March 2014

CONCEPTS
When Women Leave, Engineering Loses

BY CRAIG MUSSELMAN, P.E., F.NSPE

Several years ago, I was at an ABET symposium on engineering education. A man rose to say, “I would like to comment on a topic we don’t often discuss in the engineering profession. I have been a professor for over 30 years now, and I can tell you that more of my former female engineering students are not working in engineering than are, at this point in time. I wonder if the engineering profession is not user-friendly to women.” That comment has stayed with me, and I believe this is an issue that all of us in the engineering profession need to think about.

Here is the issue: In round numbers, about 18% of graduates earning baccalaureate degrees in engineering are women, but women make up only about 10% of the engineering workforce. What is going on?

First, the overall numbers can be misleading. Data from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) indicate that the percentage of women obtaining baccalaureate degrees in engineering was less than 2% in 1975, and now is about 18%. The number of engineering graduates, both men and women, was about 40,000 per year in 1975 and now is at an all-time high level of about 83,000 per year. I calculate the weighted average of women with a BS in engineering in the 37-year period from 1975 through 2012 to be about 15%. The number of female engineering graduates has been essentially steady since 2004 at about 15,000 per year.

A 2011 research report, Stemming the Tide: Why Women Leave Engineering, provides data from an extensive survey of 3,745 women educated in engineering and describes the paths they took. Here is a brief but enlightening summary.

Women Who Never Entered Engineering
Fifteen percent of the respondents received a BS degree in engineering but never entered the engineering workforce. The most common reasons were lack of interest in engineering, dislike of the “engineering culture,” a desire to start their own business, and an indication that they had never planned to enter the engineering workforce.

Women Who Left Engineering More than Five Years Ago
Twenty percent of the respondents received a BS degree in engineering and worked in the field, but left more than five years ago. Many indicated they left to spend more time with family, that they developed other interests, lost interest in engineering, or did not like the employment culture or prospects for advancement. Twenty five percent provide full-time family care.

Women Who Left Engineering Recently, Less than Five Years Ago
Eight percent of respondents were women who left engineering within the last five years. One-third of them reported that they left engineering to stay home with children, but two-thirds are working full time in other fields, 78% of them in executive or management positions.

Women Who Remain Employed in Engineering
Fifty-seven percent of respondents remain employed in engineering and are as likely to be married and to have children living at home as those who have left the profession. The responses indicated that women who have left engineering report that they are equally confident in their engineering abilities and are equally confident in their ability to manage work-life role demands as are the women who remain employed in engineering.

The upshot here is that women leave engineering in significant numbers. Between one-quarter and one-third of women who leave engineering do so to provide full-time family care. However, the majority of women who leave the profession, between two-thirds and three-quarters, do so for a different reason—to pursue a different line of work, predominantly in executive and management positions. A study by the Society of Women Engineers identified a 10%–15% gap in retention in the engineering profession between males and females.

It is not uncommon for graduate engineers to pursue careers in other fields. One NSF-funded study indicated that an estimated 1.3 million men and women in the US with an undergraduate degree in engineering are in engineering positions, while 1.1 million engineering graduates have pursued different careers, largely in management, and about 400,000 engineering graduates of working age are not in the workforce. So, for all engineering graduates,  about 46% are  working in engineering; the balance are working in other fields, predominantly management related, or are out of the workforce. Men leave engineering, too, in significant numbers, but women are leaving for different reasons.

There may be a significant difference in retention among various engineering disciplines. Recent data from ASEE indicate that the disciplines with the highest percentage of female graduates are environmental (44%), biomedical (39%), chemical (33%), and biological and agricultural (31%). The percentage of females in both mechanical and electrical/computer engineering, by far the largest engineering disciplines in terms of numbers of graduates, have the lowest percentage of female graduates of all disciplines (about 11%).

The migration of women from engineering to other lines of work constitutes a significant loss to the profession of both talent and perspective, and it’s one that deserves our attention.

Craig Musselman, P.E., F.NSPE, is author of NSPE’s Licensing Blog (www.nspe.org/blogs). This article is adapted from one of his blog postings.