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Shree Bose, who won the grand prize at this year's Google Global Science Fair, credits her love of science to her big brother, Pinaki. As a child, he had a habit of teaching her what he'd just learned in science class. How atoms work, for example.
"He'd spend an hour trying to explain the concept," she said. "He'd gesture wildly with his hands. He was trying to get my brain to wrap around the idea that everything we see and touch is made up of tiny, tiny parts. He had so much passion and enthusiasm for it." She was 6 then; he was 8.
Now 18 and a senior in Fort Worth Texas, Bose swept the prestigious national competition - and scored $50,000 -- for tackling ovarian cancer. She discovered a protein that keeps cells from growing resistant to the chemotherapy drug cisplatin. Among the five finalists in her age group, she was the only female.
Consider these numbers: In 2008, 41 percent of college freshman men planned to major in science and engineering, compared to 30 percent of women, according to the National Science Foundation's Women, Minorities, and Persons with Disabilities in Science and Engineering report. Some areas of science do attract more women than men, such as biology and social and behavioral sciences. But computer science, physics and engineering are overwhelmingly male.
Nowhere is that disparity more pronounced than in engineering, with computer science close behind. More than twice as many men than women attend graduate school for computer science fields, and more than four times as many men are enrolled in engineering, according to the report.
(It should be noted that America as a whole has been outpaced by competitors for years now when it comes to science and math education. In a 2009 math and science exam given to students all over the world, U.S. students placed 25th in math and 17th in science, compared to other countries.)
It's not all bad news in engineering. While master's degrees awarded to women hovered at 22.6 percent in 2010, a slight dip from 2008 and 2009 levels, bachelor's degrees among women climbed to 18.1 percent, and more engineering doctorates - 22.9 percent - were awarded to women than any time in the past, according to the American Society for Engineering Education.
Angela Bielefeldt* is a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Colorado Boulder. The percentage of women in her classes is dismal, she said. Of the 60 to 80 students that take her freshman civil engineering class, only 10 to 12 are generally women.
"In civil engineering, it's really pathetic," she said. "In environmental engineering, it's closer to 40 percent. Right off the bat, if you're a woman, you look around, and there aren't a lot of women who look like you."
Bielefeldt has been on the hunt to explain - and fix - this yawning gender gap. Inherent differences between the genders can explain some, but not all of it, she says. Every year, her students write personal essays on what engineering means to them, and she pays close attention to what her female students say. Some say they find the scarcity of women to be isolating; others cite subtle discrimination.
"Frequently, you see women relegated to very traditional roles - I'll build the robot, and you can be secretary for the group," she said. "Unless you're very assertive, men can take over the group."
And while female engineering majors grade just as well as men, they have a tendency to underrate their technical abilities, she said. "Women tend to leave engineering with higher grade point averages than the men... but they perceive that their technical skills are sometimes different. And they're not different, in reality."
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33 Comments
Add CommentOver the span of a thirty year career in engineering, I only worked with a female engineer once. On the other hand, I have no reason to believe that woman are fundamentally incapable of being good engineers. It might be that most women are not interested in the various pursuits that contribute to becoming an engineer. I suspect that biological, social and cultural factors all play a role in creating the obvious gender polarization in engineering. I also can't say that it is necessarily "bad news". If I thought that women were being deliberately excluded, I would have a big problem with that but I don't think that is the case. I am sure that it might be a little creepy to be in college classes so heavily populated with men but it's not fair to assume that the feeling comes from a conspiracy to exclude them. Bottom line: I don't see that we have a problem that needs to be solved. I might only suggest an explicit effort to recognize the disparity and offer strong evidence to assure the women who choose to be engineers that they are free to make that choice without impediment or derision. If you are good, you're in.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisCouldn't agree more. We don't push men into nursing simply because there aren't "enough" men in it (as measured by some arbitrary yardstick). We should allow for people to do what they like and interests them. And let's ensure they are barrier free and we aren't pushing them out.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisfaucets, I suspect that you must be male. I graduated 30 years ago with a BS in chemical engineering. I have worked with a handful of women, but most of my colleagues have been male. I work in the oil business, which is even more heavily male that most industries, even outside of this discipline.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYes, I was excluded at every turn. My college adviser tried to get me to change majors, saying that I was taking a job away from a man that might have a family to support, and that I would likely get pregnant and quit, so why do something so hard? My first supervisor, at Amoco (remember them? Now they are part of British Petroleum) told me and one of my peers, also female, that we should expect to never advance. He said women were too emotional to be supervisors, and we couldn't advance on the technical track because every one knows women aren't as good in science and engineering as men are.
