Thursday, February 21, 2008 is Introduce a Girl to Engineering Day (this is part of Engineers Week 2008, February 17-23).

The National Engineers Week Foundation is asking the engineering community to focus on addressing the issue of a general lack of woman engineers.  Introduce a Girl to Engineering Day is the only outreach of its kind aimed at and organized by a single profession. On February 21, 2008 and in programs throughout the year, women engineers and their male counterparts will reach as many as one million girls with workshops, tours, on-line discussions, and a host of hands-on activities that showcase engineering as an important career option for everyone.

The National Engineers Week Foundation has made the following comments regarding this matter:

Currently only 20 percent of engineering undergraduates are women. Only ten percent of the engineering workforce are women. For years, false notions of girls’ innate inability in math, lack of science preparation in high school, and assumptions about the effects of historical and institutional discrimination, have been offered as causes for the startling disproportion.

Recent surveys, however, refute most of those theories, including the ones that question girls’ academic readiness to study engineering when they leave high school. Girls and boys take requisite courses at approximately the same rate, with girls’ enrollment often exceeding that of boys. While 60 percent of boys take Algebra II, for example, the enrollment rate for girls is 64 percent. Similarly, 94 percent of girls and 91 percent of boys take biology while 64 percent of girls and 57 percent of boys take chemistry. In the one science course – physics – where boys’ enrollment exceeds girls, the rate is 26 percent for girls and 32 percent for boys. Still, less than two percent of high school graduates will earn engineering degrees in college.

Further, assertions of the effects of institutionalized discrimination – certainly a major factor historically – seem undercut compared to professions such as medicine and law that also were largely bastions of men a generation ago yet now have a majority of women pursuing those degrees.  Instead, experts contend that the major culprit is one of perception among girls and the people who influence them, including teachers, parents, peers, and the media.

In short, girls have to perceive they can be engineeers before they can be engineers. According to the National Engineers Week Foundation, nothing conveys that message as effectively as mentors and role models and no program more effectively brings girls and role models together than Introduce a Girl to Engineering Day, now in its 8th year.

Visit http://www.eweek.org/site/News/Eweek/2008_nationalpledgeroster.shtml to access Introduce a Girl to Engineering Day activities nationwide.

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