Can Colleges Improve Gender Balance in Engineering?

I work at a college where male undergraduates are in the majority because they are in the majority of one of the college's biggest majors, engineering. I have participated in discussions about how to improve the gender balance, and it bothers me that the best suggestion is to add more female-dominated majors, like education and allied health. In my mind, this "solution" just buries an important social problem for the sake of improving a college-wide statistic. As I recently blogged, systemic biases, stereotypes, entrenched cultural expectations, as well as outright discrimination in such matters as compensation and the structuring of job requirements operate to segregate men and women into highly polarized fields of study. Though colleges are not necessarily to blame for these forces, it is wrong, I think, to affirm that polarity by inviting it as a solution to the problem of overall gender imbalance. But at the same time, I recognize that it is difficult for colleges to address the problem of gender disparities within majors. By the time students reach college, many already have some sense of what they want to study, and if they're not already interested in STEM subjects, college is not usually the place where that happens.

So I read with interest this article about efforts Notre Dame is making to improve the gender balance among its engineering undergraduates. Specifically, it has implemented a dual-degree program with a nearby St. Mary's, a private women's college. St. Mary's students majoring in math or science may also take pre-engineering classes at Notre Dame. After graduating from St. Mary's in whatever they majored at there, they may enroll at Notre Dame for a fifth year, and complete a second degree in engineering in that time. Seven students have made that choice. These women improved the gender balance in Notre Dame's engineering college not just by being there, but by making it easier to recruit female first-year students who see value in a more gender-integrated program. This has contributed to Notre Dame's increase in the percentage of female first-year students in engineering -- from 22 to 30% over the last eight years. Other efforts are also credited. For instance, Notre Dame carefully assigns first-year female engineering students to pre-selected dorms where they live in proximity with each other and upperclass mentors.

Even colleges that don't have an affiliated all-women's college in the picture can make similar changes that might help improve gender balance in engineering. First, targeting women for inclusion sends the right message that the university believes they can become engineers if they want to. Second, the careful dorm assignments help create a community of support. Third, and most importantly, recognizing that it might take longer for women to warm up to the idea of becoming engineers compensates for the fact that women in engineering have fewer role models, might have received less support for that choice in their earlier education, and might need some time to deprogram from the cultural messages like "math is hard" Barbie. The extra year/joint degree options could make it easier for any student to try out engineering and see if it's a fit. Tuition assistance and scholarships for that extra fifth year could make the dual degree in engineering even more appealing. These options should be directed at undecided students, as well as students who have already chosen some other major, like, say the female-dominated programs in allied health. Imagine someone pitching to them the value of a second degree in, say, biomedical engineering, and then offering the academic, social, and financial support to make that happen.

There is one thing, though, that colleges should not copy from Notre Dame. Two university officials quoted in the article referred to female engineering students as "girls." No one referred to their counterparts as "boys," and it would have stood out if they had. I agree that to overcome cultural biases and stereotypes, colleges and universities need to pay special attention to female students in STEM fields. But that is not a license to infantilize those students or think of them as less capable or mature than their male counterparts. Hopefully those quotes are an isolated occurrence. Otherwise, the message it sends will undercut the positive steps toward dismantling the gender imbalance in engineering.

Physics, Engineering, and Title IX Quotas, Oh My!

The alarmist tone of John Tierney's column in today's New York Times, warning that university physics and engineering departments are about to be "Title Nined," conjures up an image of banished male scientists being consoled by ex-wrestlers as they all gaze longingly at the university campus from just outside the gates. Science is about to invoke the dreaded Q-word (as in Quota).

Indeed, government agencies that dispense federal funds are becoming increasingly concerned about the possibility of sex discrimination by universities who receive research grants.
But this doesn't mean that NASA or the National Science Foundation, for example, are about start counting scientists by sex the way that athletics departments do. Because while all education programs are governed by Title IX, only athletics programs are subject to the regulatory interpretation that measures equality by statistical proportionality (as one option among several). And this is for good reason. Only athletic departments have been granted the special dispensation to satisfy Title IX's nondiscrimination mandate by employing a "separate but equal" framework. Because athletic departments practice segregation, which history teaches is usually discriminatory, they have to compensate by proving equality in other ways, one option being statistical proportionality.

Because academic departments are not segregated, we are not likely to see anything like a "quota" forcing talented men out of science (or trapping talented women in, as Tierney seems to suggest). Rather, the application of Title IX to physics and engineering departments will more likely resemble the application of other discrimination statutes like Title VII to gender-integrated workplaces. In those applications, the focus is not on statistical parity, but on the rooting out of intentional discrimination, pretext, and "neutral" practices that have a disparate negative effect women. One has to wonder if these are practices that those who raise the red-herring of quotas secretly favor?

[h/t to BC, HW, and WM for sending along the link]

Women Graduates Expect to Earn Less than Men

A recent study by Duquesne University professor Charles Wilf shows that women who graduate from college expect to be paid less than their male counterparts. The survey, called the Collegiate Seniors' Economic Expectation Research (SEER) Survey & Index, is intended to be administered annually and tracks trends in career expectations.

Fifty-one percent of women and 35 percent of men polled expect to earn under $30,000 in their first year after college. Twelve percent of women and 24 percent of men expect to earn more than $50,000. (A 2007 report by the American Association of University Women has similar findings: women earn 80 percent of what men make one year after college; that gap widens to 69 percent after 10 years.)

This gender gap in expected earnings results, at least in part, from the choice of academic major. Women who participated in the survey tended to major in the social sciences while men tended to major in fields like computer science and engineering, which generally have higher starting salaries and greater marketability. This finding only highlights the importance of encouraging women students to feel supported and mentored when pursuing fields such as computer science and engineering, something that many colleges and universities are still struggling to achieve.

Elsewhere in the blogosphere

David Cohen posts at Feminist Law Profs about Cal Poly's efforts to evade Title IX by sponsoring men-only engineering classes in Saudi Arabia.

-and-

At Womenstake.org, Neena Chaudhry of the National Women's Law Coalition reflects on the three-year anniversary of the Department of Education's 2005 Clarification, which allows schools with grossly inequitable particpation opportunities to satisfy Title IX using the results of a web-based survey of female students' interests and abilities.

Increasing the Pipeline for Female Engineering Students

The Daily Pennsylvanian reports that the University of Pennsylvania has launched a new program, called Advancing Women in Engineering, to encourage the development and support of women engineering students, and to increase the support system for middle school and high school girls who think engineering would be a cool career to pursue.

As we've mentioned previously on the blog, supporting, hiring and promoting women who are interested in careers in the math, engineering and science fields is a challenge that many schools are still struggling with. It sounds like this program is a step in the right direction.