Minority women in engineering: a performance review

Summary form only given as follows. In order to meet the technological challenges of the future, this country will need to utilize all of its available talent, and women are a significant resource pool. To make an impact, the enrolments of female engineers must increase considerably to ensure that we obtain the necessary graduates to join the workforce. Although there has been much discussion of and effort put into increasing the numbers, the undergraduate female engineering enrolment remains much lower than desired, at approximately nineteen percent. At Morgan, over 33% of the combined enrolment in the three disciplines offered, civil, electrical and industrial engineering, is female and the average percentage of females in our graduating classes is 32%, a group consisting of primarily African-American women. These figures far exceed the national average for women. In order to affect change, we must continue to become as knowledgeable as possible about women students and understand their patterns, particularly early in their education, in order to make major strides in the enrolment, and subsequently graduation rates of females. This paper is a step toward that process. In this paper, the performance of female engineering students in our School of Engineering is presented. Among the factors used in the study are high school, enrolment and graduation grade point averages; SAT scores; time to graduation; performance at the departure from the major; and transfer status and credits. In addition, a general sense of the participation of our women engineering students in noteworthy activities and the profession is provided