As I moved into management, and had access to salary information, I found that I, and the other women in technical positions, consistently made lower salaries than the male engineers with equivalent education and experience levels. We might have the same pay grade, but we would be on the bottom end of the pay grade, while the men tended to be in the middle or upper end. Even 15 years ago, I was told that I didn't need the same salary as the other guys, because I was married and my husband was an engineer, so we had 'enough' money. This, from a male supervisor who had a stay-at-home wife who had a home ec degree and had never worked.
You would think things might have changed in 30 years. I went recruiting for a new engineer at my alma mater earlier this year, and found that there are still only about 5-10% females. I report to the president of my company - we decide to hire a female because, as HE stated, all things being equal he felt that the women had to overcome a lot more to get their degree and had already demonstrated they knew how to work. He probably feels this way because his daughter just graduated with an engineering degree, and he saw first hand what she had to go through, from classmates and professors. I bet YOU never had a potential employer asked if you minded getting your little hands dirty.
I am a director in the IT industry and I find most of this article to be ridiculous. People achieve their goals in life based on their desire and determination to do it not this cry baby crap that somehow women are shunned or something. It is true most of my project teams are full of male developers. However, I will always hire on and assign females first, especially for the projects with small teams or individual areas because women tend to be far more attentive to detail and actually work, I never have to babysit a female developer. As far as college, well who the heck cares. There is nothing about college that creates success. I have a number of developers who skipped college entirely and they are some of the best programmers I have. What is clear about the college experience is it does not at all reflect reality, when a person actually goes out into the workforce. For myself, I always knew from childhood that physics or engineering would be it. I ended up a programmer because I learned back in the early 80s how to program as a kid. One of my sisters is a programmer as well, getting there by doing it, went to college for it and has been working in the industry for years. My other sister no interest. My daughter, no interest. In my kids high school and grade schools, no matter how much girls are asked about science, engineering and etc... hardly any ever express a desire to actually go into those fields. I think this article dismisses the fact that women just dont like this kind of work beyond the 20% or so that are in it now. This fact is dismissed as impossible to be the cause and a whole lot of nonsense about being discriminated against is being tossed in to make it seem like women are being pushed out of these fields. A ridiculous concept since women make up more than 50% of all college grads and society has been pushing men out of college in favor of women in the name of diversity. SO with women basically given preference in every university, men being pushed out, there is every opportunity for these women to take over any degree offered including hard sciences and if this female majority of college students are still not going into hard sciences, it is primarily because they don't have interest in hard sciences. The few women who do have interest can and should pursue these careers. The world will eventually move the fools who discriminate out of the way and any woman with talent will succeed. Just as any man with talent will as well.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThere is a mean difference in mean IQ in favor of men of about 5 points in IQ. The further you go up the distribution the more skewed it becomes. There are twice as many men with an IQ of 120 plus as there are women, There are 30 times the number of men with an IQ of 170-plus as there are women.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisDescriptive Classification of Intelligence Quotients
IQ Description % of Population
130 plus Very Superior 2.2%
120-129 Superior 6.7%
110-119 High average 16.1%
90-109 Average 50%
80-89 Low average 16.1%
70-79 Borderline 6.7%
Below 70 Extremely low 2.2%
Apparently, the IQ gives a good indication of the occupational group that a person will end up in, though not, of course, the specific occupation. In their book, Know Your Child's IQ,
Glen Wilson and Diana Grylls outline occupations typical of various IQ levels:
140 Top Civil Servants; Professors and Research Scientists.
130 Physicians and Surgeons; Lawyers; Engineers (Civil and Mechanical).
120 School Teachers; Pharmacists; Accountants; Nurses; Stenographers; Managers.
110 Foreman; Clerks; Telephone Operators; Salesmen; Policemen; Electricians.
100 plus Machine Operators; Shopkeepers; Butchers; Welders; Sheet Metal Workers.
100 minus Warehouse men; Carpenters; Cooks and Bakers; Small Farmers; Truck and Van Drivers.
