International Women in Engineering Day

Every year on June 23, the world celebrates International Women in Engineering Day. I noticed on an old picture there was only one girl in my 30-student thermodynamics class of 1986. The reason I write this blog however, is that people tell me the M/F ratios have not changed that much since, whereas we were all convinced, back in 1986, that things would change soon.

You could ask why this matters. This is a justified question. Why does it matter that one gender is underrepresented in a particular subject or faculty? Couldn’t we just live with that? The classical answer from the point of view of industry/ society, is that some potential is underused: the underrepresented gender may contribute more than it actually does. This ignores the fact that there may be an overrepresented gender, the men. Perhaps the overrepresented gender is contributing inefficiently to the bottom line, assuming that each gender has specific inherent qualities the other gender may have to a lesser extent? There is however another reason why imbalance is bad. An unbalanced ratio may make studying at a particular faculty less attractive for the students themselves either because of too many of your own gender or because of too many of the opposite gender. Gender imbalances may lead to boring study places and boring work places.

As for the causes, I have been reading a lot of articles about this. Most articles spend too much attention on why girls / women don’t study engineering, but they don’t spend sufficient  attention on the boys/ men motivation, as if that doesn’t matter much. Moreover, the articles focus too much on career impediments, like glass ceilings and salary differences. These career impediments equally exist in other professions, so why should there be a bigger problem in engineering? The choice for a scientific or engineering profession is made at secondary school, long before these career differences are actually experienced.

Most articles agree on a few things. There are hidden forces in education which drive boys / girls in divergent directions, and this is not so much related to school orientation, but rather family role related. It is interesting to note that this divergence is worse in industrialised countries. In poorly industrialised countries, men and women are equally forced to look for a job with sufficient revenue, whereas industrialised countries offer the luxury to women to accept somewhat less paid, but stable part-time or 9-5 jobs. As a result, paradoxically, industrialised countries seem to have more imbalance in the M/F engineering participation ratio.

Another finding is the role of self-efficacy. Self-efficacy is the degree to which you are confident you will be able to solve a difficult task. For technical challenges, girls/women seem to have a lower self-efficacy than men, but the question is whether this low self-efficacy is sufficient ground not to start the studies. Men with low self-efficacy exist as well and are kindly asked to study engineering anyway and suffer the consequences of their lack of self-confidence. “Bite on your teeth!” we say in Dutch. I'm joking a little but our society is tough on men as well.

I’m in favour of general STEM actions to encourage young people in general for science. However, I’m not in favour of girls-only actions, as these may have an adverse effect.

I refer to my blogs: ‘The Engineer’s Social Role’ and to ‘European Young Engineers’.

Afbeelding van Dee via Pixabay