Several factors, including a high dropout rate after freshman year, contribute to the low number of female engineers

The IEEE’s Women in Engineering (WIE) Committee and the Educational Activities Board (EAB) are teaming up to help provide universities with hands-on projects designed to encourage women to pursue degrees in electrical engineering and computer science.

The new two-year initiative, “Increasing the Representation of Women in the IEEE’s Fields of Interest,” is aimed at resolving problems in academia that many believe have led to a lack of female engineers. The IEEE plans to spend US $378 000 on the program.

Spearheading the initiative are IEEE Senior Member Amy Bell, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, in Blacksburg, and Moshe Kam, vice president, IEEE Educational Activities.

“Women’s underparticipation in electrical and computer engineering and computer science worldwide threatens the competitive vitality of the workforce and the profession,” Bell wrote in describing the initiative. “It restricts the employment opportunities of half the population.”

The underrepresentation of women in electrical engineering and computer science is a persistent problem that has long been recognized. In 2004, U.S. women, for example, earned fewer than 15 percent of such degrees, while they earned 46 percent of the bachelor’s degrees awarded that year in biomedical engineering and 41 percent of the bachelor’s degrees in environmental engineering. Other countries face a similar gender gap. For example, fewer than 10 percent of engineering degrees awarded in Japan, Italy, Spain, and South Korea went to women.

Overall, women make up 8.5 percent of all engineers in the United States, according to statistics compiled by the U.S. National Science Foundation and the American Society for Engineering Education.

DETERRENTS Several factors, including a high dropout rate after freshman year, contribute to the low number of female engineers. A large-scale U.S. study known as the Women’s Experiences in College Engineering project, as well as other studies conducted at Purdue University, Virginia Tech, and elsewhere, have uncovered a number of deterrents. They include a lack of female role models, the absence of peer support, and little effort by faculty to encourage young women to stick with engineering. On the other hand, women are more likely to continue their studies after they’re exposed early on to team-based, hands-on instruction that focuses on how engineering can solve societal problems.

“The conversation about why women are not doing well in undergraduate engineering programs has changed,” Bell says. “It’s gone from ‘What’s wrong with women?’ to ‘What’s wrong with engineering education?’”

NEW APPROACH The initiative intends to change how engineering is taught by introducing practical projects in freshman classes. It calls on the IEEE to work with educators to develop hands-on projects and online workshops for freshmen.

This month, a group of engineering-school faculty will start developing proposals for projects that address real-world electrical, computer engineering, and computer science problems whose solutions can benefit society. The idea is to first present a problem in a background lecture along with at least one solution. That will be followed by a summary lecture that reviews the problem and discusses the challenges and trade-offs involved in its solution, as well as the solution’s impact on society.

A review committee will approve all proposals for development. Individual lessons are to be turned into online teaching aids and posted on the IEEE Web site by November. Both the WIE Committee and the EAB are set to promote them to members and to the engineering-school community. Educators whose lessons make it to the IEEE Web site will receive $5000.

The initiative also calls for developing online workshops that showcase the best teaching practices found in electrical and computer engineering and computer science classrooms. The practices will be reviewed and selected by the same IEEE committee. The goal is to develop educational strategies that focus on the learner rather than on just the concept being taught, an approach known as learner-centered teaching. Other educational strategies include those focused on students working on team projects.

The third and last part of the initiative calls for the IEEE to promote the projects and best teaching practices at electrical and computer engineering schools. Instructors who register to use the free teaching aids and workshops will be asked to assess them.

No one expects changes in curricula overnight. “The first criterion for judging the initiative’s positive impact will be simply the number of teaching aids developed,” Kam says. “Another benchmark will be the number of faculty that incorporate the projects in their classroom instruction.”

“My hope is that in the end we will see substantial increases in women engineers,” Bell says. “But at the very least we will create high-quality materials, and anyone who uses them will benefit. It can only be a good thing.”

Eventually, the program should also help establish equity and opportunity in engineering’s management ranks, Kam says, adding, “When we help women, we help men as well.”