90 Laborers; Gardeners; Upholsterers; Farm hands; Miners; Factory Packers.
Given the relative and absolute number of men in the higher IQ ranges, one would expect a disproportionate relative and absolute number of men in those occupations associated with the same. However, feminists, jurists, and the political body of the USA and other nations have unjustly attributed this disparity to intentional and or unintentional gender discrimination against women.
Dramatic Orwellian Affirmative action and other overt and covert programs to unjustly give women those educational and employment opportunities that justly, because of both ability and effort, belong to men have resulted in significant decreases in productivity and efficiency through out the American economy and those of other nations which had adapted these authoritarian and Machiavellian precepts.
Grace Hopper would be spinning in her grave. The Navy finally named a ship after her, but it really ought to have been an operating system.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI should like to point out that there are seven types of intelligence, and IQ tests are only able to detect three. Women statistically dominate in Interpersonal and Intrapersonal intelligences, forms of EQ.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI believe it to be much more closely related to innate desire, and wiring from traditional roles. Women are frequently superior at multitasking and functioning in chaotic situations where they may not reach a single high point of focus, but distribute their attention to many tasks well simultaneously. Engineering is not as conducive to this type of wiring and so would be less appealing to a higher number of women than men.
As a woman with a very superior IQ, according to your chart, I must say that I have no desire to be an engineer as it does not offer the creativity that I prefer. I don't see this as a problem so long as women who wish to pursue engineering are offered the same opportunities and equivalent pay.
If an overall 1:1 gender ratio is the ultimate goal, an equally valid question would be;
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thiswhy are young men with an aptitude for science and engineering continuing to pursue higher education while their male peers are outnumbered in almost every other discipline?
For the last few decades the entire education system has focused on the success of female students, and countless 'glass-ceilings' have been broken.
Meanwhile a generation of 'lost boys' has emerged, but they don't garner nearly the same amount of attention.
The measure of success in an educational system should be free of racial, socioeconomic, and gender biases.
Seems that most of you are underestimating the power of gender roles and self-fulfilling prophecy that effects everyone. From birth, men and women are treated differently. The chances of being encouraged to pursue hard sciences as a young girl are extremely low; both male parents and female parents are to blame for this (dig through the research; it has been done). In the near future, I presume that this will change and the lines between stereotypes and trends such as this will will blur and become less noticeable and recognized. Until then, we can only hope that people will realize the truth and act accordingly.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIf you think there isn't deliberate discrimination against women in engineering & the physical sciences, you are living in a fantasy universe.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI can remember when the Dean of Graduate students in my alma mater (a major leading physics department in the US) openly stated he would do nothing to help my women colleagues find Ph.D advisors "because they'd just get pregnant and leave, so why waste a good position on them".
As an R&D manager I had to go out of my way to make sure women were included in the recruiting pool, otherwise we'd remain an all male enclave.
These type of environments create climates hostile or at best indifferent to women, & then we wonder why it's such a struggle to get women into traditional male fields
In this subject as in many others, the most important thing is to foster equal opportunity, not equal outcome.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisEnforced equality is as unfair as enforced inequality, and in fact it tends to be more dangerous. It often leads to oppression in the name of "justice".
Let's chip away at the tradition and prejudice that hinder the women with a technical and scientific inclination, and let them freely choose what they want to do with their lives.
On a personal note, as a male I find an all-male environment extremely depressing in the long run. Women do have a civilising influence.
The day will come when the people who design bridges and airplanes will include 50% women, irrespective of competence, in order to fill the female quota. That's the day I stop driving and flying.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis article is pretty much right on, in my computer science class, there was 1, count em, 1 female, she did quite well. I can say there was no reason there weren't anymore, just they weren't interested. I did see a few more in some of the freshmen class' when I was leaving.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThere you go making sense again, just like you did in the last article about four or five months ago that was exactly like this article. The comments on this article are almost identical to the comments on the last article. I reckon the author of the last article didn't get the comments she expected so she deleted the comments and brought the same article back. You can't keep doing the same thing over and over and expect a different result - I think Albert E, called that being crazy. I know most of you who comments here remember that article; I know that my memory is good enough that I remember it.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisTo the author of this article: Since you got almost the exact comments on this article as you did on the last article that is almost a carbon copy of this article, is your research now complete, and are you happy with the results? This should be your conclusion: You cannot force people to do what they don't want to do; when you do, you create disasters - just like the disaster the educational system created with the 'Lost boys'. I hope the system is happy with that disaster, and I hope the movie industry in happy in the disaster they created when they substituted a female for Peter Pan and a cigar smoking female in Battle Star Gal. Both of those movies were a total flop, and that is what you will do in the educational system...creating a total flop.
