I couldn't help overhear what the young woman at the table next to mine told her lunch mate: "So, my sister tells me she wants to go into engineering and I'm like, 'Are you crazy? You'll be the only girl in a classroom full of guys!"

Did she know what she was talking about or had she just bought into the flawed perception that "girls don't study math and science"? It turns out, both.

First a few statistics. Nationally, female enrollment in engineering schools has hovered between 17 and 20 percent and "has been trending down since 1998-99," says Steve Melsheimer, associate dean of engineering and science at Clemson University.

Out of the nearly two million people who worked as engineers in the U.S. in 2006, about 223,000 were women, according to U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Now for the perception. Young women "keep hearing that the field is non-traditional," says Serita Acker, program director of Women in Science and Engineering (WISE) at Clemson, which they take to mean that "traditionally, women do not choose engineering as a career. When they think they'll be the only one in their class or field, they hear, 'Lonely road. Not much support. Not an area of interest to other women.'" So "in many companies and engineering schools young ladies find that they are the only one in the class or company."

Who feeds the perception? When Acker asks elementary, middle school and high school age females what engineering is, she says the reply is "generally, a train conductor, someone that works in a plant, works with machines. They do not view it as an attractive field."

"If they do not have a role model they have no idea how this field affects the world. How many TV programs show females as engineers? They think it is boring because it is not shown as a career choice for females."

The low numbers of women in these fields is in part due to fewer women role models, but also because of "prevailing assumptions that women aren't as skilled in those fields and that inflexible research schedules will interfere with family responsibilities might worry employers," says a Newsday article.

"Some employers still believe a woman with a child won't perform her job properly or that a woman professor won't be as successful in placing a protege," explained Phoebe Leboy, retired professor of biochemistry at the University of Pennsylvania in the article. "So these young women look at the hurdles to being successful in these fields and say, 'I'm not going to make it.'"

Chloe LeGendre, a junior at the School of Engineering and Applied Science of the University of Pennsylvania, majoring in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, says her classes are "about 30-40 percent female." She went into the field because she had enjoyed chemistry and math and was "particularly fascinated by genetic and protein engineering."

She says she is treated the same as the males in her classes and never feels uncomfortable. But when she was in an interview with a chemical engineering tenured faculty member at another university, she was told,

"Women never did well in engineering because they had their priorities all wrong," which "only inspired me to work harder and to attend a different school," she says.

Surveys conducted by Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) indicate that young girls' images of an engineer as someone who just builds bridges or work on cars is fading. Outreach programs such as RIT's WE@RIT and WISE, run by Serita Acker at Clemson and others across the country have helped. But perception is a powerful thing and we can influence it, says Acker, if we stop referring to engineering as a 'non-traditional' choice for females.

© by Andrea Kay