Women in Engineering Education Webinar

Women in Engineering Education

I had the opportunity to participate in an IEEE webinar today discussing the ways that we can make engineering more accessible to women. Mary Ayre, Julie Mills, and Judy Gill presented ways to make engineering education more inclusive for women.

Here are some concerning facts (Ayre, Mills, & Gill, IEEE PowerPoint webinar, November 2, 2010)…

· According to the speakers, the number of women in engineering undergraduate students peaked around 2003 and is declining. Except for in Britain where it continues to grow, but their percentage of women engineering students is still below the declining average of many or the countries in the rest of western Europe and the US.

· Women make up only 11% of the engineering workforce in Australia

· Women engineers only stay in the engineering workforce an average of 5 to 10 years

On top of this I found an article that indicated that the “growth” of a society could be judged by how many engineers that the society has in comparison to the number of attorneys (Murphy, Shleifer, & Vishny, 1991). Murphy and colleagues (1991) postulate that perhaps some professions could be considered to be better for a society than others, and in their research, they found that engineers were “better” for society than lawyers and stockbrokers.

I believe that it is important that we encourage more people to become engineers, look at other opportunities to allow people to join the pipeline, and first and foremost take care of the people that have already made a commitment to engineering.

Here are some of the suggestions Ayre, Mills and Gill provided to create an engineering curriculum that appealed to a broader audience.

First, I loved their definition of curriculum: the sum total of all the factors in the classroom: the topics, the students, the teachers, the attitudes, the lenses.

There is evidence that many courses have a masculine gendered engineering curriculum focusing on cars, rockets, and weapons (King, 2008).

In their research, they have found that women and men as well have a strong interest in the social context and social value of technology. They encourage professors to discuss these issues when introducing topics.

Allow for flexible:

Teaching and Learning

Teaching Practices

Learning Environment

There are multiple ways of learning visual, auditory and kinesthetic is one conceptualization of learning styles, but Gardener certainly broadens the horizons with his version of multiple intelligences. Allow for opportunities for student to learn in their preferred manner. Ask yourself if there are ways that this assignment could be personalized and be both equal and different?

Become aware of your own Gender lenses

Assumptions about students

Aims and objectives, which are yours and which are the colleges

Assessment

Content

The authors discussed active learning strategies and a variety of methods to accommodate multiple learning styles.

And, depending upon your end goal of this program, the authors acknowledged that attracting, retaining and supporting women in engineering cannot be the sole responsibility of women engineering faculty. The institution needs to support the mission in ways other than giving faculty more to do!

The webinar will be on the IEEE website by early next week. There were some excellent strategies and resources provided. If you are interested in this area, I highly recommend taking a look.

References:

Ayre, M., Mills, J. & Gill, J. (2010). WIE webinar for IEEE 9 am on November 2, 2010.

Murphy, K., Shleifer, R., & Vishny, R. (1991). The allocation of talent: Implications for growth. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 106 (2), 503-530.