Archive for Julien Russell Brunet

Blame culture. Or genes. Or Dilbert. In engineering, it’s a man’s world—for now.

The Eurythmics had it only partly right. Back in 1985, the British pop duo of Annie Lennox and Dave Stewart recorded Sisters Are Doin’ It for Themselves with the Queen of Soul, Aretha Franklin. A modern feminist anthem, the song makes this interesting observation: “The inferior sex has got a new exterior. We got doctors, lawyers, politicians too.” Indeed, much of that has come true. At several Canadian medical and law schools, women now outnumber men. But there’s one traditionally male-dominated field where men are still a clear majority—and where women’s representation has even declined in the past few years: engineering.

According to Engineers Canada, the number of women enrolled in engineering programs was on the rise for a full decade before plateauing in 2001, when 20.6 per cent of students were women. But since then, as more and more men have taken engineering, the number of women has remained flat. Since 2001, the proportion of female engineering students has dropped nearly every year, to just 17.3 per cent in 2007, and a mere 17.1 per cent in 2008. At the University of Toronto, for one, women comprised 26.6 per cent of engineering students in 2001, but just 21.4 per cent in 2008. And the phenomenon is not confined to Canadian universities: female enrolment in engineering has plateaued across North America.

The reasons are the subject of a heated debate in and outside of the academy. “Certainly, it is not due to a lack of effort to encourage women to go into engineering,” says Judy Myers, the past president of the Canadian Coalition of Women in Engineering, Science, Trades and Technology (CCWESTT). Indeed, universities have embarked on a number of initiatives to attract women to the field, and the deans of some of the country’s top engineering schools are female. Yet the male-female gap continues to grow, confounding professors and university administrators. And before they can address the phenomenon, they must first figure out why it exists.

One hypothesis, endorsed by CCWESTT, suggests that women aren’t turning away from engineering so much as they’re turning toward other sciences that seem to offer not only challenging career opportunities but also the chance to make a difference. As Elizabeth Cannon, dean of the Schulich School of Engineering at the University of Calgary, explains, there are now many science disciplines that fit the bill, and so women might enrol in health or environmental sciences instead of biomedical or environmental engineering. “With so many doors open,” says Cannon, “you get a little bit of a dilution across all of these areas where women can be successful.”

Others suggest the field may still have an image problem—engineers as out-of-touch geeks or nerds. As Tyseer Aboulnasr, the dean of the faculty of applied science at the University of British Columbia, says, “The perception of engineering as a pure-technology field that doesn’t really connect with society is certainly an issue.” A recent study supported by Engineers Canada found that young women tend to “equate engineering and technology . . . with construction work, outdoor work, working in a cubicle, and relating primarily to computers and machines, rather than people.” Says Kathleen Sendall, an engineer and the first woman to chair the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, “Dilbert has contributed to a number of stereotypes about engineers.”