My Daughter is an Engineer: A Parent-Daughter Weekend of Engineering Exploration at CSULB [Member Activities]

Although there have been great contributions made by women in the field of engineering, women still comprise less than 10% of the engi-neering workforce. In 1974, women comprised about 1.6% of the 50,286 students enrolled in U.S. engineering programs. This number increased to 14.8% of 78,225 students by 1994. The National Center for Education Sta-tistics´ publication, The Condition of Education, reports that although U.S. women have earned more than half of all bachelor´s degrees, only 17% of those degrees were in engineering [1]. The majority of the degrees that women earned were in professions such as education, English, and visual and performing arts. Social influ-ences such as stereotype threat [2] and stigma attached with mathematics competence continue to steer women away from engineering. These facts, coupled with the lack of engineering awareness by parents and teachers and societal expectations of appropriate female-male roles, also contribute to the low number of women engineers.