10 percent is a disparity? Interesting ideas but no basis in reality; this is well within the bell curve.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"If I thought that women were being deliberately excluded, I would have a big problem with that but I don't think that is the case. "
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Bottom line: I don't see that we have a problem that needs to be solved."
"If you are good, you're in."
I'm sure if you keep saying these things it's almost as good as if they were true.
"We don't push men into nursing simply because there aren't "enough" men in it"
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhat the nursing schools and hospitals do is more "pulling" men, that is, aggressively courting them. Should engineering schools and firms actively seek out women, advertise directly to them, and lure them with higher salaries?
Yes, I'm sure it's all about the interest of individual women. The possibility of systemic discrimination in hiring and promotion, for example, never having been demonstrated in any field ever. I'm sure, in fact, that there is a smaller percentage of male college graduates in general now, for no other reason than an inexplicable lack of interest on the part of individuals.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisArchimedes, in the absence of IQ tests being used to offer college places and jobs, I don't see how it pertains to the topic at hand.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOh, and by the way, pretty much every measure of worker productivity has shown increases worldwide over the past 50 or so years, but currently, the US is highest. I'm sure that will be a comfort to you.
Thank goodness. I was worried that the comment thread for an article a bout women wouldn't have enough comments devoting their concern about men.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisGood news: white men are continuing to attend college and graduate in sufficient numbers. The "lost boys" are mostly those poor and minority males who got kicked out of school and into juvenile detention under racially biased zero tolerance enforcement.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisJust out of curiosity, when medicine "finally included 50% women, irrespective of competence," did you also give up medical care?
Your certainty that it wouldn't be possible to find enough competent women to design airplanes and bridges is so charmingly old-fashioned and blatant in its misogyny.
You're funny. I don't know what you're referring to with "substituting a female for Peter Pan" since the part was written by Barrie for a woman, but the idea that it is somehow the downfall of Hollywood is killing me.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSome of the comments here really encapsulate the male attitudes that I dislike in the computer science field. And probably the reason many women leave.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIndeed, half the men wrote in to say "la, la, la I can't hear you" and the other half wrote in to express directly that women are stupid, whiny, and incompetent, and have only gotten in at all due to quotas.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI had previously been opposed to hiring decisions based on applicant's behavior on-line. Now I'm thinking that a troll-screening start-up may be the next great thing.
You forgot the third half...
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisFrom an industrial perspective, let me share some facts:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this1. women who graduate as engineers or computer scientists have if anything a better chance of getting hired in many big companies, because of internal quotas. Maybe it's the opposite in smaller companies, I cannot say, I work in a big company.
2. when we hire women engineers and computer scientists, they are on the whole no more or less competent than others. Indeed, being a multinational, I frequently interact with colleagues by email without being sure what gender they are, based on their names, and it would never occur to me that finding out they were male or female would impact my assessment of their capability.
3. The men who don't get promoted claim it's impossible to get ahead because there is too much pressure to promote women. The women who don't get promoted claim it's impossible to get ahead if you're a woman in a competitive technical field. On the whole, the best engineers and scientists, the ones who make the best contributions, tend to get ahead, and the others find some excuse to blame the system.
4. we hire between 50/50 and 60/40 male/female ratio - I'm sure we aim for 50/50 but it's not always possible. However, within this environment, you quickly see some gender differences. If a project or even a training has a high content of psychology, biology, environmental science, you can be sure that women will be over-represented. If it's a very mathematical or computational project or training, very few women will be involved.
5. In other words, this is NOT about hiring or colleagues or peer-pressure or anything like that, because none of those are involved. You are working as a chemical engineer on a project, with male and female colleagues doing similar jobs. You sit at your desk in a mixed environment. You recieve an invitation to attend a meeting or a 1-day training on a given topic. Depending on the subject, the male/female ratio will be predictably and dramatically different.
