Women in Engineering and Science: Through the Decades

by Janice Lee Jijina and Lauren Elizabeth Jijina

As a member of the New York Water Environment Association for more than 20 years, I often wondered whether there were few women in the field or just few women in NYWEA. At many local events I was the only woman or one of only a few women in a room full of men. At statewide events there were more women, but we were still a very small minority. In 2001, I began an initiative to reach out to women scientists, engineers, operators, and vendors to encourage their greater participation in NYWEA. Fortuitously, at the same time a major change was occurring in women's participation in the science and engineering fields in general. The Women's Initiative has grown from an initial meeting of 8 women to an e-mail list of over 60 women. Goals include making women more comfortable participating in NYWEA-where they are often outnumbered 10 or more to 1 by men-providing career training programs, a place where women can network, and informal mentoring opportunities. A core group of six women has organized eight programs since 2001, with up to 40 women in attendance at each event. Several women have joined NYWEA as a result of this effort.

While neither NYWEA nor the Water Environment Federation (WEF) keeps data on gender, a list of the current NYWEA membership was reviewed to see general trends. First names were used to approximate members by gender. Of the 1,946 NYWEA members, approximately 221, or just over 11 percent are women. As shown in Figure 1, of current members, none of the women members joined NYWEA before the 1970s. However, approximately 19 percent of current members who joined NYWEA since 2000 are women.

Many women members are active in NYWEA. According to NYWEA's 2004 Who's Who Directory, of the 336 members who are active in chapter and state committees, task forces, and boards, approximately 60, or 18 percent, are women. Women make up about 9 percent of chapter board members, and 15 percent of committee and task force chairs. Interestingly, 27 percent of women members are active (about 60 of 221), compared with 16 percent (about 276 of 1,725) of male members.

Women lag significantly in both New York-based WEF awards and NYWEA awards. Women make up about six percent of the New York members of the Select Society of Sanitary Sludge Shovelers (SSSSS), based on data from 1984 through 2004. The SSSSS was first established in Arizona in 1940 "to provide recognition to members of an Association who make outstanding contributions to its affairs, above and beyond the call of duty and who may not receive other awards or serve the Association as an officer."

As shown in Figure 2, the number of women receiving shovels has been increasing over the past 20 years. A review of the 2003 NYWEA Awards Booklet shows only 29 women receiving awards out of 770 recipients listed, a little less than four percent. Since many of the award listings go back decades, it is expected that it will take many years before women make up a significant amount of overall recipients. However, as greater numbers of women become active in the association over a longer time period, a number more representative of the 11 percent female membership should be attainable on an annual basis. A NYWEA award has been developed to honor the memory of Emmeline Moore. While both women and men will be eligible to receive this award, by naming an award after a pioneering woman scientist, the association will have the opportunity to celebrate a woman role model each year that it is awarded. Much has been written about the gender discrepancy in science and engineering. Today, more women than men are going to college, more women are choosing professions outside the traditional workplace, and more are choosing careers in mathematics and science. But even while more women are taking this path, "more" is relative to the career. Twenty years ago, three percent of engineers were women. Today, although this percentage has more than tripled, it is still just over 10 percent of the engineering population.

The U.S. Department of Labor reports that in 2002, 98 percent of dental hygienists were women, 93 percent of nurses were women, 99 percent of secretaries were women, and 97 percent of kindergarten and preschool teachers were women. Speech therapists, child care providers, and dieticians-all of these jobs are traditionally chosen by women. But less than seven percent of mechanical engineers and only 10 percent of civil and electrical engineers were women in 2002. Why are so many women still working at traditionally "female jobs" when so many more career paths are available?

As girls move from elementary school through high school, it has been shown that they have a sharply decreasing interest in mathematics and science. The Women in Engineering Program Advocates Network (WEPAN) report, Factors in the Underrepresentation of Women in Engineering: A Review of the Literature, offers some possible explanations as to why girls in elementary and middle schools have a waning interest in mathematics and sciences. Some reasons cited include peer pressure, lack of parental support to take advanced mathematics and science courses, and associating mathematics and science with more masculine traits. Many studies also document subtle gender bias in the classroom. David Sadker, author of many publications concerning women and education, reported in Gender Equity: Still Knocking at the Classroom Door that "teachers unconsciously make males the focus of instruction, giving them more frequent and more precise attention." Other reports indicate that boys tend to be called on more often.

