Thirty years after the first wave of women began pursuing engineering careers, it’s still mostly a man’s world — despite an earnest effort to encourage females to pursue a profession with good opportunities.
Take Taya Upkes, who graduated summa cum laude in May with a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Missouri-Kansas City.
She had nine job offers before receiving her diploma and accepted an offer from Cummins to work at its plant in suburban Minneapolis.
Her starting salary? Somewhere in the “mid-60s.” And Cummins also is paying her graduate school tuition. She helps design generator sets for yachts, she said, and she’s the only woman working in a department of 15 or 20.
“The demand for engineers in general is high,” said Gary Mirka, an associate dean at Iowa State University. “Ninety-five percent of our students have jobs within six months, and recruiters are keen on women.”
Nationally, 17.9 percent of undergraduate engineering students were women in 2009, according the most recent data from the National Science Foundation. Ten years before, 19.8 percent of engineering students were female.
And even when a woman obtains a degree in engineering, it’s no guarantee she’ll enter or stay in the profession. The foundation reported that 12.9 percent of the almost 1.6 million engineers in the nation were women in 2008, significantly lower than the graduation rate.
Betty Shanahan, executive director and chief executive of the Society of Women Engineers, said a study last year called Stemming the Tide: Why Women Leave Engineering found one-third of female engineering graduates didn’t enter the profession because they thought the workplace culture was inflexible and not supportive of women.
The report also found nearly half of the female engineers who left the profession did so because of poor working conditions, too much travel and lack of advancement or low salary.