6. But it will not be 100/0 either. There are some women who like the "typically male" stuff - and they do fine, no different than their male colleagues. It is just not the norm.
All the above are facts. I am not going to give an interpretation of why this is so, all the arguments have been discussed above. But I do think that some of the claims made in the article and in the comments simply do not square with the facts. And every scientist, male or female, will tell you: you are entitled to your own opinion. But you are not entitled to your own facts :)
Forty years after I experienced the nastiest of exclusionary tactics in Zoology at the University of British Columbia, we're still studying and marvelling at how few women survive miserable treatment, both blatant and subtle.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHow 'bout we get serious about the mechanisms by which this happens? Each woman's exclusion is singular, a multi-faceted effort very particular to her and her situation, thus each becomes an isolated case. These one-off exclusions by a barage of personalized disincentives add up to the overall statistics that cause such hand-wringing and (mostly) crocodile tears.
I've written a memoire called *Spinster of Science* about my years attempting to become a scientist. The title is a twist on the 'baccalaureate' of the B.Sc. degree, which makes the guys jolly Bachelor boys with considerable prospects in a welcoming network, while even the best of women often must find their own way with their passions or interests, or they finally see the writing on the wall and get out.
Do you think there's any interest in gathering these singular stories, to try to understand HOW women become spinsters sidelined from the high priesthoods of science, applied science, math, etc? Will there ever be any real progress until we face, understand, and start getting practical about the nuts and bolts of this problem?
I am allergic to makeup and perfume. Wheezing is like being water-boarded all day long. I did a lot of wheezing as a child. [There is medicine now.] Powder puff stuff makes me sneeze at a range of 3 feet. Naturally, powder puff dust made me panic in those days. So I stayed away from anybody who made me sneeze. Since panic makes it impossible to discuss the source of panic, there you have a source of isolation of anyone who wears makeup. That was bad for them and worse for me. Women: Quit wearing makeup!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this'I want to be in engineering to help people, to have positive impacts on society and the environment.'
Problem 2: A little asperger syndrome [mild autism] is helpful in engineering and science. Autistics make great programmers. Women tend to be too much the opposite of autistic. Too much empathy can distract a person from the mathematics.
Problem 3: Engineers and scientists are excluded from decision-making in this country. Thus problem 2: Helping people requires being involved in the decision of what to build. Preachers, politicians, managers and the 1% have too much authority. Helping people is rather distant from engineering and science most of the time.
Problem 4: In those days, staying out of Viet Nam was a life-or-death problem only for men.
PS: My wife has 3 MS degrees: 2 in chemistry and 1 in computer science.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI am a retired engineer. I worked at a major research institution and the last few years of my career served as an ombudsman for female engineering employees. I am now at an age to reflect on this subject after a lot of years experience. For better or worse I think it will take time (generations) for past societal influences to be overcome in attracting women to engineering and science.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIn the meanwhile I think past societal influences have pushed women into careers where they have perhaps talents that surpass those of men. Namely, teaching children, healthcare and any work that requires manual dexterity.
Maybe the workplace should focus on proper rewards for work rather than numbers of which gender are occupied.
In the former Soviet Union there were more female engineers (as well as doctors and teaches) than male. Although there were mostly men on the top positions in all institutions - industrial, scientific, political, event in the arts, etc. including Communist Party. Why?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBecause engineers (as well as doctors and teaches) were not paid that much! So male-dominated society pushed women to low paid positions and give high paid positions to men! That's very simple.
I head that girls in US were not allowed to take math classes even in 1950s. In Russia girls had math education together with boys from Catherine the Great times and in many cases were much better in it. Also in Soviet Union in many cases boys did not finish even high school and girls-boys ratio in high school was sometimes 5 to 1. And still almost all top positions were occupied by men!
That's THE MATH of our society.
So you're saying that women were discriminated against 30 years ago? Zounds!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhat does that have to do with there being little female interest in Computing Science and Engineering these days?
Also, your employer hiring someone based on gender is sexist.
I'm repeating myself a bit, but I fail to see how 1950's societal gender perceptions play into this discussion, especially since you're talking about the former Soviet Union.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI mean, maybe males received preferential treatment in Indo-China in 1529. Is that relevant (barring the fact that I made that up without even fact-checking it)?