In 1989, a survey created by Eleanor Baum, dean of engineering at Cooper Union, was mailed out to women engineers, the results of which were analyzed by John H. Lienhard, host of the radio program Engines of Our Ingenuity. He reported that there was an overwhelming response. He said, "The largest and most forceful complaint wasn't with their work. It was with the hurdles they had to jump to get to their work. Too many of their high school counselors discouraged them from going into engineering. They even discouraged them from going into math and science. So did some of their high school math and science teachers."

In high school today, women take more than half of all advanced placement exams. However, the percentage of women taking advanced placement exams in the mathematics and sciences is much lower. In his 2002 publication, An Educator's Primer for the Gender War, David Sadker wrote, "Female enrollment in math and science courses has increased dramatically in recent years. Girls are more likely to take biology and chemistry as well as trigonometry and algebra II. However, boys still dominate physics, calculus, and more advanced courses and are more likely to take all three core science courses-biology, chemistry, and physics."

In Survey of the American Freshman, only two to three percent of freshman women intended to major in engineering, with the exception of Asian/Pacific Islanders at six percent.

The picture is slightly brighter when science and engineering are viewed together. The National Science Foundation's Science and Engineering Indicators 2004 shows that the percentage of women intending to study science and engineering rose from about 33 percent in the 1970s to about 45 percent in the 1990s and then stabilized. The study states that less than half of students in science and engineering programs complete their degrees within six years, with more women than men leaving these programs.

Still, there is hope. According to the Indicators report, the number of women who received their master's degree in science and engineering has tripled over the last 30 years. The number of women doctorate holders has increased from 20 percent in 1993 to 24 percent in 1999. Approximately 50 percent of women and 36 percent of men employed as scientists and engineers in 1999 received their degrees within the last 10 years. Therefore, as the larger proportion of male scientists and engineers reach retirement age, there will be a significant shift in the gender ratio.

The lack of role models was and continues to be a big problem for college engineering students as well as younger students. Factors in the Underrepresentation of Women in Science and Engineering reported a 1995 study showing that women made up only 9 percent of physical science professors and 4 percent of engineering professors, with only 4.4 percent and 0.3 percent respectively being full professors. They also reported that there were fewer illustrations of women scientists and engineers in textbooks and popular magazines. There are, however, growing numbers of women in leadership positions in environmental agencies and organizations, such as the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, American Society of Civil Engineers, WEF, and NYWEA. Changes are occurring in universities as well. In December 2004, Susan Hockfield will become the first female president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Statistics show that there is a gap between the salaries of men and women in engineering, starting from right out of college with a difference of a few thousand dollars, to a gap of $10 thousand or greater as time goes on. However, as there has recently been an influx of women entering the engineering profession, some of the gap in pay is probably due to the relative inexperience of the new employees.

Women have a chance to make great strides in the engineering workplace over the next few decades. Statistics show that there will not be enough scientists and engineers to fill these positions. The National Science Board warns, "If action is not taken now to change these trends, we could reach 2020 and find that the ability of U.S. research and education institutions to regenerate has been damaged and that their preeminence has been lost to other areas of the world." The National Science Board notes that those entering the workforce today with graduate degrees made the decision to study mathematics and science in middle school. If middle school and high school girls today are encouraged to pursue these fields, there can be a large improvement in the ratio of women to men in the engineering profession.

Today, there are many programs that seek to target young girls who may not know about engineering. For those young girls, there is "Introduce a Girl to Engineering" day, part of National Engineers Week that takes place once a year. Each year, about one million girls get first-hand experience with what an engineer does, and they get to meet role models in engineering. Engineers visit classrooms, and there are tours of labs, experiments, competitions, conferences, and dinners that take place all across America as engineers give girls a feel for what the industry is like.

The Girl Scouts have also made great strides in promoting careers in engineering to their troop members. Together with the Ad Council, the Girl Scouts put out a series of commercials asking girls to go to their new interactive website, www.girlsgotech.org, which features games, career choices in engineering, and interviews with women currently in the profession. The Ad Council says, "Girls Go Tech is an initiative to encourage girls to develop an early interest in these subjects and, ultimately, maintain that interest as they grow up to help ensure a more diverse, dynamic, and productive workforce in the future." Similarly, the National Academy of Engineering has their own preteen-focused website, www.EngineerGirl.org, which outlines careers in engineering in space, medicine, the environment, and communications.

