The University of British Columbia’s (UBC) Faculty of Applied Science has set a goal of 50 per cent female enrolment by 2020.
Sheryl Staub-French, professor of civil engineering, said the initiative is targeting first-year engineering students. Last year, 29 per cent of first-year engineering students were female, but that number has grown to 32 per cent this year, she said.
Staub-French said increasing female enrolment in engineering is an important goal.
“A lot of research shows that more diversity within an organization leads to better outcomes . . . We want an engineering profession that reflects our society, which is 50 per cent men and women by and large,” she said.
Staub-French holds the Goldcorp Professorship in Women in Engineering at UBC, and one of her roles include attracting more women into the profession. She also leads a program called “engcite,” which hosts outreach events for students from grades 8 to 10.
“A lot of people either don’t know what engineering is or they have misperceptions about what engineering is,” she said. “Some people think it’s kind of like the nerdy guy [profession], like that TV show The Big Bang Theory—sort of socially awkward people, and you’re really focused on a specific technology working away in a lab by yourself.”
But Staub-French said engineers are more than a simple stereotype.
“Engineers are really at the forefront of addressing a lot of society’s pressing problems, like climate change, extreme poverty, clean energy, [and] clean water . . . So we try to communicate that it’s really a ‘helping’ profession,” she said.
Staub-French said the initiative also involves educating sixth- and seventh-grade teachers about the perceptions of engineering, while giving them the tools and resources they need to teach engineering in their classrooms.
According to Engineers Canada, women accounted for 11.7 per cent of professional engineers in Canada in 2013.
Tirajeh Mazaheri, a student program co-ordinator for the Women in Engineering organization at UBC, said students in the organization promote engineering to women through workshops and mentorship programs.
She said a 50 per cent split between men and women in engineering would open up many possibilities in the field.
“Women bring some ideas that men will never even think about and vice versa,” she said. “Because engineering is such a male-dominated faculty, it’s hard for a lot of girls to get excited about it. We don’t want that to happen, because the things some women have come up with in the industry are incredibly amazing.”
Parents are also an important part of why women choose to enter engineering, according to Staub-French.
“We talk about things like bias and how bias might affect how they act as parents, in terms of encouraging their daughters to go into engineering,” she said.
“Everyone is biased . . . There’s this great study looking at conductors of an orchestra. When you put the conductors behind a screen and you couldn’t tell what gender they were, they ended up hiring 50 per cent women. And it used to be a very male-dominated field,” she said.
Staub-French said her family supported her decision to enter engineering, though she still faced challenges.
“I think [for] a lot of the women of my generation, it was such an anomaly to have a woman at the table, that we were often either overlooked or people didn’t know how to relate to us,” she said.
Mazaheri said she would encourage other universities to follow UBC’s goal of increasing female enrolment in engineering.
“There are many more female doctors and scientists than there are engineers because it’s just assumed, ‘Oh, engineering, that’s mainly for guys, why would I do that?’ And that’s such a fallacy,” she said.
