Women
encouraged to enter engineering by college
By Yi-Fang Vicky Lin
On-line Forty-Niner
The
number of female engineers is extremely
low.
“Currently,
there are only 537 female students studying
engineering,” said Lily Gossage, director
of Admissions and Advising in College of
Engineering. “But the campus is 58 percent
women, so do you see the big imbalance?”
The
College of Engineering at Cal State Long
Beach is encouraging women to grasp more
than 6,000 job opportunities in this male-dominated
profession, Gossage said.
Among
all the engineering options at CSULB, the
construction engineering contains the lowest
proportion of female students with less
than 1 percent. The aerospace engineering
and mechanical engineering options have,
respectively, less than 4 percent and 7
percent of women.
Gossage
attributes the lack of women in engineering
to society.
“I
don’t see any difference in their brain
chemistry,” Gossage said. “I think there
is the consequence of socialization. If
you look at the high schools, who are the
ones that are in the machine shops, who
are the ones looking at the car batteries,
who are the ones that are changing their
oil.”
Society
ideals of appropriate roles for males and
females have fundamentally developed from
family, said Lloyd Hile, chairman of chemical
engineering.
“If
a girl is starting to be interested in building
a car model, that’s probably going to be
more discouraged than [playing] with dolls,”
Hile said.
The
absence of engineering curriculum in middle
and high schools has also resulted in the
misrepresentation about the field. Most
are not aware that engineering is another
professional option for females to pursue.
In
term of challenging the ideology, the College
of Engineering held an educational conference
called “Women Engineers at The Beach,” which
was exclusively held for female students,
Friday.
More
than 450 women, with 95 percent of the participants
math or science oriented, came from local
middle and high schools. Women guest speakers
who succeed in the engineering field were
invited, along with 14 workshops for students
with hands-on experience. The conference
not only gave students a glimpse of the
engineering field, but also the CSULB physical
campus environment.
“We
hope to integrate some ideas of engineering
into middle schools,” Hile said. “Middle
school is really where it should be done
because that’s where people are shaping
their goals.”
Hile
added that the conference was an opportunity
to expose the engineering discipline to
youngsters, and make a distinction between
engineering and science.
“I
think young ladies should not be afraid
of math and science,” said Kimberly C. Nilsson,
the vice president of Solid Waste Solutions,
Inc. “You can do anything you want to do
as long as you set up your mind-set.”
As
one of the guest speakers at the conference,
and one of the few professional women in
civil engineering, Nilsson’s success has
become an example to her niece, whose goal
is to be a woman civil engineer.
One
of the participants at the conference, Taylor
Bright, an eighth grader at Lexington Junior
High, said she learned the concepts of various
engineering fields by attending the workshops.
She said she has gained self-confidence
aiming to pursue a future career in aerospace
engineering by saying, “If men can do it,
I think women can probably do it better.”
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