Sara Tracy, a graduate student in chemical engineering, works with a distillation column in Gleeson Hall on Tuesday.

Female engineers on the rise

Groups forming on campus are aiding women engineers, but the numbers are still low

By: Aleks Cherednichenko

Posted: 2/15/07

Women make up eight percent of the overall engineering workforce in the United States. That's 113,100 women employed compared to the 1.06 million men who occupy the field, said the National Science Foundation.

"There aren't too many role models for girls in the engineering field," said Ellen Momson, director of Women and Minorities in Engineering Program.

Nationwide, women make up 18 percent of undergraduate students in engineering colleges. In contrast, in 1979 the enrollment rate was 12 percent according to the National Science Foundation. These numbers do not exclusively include women who graduate with an engineering degree.

The numbers of women participating in engineering have increased over the past three decades, but only by six percent.

"I remember my experience as an engineering student in the late 1970s. I was one of the first women to go through University of British Columbia's mechanical engineering program," said Katharine Hunter-Zaworski, director of the National Center for Accessible Transportation. "It was like a boys' club."

"The classroom environment was not the most comfortable one. Most of the male professors and students were not respectful," Hunter-Zaworski said.

"I think that now, especially this campus, has focused more on retention and recruitment," Hunter-Zaworski said.

Engineering is a broad field and OSU's College of Engineering includes eight departments.

"We have close to 40 percent of students in the biological and ecological, and chemical engineering departments that are women," Momson said. "Our entering freshman class this fall term was also 40 percent larger in the number of women enrolled."

"We've seen that environmental, biological, and chemical disciplines have always attracted more women than physical or mechanical fields," said Christine Kelly, associate professor in OSU's Chemical Engineering department.

"I don't know if I'd call it a trend but I think women are drawn to the biological and chemical disciplines because they are viewed as people professions," Momson said. "Women may feel like they can make a bigger difference in our society through medicine or environmental research."

OSU is one of the few universities in the country where women are the head of the mechanical and electrical engineering departments.

One of the resources on campus available to women in engineering majors is the Women and Minorities in Engineering program.

"We try to communicate to women how vast the engineering field is and how much good can be done," Momson said. "At the Women and Minorities in Engineering program we do a lot of outreach, especially to middle school and high school students."

The program offers two all-female orientation Odyssey classes in engineering.

"This fall we had 37 women enrolled in the classes, which are funded through the Tektronix scholarship project," Momson said.

The Tektronix scholarship project puts freshman women in various departments doing research under the guidance of professors.

"This is a wonderful opportunity for mentorship. All the faculty are very supportive of all these women, and most of the faculty are men," said Erin Biddlecombe, graduate teaching assistant at the College of Engineering.

"I think that engineering gets pretty bad PR, and that's why it gets overlooked by a lot of talented women, and some just lack encouragement," said America Leavenworth, OSU's Society of Women Engineers pre-college outreach coordinator.

Society of Women Engineers is a nationwide organization with chapters on various university campuses.

"Our chapter has 15 full time members, all women," Leavenworth said. "This organization connects women to their peers and tries to send out the message that careers in engineering can be personally enriching."

Eta Kappa Nu, OSU's Electrical and Computer Engineering Honor Society, is headed by six member executives, one of which is Monica Kempsell.

"My experience as a woman engineer has actually been good; true, there are some professors who may think that I'm not as good as a man, but I prove them wrong by being at the top of my class," Kempsell, a student of electrical and electronics engineering, said.