Magnetic fields

ASEE Prism, May/Jun 2003 by Home-Douglas, Pierre

Attracting more women to engineering is just as problematic tor Canada as it is for this country, but our northern neighbors have managed to boost their numbers by designing new programs in areas like microelectronics.

When Monique Frize started studying engineering at Canada's Ottawa University in 1963, she didn't find a lot of female soul mates in her class. In fact, she didn't find any females at all. Frize was the first female engineering student the university had ever admitted. "The dean called my father and said, 'Talk some sense into your daughter,' ''Frize recalls. "He said, 'I can't. She'll do what she decides to do.'" Four decades later, Frize is doing her part to make sure that the number of women in engineering continues to rise across Canada. In 1989 she was appointed the first NSERC (Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada) Women in Engineering Chair. Her first day on the job was the same day as the funeral for the 14 students murdered at Montreal's Ecole Polytechnique, 13 of whom were final-year mechanical engineering students. "I was in the media a lot that day, and I was very angry and full of sorrow for what had happened," Frize recalls. "I remember saying, 'A thousand women for everyone who died.' And now we have had more than 15,000 women engineers who have graduated since then." In 2001, women made up 20.3 percent of the total number of engineering undergraduates in Canada, up from 3.6 percent in 1975 and 10.8 percent in 1985. (The percentage of women undergraduates in the U.S. is almost the same as Canada's-just over 20 percent). Like universities in countries such as the U.S. and Britain, Canadian schools are exploring different ways to boost those numbers. As Elizabeth Cannon, a former chair of Women in Engineering points out, "What's needed is a multipronged approach. There is no one silver bullet that is going to make all the difference."

One of those prongs has been the NSERC Chairs. In 1997 the program expanded to provide five regional chairs: one each in Atlantic Canada, Quebec, Ontario, the Prairie Provinces (Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta), and British Columbia (including the Northwest Territories). Each chair is cosponsored by a major corporation such as IBM, Petro-Canada, and Alcan. As Cannon points out, the impact of the five chairs has been more than the sum of its parts. "It has given us a voice from coast to coast in the country, helping us share strategies and work at issues on a national and an international level." The professors meet regularly, share a newsletter, and provide links to each other's Web sites and many other related programs. In addition, each chair helps develop networks that reach groups such as school boards, teachers, guidance counselors, parents' groups, students, employers, and engineering deans.

Most Canadian universities have initiated various outreach programs to attract more women to the study of engineering. These often start at an early age. Summer camps and workshops are also proving to be popular ways to attract young female students to the opportunities in engineering. Ryerson University in Toronto, for example, offers Discover Engineering, a weeklong summer camp for high school girls that includes hands-on activities in a number of engineering disciplines. In the late 1990s, the school also expanded the program to include a one-day career conference to target senior high school girls. The university even works with Girl Guides to help elementary school age girls earn an engineer badge.

Mentoring programs have also proved popular. One of the most innovative plans has been created at the University of Calgary in Alberta. Called SCIberMENTOR, the program is an e-mail mentoring initiative offered in conjunction with the University of Alberta in Edmonton. It matches girls between the age of 11 and 18 in Alberta with women studying science or engineering or practicing as scientists or engineers, taking into account such factors as interests and hobbies. "The program allows us to get out to the rural areas," says Elizabeth Cannon. "We have a reach far beyond our own backyard." The program began in 2001 and already has close to 400 girls who have signed up.

"The women who are mentoring are excited about it and so are the girls. It's a really neat program." As many women involved in recruiting more female students to engineering have discovered, one of the problems is getting high school girls to understand what engineering is all about. "When we asked students to define what they think an engineer might do, less than a third of class were able to give us a decent answer," says Lisa Anderson, a mechanical engineer and the coordinator for Women in Engineering at Ryerson. But what is perhaps more revealing is the difference between the answers given by boys versus girls. "When we ask them point blank would they consider it as a career, guys will say yes - even though they don't know exactly what it is," Anderson explains. "Girls, on the other hand, will say they'll do it only if they clearly know what it is. It all comes back to the perception that engineering is a good career decision for guys."