March 2022 - Women's History Month

Since March is Women’s History Month we would like to highlight some resources and information about women in engineering:

• The 2020 NCSEA SE3 survey determined that only 24% of the over 5,000 respondents identified as female. When looking at job titles, 37% of entry-level/staff engineers identified as female, while only 10% of principals/owners identified as female.
• The Society of Women Engineers’ (SWE) article Women in Engineering: A Review of the 2020 Literature is a great resource to learn about the state of women in engineering today. The conclusion of this article challenges us to think about the barriers that are pushing women away from engineering while still considering ways we can encourage more women to be interested in the field.
• SWE has also summarized a report put out by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine that covers promising practices for addressing the underrepresentation of women in STEMM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics, and Medicine) fields. Some suggestions include:
  • Adopting a data-driven approach to implementing institutional change by collecting information by gender and other demographic qualifiers to determine how specific problems are affecting women of intersecting identities.
  • Recognizing, rewarding and encouraging DEI efforts in ways that promote cultural change. This might be within a specific company, or for organizations to encourage among their member-companies.

As always, when considering issues on the basis of identity, we encourage using an intersectional lens. As noted by SWE, intersectionality acknowledges “the reality that not all [women’s experiences] are the same and that a female identity intersects with other identities (e.g., race, sexuality, ethnicity) in ways that can complicate a woman’s efforts to enter engineering.”
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