While not directed solely at girls, several NYWEA programs are also aimed at encouraging elementary and secondary school students to pursue environmental careers. Each year, scholarships are awarded to college freshmen majoring in the environmental field. Annual competitions include a poster contest on an environmental theme for younger students and the Stockholm Junior Water Prize competition for high school students. The NYWEA Spring Meeting includes a public education program for elementary school students.

For college students, there are programs like MentorNet (www.mentornet.net), where students are matched one-on-one with a woman working in their field. "The mission of MentorNet is to boost the participation and advancement of women in scientific and technical careers, one of the last extensively male-dominated professional arenas. Today, more women are studying engineering and science than were a few decades ago, and many are even receiving their Ph.D.s in these fields, but with women only representing 10 percent of the engineering workforce in the U.S., there is still a long way to go before we are benefiting from the full range of talent available," says MentorNet's founder and CEO, Carol B. Muller, Ph.D.

The National Science Foundation's Advance Program provides award opportunities to individuals and organizations to increase the participation of women in the scientific and engineering workforce. Information on their grant programs is available at www.nsf.gov/home/crssprgm/advance/NSF. The Extraordinary Woman Engineers Project (www.engineeringwomen.org) is designed to inspire young women to enter the engineering field and to develop a new generation of role models for those in the field.

WEPAN, the Women in Engineering Programs and Advocates Network, is also taking a leading role in the quest for more women engineers. WEPAN has programs for elementary school, high school, and undergraduate programs. Activities for grades 3 through 12 that introduce engineering in a way that is clear and understandable are featured on their website, www.wepan.org. Younger children can try an egg-drop experiment to test which kinds of packaging work best to protect the egg and be environmentally sound, or they can study feet and the different parts of shoes that help athletes play, while learning about friction, support, and traction. Upper-level elementary school children can experiment with light and communication, while middle school students can learn about kinetic and potential energy as it applies to roller coasters and other amusement park rides. High school students can learn about secure information transfer, including coding and encrypting by hand and on computers. Each activity shows how the students approached the problems like an engineer would, and each has a presenter's guide. WEPAN also has newsletters for students of all ages, summaries of engineering programs at a good number of universities, data and statistics related to women in engineering, and conferences, training seminars, and programs designed to let women know about engineering and help them reach their goals.

Girls growing up today feel that all professions and lifestyles are open to them, a feeling that their mothers may not have shared. They can look to their older sisters who have entered science and engineering careers in greater numbers. They see more women in their communities and in the media in professional roles. Our daughters are supported by new advocacy programs and by more women in the political arena. As parents, we should encourage them to pursue all types of careers. As an organization, we can take on the responsibility of supporting a more diverse and gender equal profession. NYWEA can take on a leadership role by increasing its efforts to encourage students to study science and engineering and by continuing to support women working in the environmental field.

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Janice Lee Jijina: At Cameron Engineering, I am the associate in charge of the firm's planning and environmental projects, and I manage the firm's administrative, human resources, and technology functions. Many of my projects involve master planning, permitting and/or environmental review of proposed environmental facilities, or municipal, commercial, industrial, or residential developments. Other projects involve research, such as the impacts of vector control methods on human health and the environment, or habitat restoration. I am a member of the American Institute of Certified Planners and have served as the president of the New York metropolitan chapter of the American Planning Association from 2000 through 2002. For NYWEA, I have served as chair of the Long Island chapter, chair of the State Environmental Science Committee, of which I was a founding member, and chair of the State NYWEA Program Committee. Over the past few years, I have spearheaded a program to involve more women in NYWEA and am only the second woman in NYWEA's 76-year history to serve as vice president. I believe that involvement in professional organizations is important to a successful career, both for the networking and educational benefits to be gained, and for the value of volunteering your time and energy to support the profession.

After researching this article, I realize that I have been fortunate not to have encountered obstacles in my career, most likely because I had two strong, supportive, women mentors, Joyce Lewin, Ph.D., in graduate school and Anita Freudenthal, Ph.D., in my early career, and I have worked in a firm for the past 16 years where knowledge and ability, not gender, are important.

I worked while my children were growing up but asked for the flexibility that I needed, carving out time for school events and doctor's appointments while making sure that my job responsibilities were met. My husband, a partner in a structural engineering firm, and I have raised two very mature and independent teenagers. Our daughter, Lauren, is a sophomore at the Olin School of Business at Washington University in St. Louis. While working as an intern at Cameron Engineering this summer, she assisted in the research and preparation of this article. Our son, Marc, is a senior in high school who plans to teach high school science or social studies.

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