Women
encouraged to join engineering
By
Michelle Zenarosa
On-line Forty-Niner
The
College of Engineering at Cal State Long
Beach along with the Society of Women Engineers
and the engineering company, Conexant, brought
"Women Engineers @ The Beach,"
an educational engineering conference, in
an attempt to give a didactic glimpse of
engineering to potential young women engineers
and to increase the percentage of women
in engineering academia and the industry
Friday.
The
event, which is the seventh in its series
and run by an all-volunteer staff of faculty,
students and alumni, has been offered every
spring and fall semester at CSULB to middle,
high school and community college female
students. In the past, 60 girls from each
school were allowed to participate but because
of the lack of funding and space resources
this year, only 30 to 35 girls from each
school were allowed to join, disproportionate
to the increasing number of applicants each
year.
"Less
than 20 percent of all engineering students
are women and that's a problem because they
are very high paying jobs being the highest
paid out of any graduates," said Micheal
K. Mahoney, dean of engineering. "If
you look at a list of graduates from business,
history, theatre arts, engineering holds
the top five slots. Traditionally it has
been a male-dominated discipline, but that's
only through tradition. It doesn't mean
that women cannot do it."
Studies
show that in 1999, approximately 10.6 percent
of all employed engineers were women most
of whom were employed in the chemical discipline
of engineering.
"Women
are a lot better with detailed information
so I'm surprised that not more women in
the United States go for it. I believe it
has nothing to do with the career itself,
the career is very exciting," said
Lily Gossage the director of admissions
and advising at the College of Engineering.
"It has to do with exposure because,
not even based on gender, we have fewer
engineers in the U.S. than our international
counterparts. In Japan, it's one lawyer
to every 10 engineers as opposed to the
U.S. where it's 10 lawyers to every one
engineer."
"I
think [women] are just as capable but they
don't do it. If the career field was better
represented as to what engineers can do
then more women might become engineers because
they might stop seeing it as a 'dark room,'"
said John Andy Brunner-Brown, a sophomore
aerospace engineering major. "I would
like there to be more women so that the
classrooms can liven up."
The
results and success of the program are too
early to tell. There must be at least a
10-year span to have a longitudinal study.
"Engineering
is nothing more than the marriage of math
and science and applying it. If you look
everywhere around you, engineering is ubiquitous.
The car you drive, the road you drive on,
the house you live in, the clothing you
wear; it's everywhere. But starkly, most
people know very little of it," Gossage
said. "We're hoping that by catching
them at a young age, we've already planted
a seed of idea in their mind and hopefully
they'll pursue it."
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