Majors, Gender, and First-Year Courses

I'm treasurer for the Olin chapter of Society of Women Engineers this year, and the national conference was a few weeks ago! Olin sent eight students. We met lots of people, went to the career fair, and listened to some interesting sessions, so I'd definitely say it was a successful trip. Something I found very interesting was how different the general SWE population was from Olin's female population in terms of fields of engineering.

Before the conference, we had decided to sell t-shirts, and the SWE members at Olin had voted on a design made up of circuit components that spelled out SWE. There's a picture below! The 'S' is a power source, the 'W' is a resistor, and the 'E' is a loop of wire. A lot of us thought this was a clever design. Olin is about 1/3 Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) majors, and though there's some variation in major by gender, ECE is about half and half, like the school as a whole. We're also all required to take circuits classes (Modeling and Control and Real World Measurements) during our first two semesters at Olin. Even if they aren't our favorite classes, we all come away with circuit literacy and generally aren't afraid of circuit-related work.

SWE t-shirt!

So one of the things that most surprised me was the general reaction to the shirts. We often had to explain the shirt, and people who did understand tended to have reactions somewhere from "Oh, I hated my circuits course" to "I like it, but I'm not an EE." (None of us was either -- our ECEs at the conference all leaned more C than E.) The electrical engineers who walked by were excited to see anything electrical because the field was so underrepresented. I know that ECE has fewer women than a lot of other engineering disciplines, but at Olin, I'd forgotten. When I stopped and thought about it, though, our ECE faculty is pretty heavily male, even if among the students the gender ratio is about one to one.

So what engineering fields were more represented? There were a lot of chemical and bio engineers. BioE is an official concentration for the general Engineering major, but it's pretty small -- a couple of people a year. It does tend to have more girls (and all the bio/bioE faculty are women), but in my class it's evenly split. With so few bioEs, though, it's hard to make a comparison to the SWE conference proportions. ChemE, on the other hand, is not an official concentration. It might be possible to self-design a chemical engineering major, but I'm not sure if anyone ever has. I imagine it would involve taking Wellesley science classes.

There were also a number of mechanical engineers at SWE, and this didn't feel very different from Olin. MechEs are about a third of Olin's students, and the gender breakdown is usually even, though it varies by year. Of the four faculty who generally teach the core mechE courses, one is a woman. What was different at SWE was that there were so many companies at the SWE career fair looking for mechanical engineering interns. At Olin's career fairs, most of the companies are looking for ECEs or E:Cs (engineering with computing). That doesn't mean that mechEs don't get internships; we just have to look for them a little differently.

The last fairly large group at SWE was made up of civil and architectural engineers. Neither of those fields is taught at Olin. I think civil would be harder than chemical to self-design, but again, I don't know if anyone has done it. Upper division electives seem like they would be the hardest parts to replicate.

Going back to people's reactions to the shirts, I wasn't really surprised by the comments about people not liking their circuits courses, but I didn't expect to have to explain the shirt or that people would choose not to buy it (even if they thought it was cute) just because they weren't EEs. I know that the reason I didn't think about having to explain the shirt is because the first-years here take two semesters of circuits, but I also think first-year classes help explain why an Oliner is less likely to feel that he or she has to stay in a particular discipline. We all had to gain at least some confidence in dealing with circuits (ModCon and RWM) and code (ModSim). Design Nature can serve as an intro to computer-aided design and basic machining, which are generally considered to be mechE-ish.

An interesting side effect of this comfort with the basics of several fields is the growth of the robotics (RoboE) concentration. It was becoming a more and more common self-designed major, and this year it's official! My class has around a dozen people who declared RoboE. This is partially a result of having three professors who do lots of robotics and have active research groups, and the success of the robotic sailing team also helps. Nevertheless, I don't think there would be so many RoboEs if people didn't find out early on that they wanted to keep taking mechanical, electrical, and software classes.

Finally, I was surprised at some of the responses of people at the conference who had heard of Olin. A lot of people heard we were from Olin and said, "Oh, your school is about half female, isn't it?" Yes, it is, and I should have realized that people at SWE would think that was important, but I'm used to people asking about the project-based learning first. Gender in engineering is definitely discussed at Olin, but I hadn't thought about the fact that people from other schools would know about Olin because of the gender ratio.