Egyptian Women in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics Education and Industry: Experience and Analysis [Women in Engineering]

When I first arrived at the Telecommunications Research Lab (TRLab) at Queen’s University’s School of Computing, Kingston, ON, Canada, in November 2009 to embark on my journey as a Ph.D. scholar, I was a member of a diverse lab. There were students with multiple nationalities, religions, and ethnicities. However, I was, at the time, the only female (Figure 1). My colleagues told me back then that there was another female student who had finished her M.Sc. degree and left months before me. My supervisor, Prof. Hossam Hassanein, was a great mentor. He was very supportive, and he spared no effort to make my transition across the Atlantic as smooth as could be. However, he did not try to make the work easy, never assuming I would not be able to handle it. For the time I stayed there, he guided me toward learning new things and working on research and organizational tasks as much as the next guy. I looked around, and there were, in general, few females in the computing labs at the school back then. I was soon joined by another female colleague, and over the next two years, more female colleagues joined our lab. The representation of females increased gradually, but my initial observation remained: there were not many female graduate students joining the computing major at Queen’s University compared to males.