CU women engineering undergraduates focus on improving diversity

By Lissa Harris

The still-modest numbers of young women entering the engineering profession reveal that two key actions need to be taken to boost women's participation, many female engineers agree: getting more high-schoolers involved in engineering and increasing the representation of women among engineering faculty.

This is no small task, but women undergraduate engineers at Cornell are working on the problem. The College of Engineering's chapter of the Society of Women Engineers (SWE) runs a wide variety of outreach programs at the elementary and high-school levels, designed to get young students interested in engineering and to bring Cornell women engineers into area classrooms as role models. The SWE chapter members even run activities with local Girl Scout troops.

Cornell's chapter of the Society of Women Engineers hosted the group's regional conference in Call Alumni Auditorium of Kennedy Hall last week. Keynote speaker Krishna Athreya, left, director of Minority and Women's Programs in Engineering, discusses the program with engineering undergraduates Angel Hill '02, center, and Cindy Winoto '02, the two coordinators of the conference. Frank DiMeo/University Photography

"Outreach is one of our biggest functions," said Angel Hill '02, a chemical engineering major who last year was co-director of outreach programs for Cornell SWE.

Women engineering students discussed these issues and many others when Cornell hosted the regional SWE conference Nov. 16-18 in Call Alumni Auditorium of Kennedy Hall. About 350 women, mainly undergraduates, from nearly 30 colleges and universities in the region -- which includes Delaware, Virginia, Maryland, New Jersey, eastern Pennsylvania, Washington, D.C., and part of New York -- shared their experiences through lectures, workshops and a career and graduate school fair.

There was some doubt initially that companies affected by the economic recession would be able to sponsor the planned fair. But, said Hill, who coordinated the conference with Cindy Winoto '02, their efforts to persuade companies to participate paid off. "It went better than we ever could have hoped for," said Hill. "I think it went well for both sides. The professionals were able to speak with a lot of students, and the students were happy with the turnout of companies."

In addition to the fair, conference participants had the chance to attend workshops on topics ranging from the finer points of electronics technology research to tips on public speaking. An important role of the conference also was to provide networking between the students and women in the engineering profession.

The national SWE recently recognized Cornell's chapter of SWE, one of the society's oldest, along with Stanford University's chapter, as Best National Student Section. Electrical engineering student Jacqueline Spear founded Cornell's chapter in 1972 at the urging of her mother, a Cornell engineering graduate.

Times have changed since the early days of SWE, but women in engineering still have a long way to go, noted Krishna Athreya, director of Minority and Women's Programs in Engineering at Cornell and a keynote speaker at the SWE conference. But, she said, Cornell is up to the formidable task of tackling diversity in engineering.

According to the National Science Foundation, in 1975 -- the year founder Spear graduated from Cornell --1.7 percent of doctoral degrees in engineering were awarded to women. By 1997, women were earning more engineering doctorates, but only 12.3 percent of the total, still lagging far behind the figures for men.

Paulette Clancy, professor of chemical engineering and an advocate for diversity and campus climate initiatives in the engineering college, is concerned about the gender discrepancies that still continue to restrict engineering as a field for women. "If you look at an average high school senior class, roughly 50 percent are women, so they accurately represent the nation," said Clancy. "But if you look at how many women go into engineering [at Cornell], it's about 25 percent, so we've lost half of them immediately."

And that's not the end of it. While women seem to make the transition from undergraduate to graduate work in engineering as smoothly as men do (the percentages of women in both are fairly similar), the story changes when it comes to moving into academia.

"If you look at how many women in the engineering graduate population decide to be faculty members, it's about 11 percent," said Clancy. "Again, we're losing half."

She said she believes Cornell can do more to increase diversity among engineering faculty. "I would like to see the greater diversification of the faculty become a strategic initiative at the university level, in the same way we are saying we want to focus on research areas like genomics and information science and advanced materials," she said. "I think it would set us apart."

Said Athreya:"Cornell engineers, very justifiably, claim that they are among the greatest problem-solvers in the world. They love to be confronted with challenges. As long as this [greater faculty diversity] is seen as a challenge for the entire community, then what is to prevent us from having an outstanding team of workers focusing energies on this?"

Molly Howard '02, this year's co-president of Cornell SWE (Katy Pan '02 is the other co-president) had praise for the organization's efforts to reach beyond the boundaries of Cornell. "The community sees that we work hard at what we do," she said. "It's a great way for us to interact and get to know the community."