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Asked by lilyn2201 to Alex, Claire, Kate, Marcus, Neil on 19 Jun 2014.
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Marcus Johns answered on 19 Jun 2014:
In my office there’s a pretty even split between men and women, as with the academics in the university department. But chemical engineering traditionally has a higher ratio of women to men than other types of engineering – about a third of undergraduate students in chemical engineering are female compared to less than 10 % for mechanical engineering.
Engineering is traditionally seen as a male subject choice – the company whom I worked for in my placement year was all men – but there are schemes out there aimed at getting more women into engineering. For example National Women in Engineering Day is on 23rd June, http://www.nwed.org.uk/ .
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Claire Brockett answered on 19 Jun 2014:
In my institute there are more women than men at the moment (very slightly), and certainly for my medical engineering degree it was a 50-50 split. Like Marcus, Medical Engineering attracts a higher ratio of men to women. At Leeds University, there’s just over 20% of students that are female in the faculty of engineering (civil, electrical, mechanical).
Women and men make equally good engineers, I think that perhaps girls sometimes aren’t quite so aware of it as a career option. -
Kate Niehaus answered on 19 Jun 2014:
In my immediate lab group the number of female PhD students is starting to outnumber the men!
As the others have said, biomedical engineering is generally more equally split between men and women than other engineering subjects. This is a real shame for the other engineering subjects, where I’ve heard from many women that they struggle in such a male-dominated environment. But this is changing slowly, and I would strongly encourage any young woman who is interested in engineering to stick with it. A good friend of mine has written and thought a lot about this for software engineering, where this problem is particularly noticeable (she is an amazing software engineer). Let me know if you’d like to hear more about that!
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Alex Lyness answered on 19 Jun 2014:
Hey lilyn2201,
In both the company I worked at whilst I did my PhD and the research group that I work in now I would say the ratio was/is close to 50:50, which is really encouraging. What I would say though is that these groups of people came from all different fields (physicists, cell biologists, chemical engineers, etc.) and were/are all working together on similar problems from slightly different angles.
Some disciplines (like mechanical engineering) do have an image problem and it seems difficult to get girls opting for these courses. What is good though is overall more women are picking STEM (science, technology, engineering and maths) related courses. Having both men and women solving problems is really important, particularly for some areas of health and medicine where women may have different and more relevant experiences than men.
I think things could be improved if more women were chosen to front programmes on TV. I can only think of Liz Bonin (Bang Goes the Theory) and Dr Alice Roberts (Horizon), who are both scientists, that get to present programmes on BBC1 and BBC2.
We need more women and engineers on TV! Reckon you could be up to the job?
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