The EE Gender Gap Is Widening

Walk into a classroom of environmental engineering students and, odds are, nearly half of them will be women. Now head next door to an electrical engineering class: you'll likely find eight men for every woman. The failure to recruit and retain more women in electrical and computer engineering-large fields with lots of students-is a major reason the representation of women in U.S. engineering as a whole has remained so low for so long. Last year, only 18.1 percent of all bachelor's degrees in engineering awarded by U.S. schools went to women. And things are getting worse: that's the lowest level in more than a decade.