status and feeling of isolation
do not exist in a single-sex institution, where female students
learn and live together and interact with many more female professors
and alumnae." The dearth of role models in non-single-sex
schools can be a real deterrent, agrees Doyle, who was the first
woman at the University of London Imperial College’s extractive
metallurgy master’s program. "From 1995-2000,"
says Doyle, "Berkeley hired very few new female and minority
faculty in the College, a gap that has since been addressed."
Doyle theorizes that "there’s always been a cadre of
women who would go ahead regardless of adversity, but when you
drop down the pyramid of confidence a bit, you get students with
less of the fighting spirit, who would feel more comfortable in
a classroom with visible role models."
That comfort level may explain an interesting statistical spike
in Berkeley Engineering’s numbers that occurred at the same
time. In 1995, only 10.5 percent of bachelor’s degrees in
the Industrial Engineering and Operations Research (IEOR) department
went to women. By 2000-2001, that figure had quadrupled to 43.8
percent – the second-highest ratio in the College after
bioengineering and higher than industrial engineering’s
national average of 33.2 percent. Perhaps not coincidentally,
Candace Yano, now a professor in both the IEOR department and
Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, was chair of IEOR during
that period. Although claiming she never set out to raise the
number of women enrolled in her department, Yano concedes that
she did try "to make our whole environment friendlier for
students. I wanted them to feel they could spend time here and
to know that the faculty cares about what’s going on with
them," she says. "That environment may attract more
women."
Yano also wonders whether IEOR’s primary mission, "to
help people make better decisions," as she puts it, may also
attract women. Studies show that women place more value on professions
with a "helping" quotient. Whether this preference is
distinct to their gender, or merely a byproduct of societal reinforcement
of roles, is open to debate. "The stereotype of an engineer
used to be a brawny fellow up to his knees in mud on a construction
site," wrote the publishers of the 1973 "Meet These
Engineers" brochure.
"Today, things have changed. [Engineers] work with doctors
to develop and refine medical instruments and health care systems;
we design and test earthquake-resistant buildings, and fight pollution
of all kinds. . . ." Thirty years later, the Society of Women
Engineers (SWE) is still trying to get that message across. "The
group we’re not reaching, that law and medicine are reaching,
are the women who want to do something for society," says
civil engineer Shelley Wolff, who recently completed her term
as SWE president. "They see engineering as making things,
rather than improving the quality of life. If you look at where
the women are in civil engineering, they’re in the environmental
engineering programs – water resources as opposed to building
bridges."
Women’s contributions to engineering, Doyle argues, are
essential. "I think that women have a lot to offer the profession,
as do minorities. I sincerely believe the engineering profession
would be stronger, with more creative designs and more in tune
with societal needs if engineers were to reflect society as whole."
There’s also the matter of those declining numbers. NSF
concluded its 2000 report by warning: "Whether women and
minorities are attracted to S&E (science and engineering)
majors is also of national interest because together they make
up the majority of the labor force, and they have traditionally
not earned S&E degrees at the same rate as the male majority.
Their successful completion of S&E degrees will determine
whether there will be an adequate number of entrants into the
S&E workforce in the United States."
Why are there so few women engineers? The answer may not have
changed much since 1973, but the question has become ever more
critical.
Back to
Page 1 | Page 2
Author Bonnie Azab Powell,
former editor of the College’s weekly student newsletter
Engineering News, is now a reporter for Berkeley’s
news Web site.
See our student survey on attitudes
about women in engineering in the Feb. 25, 2002, issue of Engineering
News.
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