Women in Engineering: A Historical Analysis

“As a woman in the United States, there are certain realities I have to face, like lower wages and lowered expectations.”

Speaking candidly about her experience as a woman in the engineering field, Columbia student Madison Cox elaborates on the pressures women face not only in the STEM department, but in society as a whole. Women in engineering have been a slowly increasing minority over the last few decades, following the feminist movement and a decreasing stigma around employed women.

Women in STEM have helped shape technology today, and will continue to do so, heading into the future. However, this trend has never grown as quickly as it should have, and even today, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), less than fifteen percent of engineers are women. As a result of historical contention and traditional ideas about the roles of women, the lack of support women receive in education, and hostile working conditions leading to a lack of retention in the field, the number of women in engineering occupations receives only slow, stagnant growth. Looking forward, this trend could have significant impacts on society in the future, both positive and negative.

Historically, the STEM field has been predominantly male. Out of 575 nobel prizes awarded in Physics, Chemistry, and Medicine, only 18 of those prizes have been claimed by women, two thirds of them in Medicine. Only five women have won prizes in Physics or Chemistry. While there isn’t a specific nobel prize for engineering, this gender disparity is reflected across all engineering disciplines, where at most, women make up twenty percent of the occupation, as is the case for computer engineers, according to data from the BLS.

However, while this data looks grim, these numbers actually demonstrate an improvement over the years. In 1957, engineer Emma Barth gave a lecture about her concerns pertaining to the lack of women in the STEM field, citing the statistic that the previous year, out of over 120,000 women receiving college degrees, only 62 had studied engineering—that’s less than one percent of one percent. Compared to this statistic, 15 percent seems like incredible progress, which, in a way, it is. But simple progress will never be enough.

While this trend may be growing, the societal attitudes that facilitate this growth are not changing fast enough. In 1989, a study conducted by two California based college Professors, Gregg Robinson and Judith McIlwee, uncovered many traditional gender ideas influencing womens’ decisions while in the field. Surveying hundreds of women engineers, and interviewing several as well, they found that many women preferred electrical and computer engineering work to mechanical engineering work as it was “clean”, whereas mechanical engineers perpetuated the image of the masculine “tinkerer” or mechanic. By insinuating that women should be limited to the less “manly” engineering disciplines, traditional gender stereotypes would continue to affect the STEM field.

While society has become more progressive, opening up opportunities for women, there is no doubt that certain sentiments still remain, if perhaps at a subtler level. Mid-sixties psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim explained the dominating attitude of the time.

“As much as women may want to be good scientists or engineers, we must remember that they want first and foremost to be womanly companions of men and to be mothers”

While this flawed hypothesis would have been openly accepted in the sixties and seventies, today it would not be, at least not publicly. Acts like Title IX, a law requiring equal treatment for girls, have made steps in the right direction. Between the years 1987 and 1997, the amount of high school girls enrolled in AP physics increased by ten percent, and the percentage enrolled in AP Calculus increased by six percent, according to the National Women’s Law Center. However, there continues to be an underlying historical force stopping women from pursuing engineering further.

To many men, perhaps Bettelheim’s explanation seems plausible—why else wouldn’t women want to become engineers? The pay is historically high, as are benefits. But the myth that women only want to please men has been debunked repeatedly through the feminist and LGBT movements, as well as the increasing marriage age and divorce rate. The only reasonable explanation for the disparity of women in the engineering field is an inhospitable workplace culture, exacerbated by male engineers’ subliminally sexist ideals and inflated egos.

A study by researchers at several prestigious engineering schools, headed by MIT Sociologist Peter Dizikes, asked women to record journal entries about their experiences in the field, and one common motif was continually being undermined by the male students. To quote one student’s experience, “two girls in a group had been working on the robot we were building in that class for hours, and the guys in their group came in and within minutes had sentenced them to doing menial tasks while the guys went and had all the fun in the machine shop.” Simple interactions like this can have a huge effect on girls, and their eagerness to continue in the field. If they believe early on that they’ll forever be sentenced to “menial tasks”, forced to watch the men have “all the fun”, why should they want to continue?

Another study, done by the University of California and the Society of Women Engineers, produces data with highly concerning implications. When asked about the impact of diversity on the engineering field, 17 percent of men stated that they believed an increase in diversity threatened the integrity of the engineering field. This could mean that the amount of men with discriminatory attitudes practically outnumbers the amount of women in the field, the perfect recipe for a hostile, inhospitable work environment.

It is one thing to be a woman studying engineering in college; though the classes are mostly men and the historical lack of automatic support and/or encouragement perpetuates, there are now many safety nets keeping women in the field. As two research studies showed, at most colleges, there are places and resources to find support and achieve success, from peer mentors to clubs and even living communities. Most universities also have a system of advising for women to take advantage of for further support. However, once college is over, most women enter the engineering workforce, a place even more hostile and less forgiving than college.

Even though 19 percent of college engineering degrees are awarded to women, only 13 percent of engineering jobs belong to women, according to the MIT study. This means that workplace conditions must be the thing driving women away. According to researcher Nadya Fouad and Romila Singh at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, who conducted a longitudinal study of female engineers leaving the workplace, only one fourth of the women sought to spend more time with children or family, the primary reason men expect when hearing of a woman leaving the field. The other subjects of the study left because they could find executive success in other fields, such as construction management, without being subject to the same harsh workplace conditions.

While society may slowly be easing the stigma around women in STEM, there’s no point in more women earning engineering bachelor’s degrees if the field won’t retain them. Just like in higher education, male attitudes need to change. No longer should men have “all the fun” while women are renounced to “menial tasks”. If the rate of women joining the engineering force continues to stagnate, the future of science and technology may do just the same.

Mary Magnuson,
Editor, Our Science.