It is well-known that Engineering field have been traditionally male dominated. For diverse reasons, those programs have been mostly commanded by man students, scholars and staff members.
Nowadays, a lot of initiatives has been implemented to promote women in Engineering careers. We can see universities offering specific scholarships, special training programs, counseling offices and mentoring activities oriented to engage female high school students and help to develop STEM vocations among them. Some of those initiatives are also targeting female professors interested in developing they career as faculty members in STEM programs.
However, building a more equal society is a process and it requires not only actions but also time, investment, and challenging our own views about gender, equity and diversity, among other factors.
In light of the Engineering careers, What Best Practices could promote female students’ access, retention and successful program completion? How can we contribute to a more diverse student-body? How to increase the participation of female faculty members in this field?
Your proposal is quite important and it's aligned with the priority of access and democratization of Higher Education considered by the Erasmus + Capacity Building programme. I find information about W‐STEM Project which aims to improve strategies and mechanisms of attraction, access and guidance of Women in Latin-American STEM Higher Education programs. They will be working, until 2022, in this activities:
- Measure the gender equality in enrolment and retention rates in STEM programs.
- Implement Universities’ policies, strategies and organizational mechanisms for improving attraction, access and guidance at undergraduate levels in STEM programs.
- Promote STEM studies vocation and choice in girls and young women in secondary schools as well as guidance in the first year of the STEM program.
- Develop an online training package for Higher Education Institutions to implement effective strategies to enhance attraction, access and guidance of Women in STEM programs.
Perhaps it could be important to follow their achievements here: https://wstemproject.eu/
This is a very interesting subject we should not loose track of. At HSD (Germany) we do have several study programmes. Two of them are called industrial engineering and energy and environmental technologies. In comparison to the general engineering study programme more girls apply for those two programmes. Once reason could be that girls tend to prefer study programmes which not only enclose the classical engineering subjects. Furthermore, I do believe that a tailored marketing campaign including female role models and the idea that you don't need to wear boiler suit in order to be an engineer could be beneficial, too.
I participated in the previous proposals that have been discussed, aimed at promoting more presence of women in engineering careers. However, in addition to promoting these measures, we cannot forget that the development of positive attitudes towards the sciences and humanities is configured in primary studies and is consolidated in secondary school, based on the activities that are developed and the success that in the same women have.
In this sense, STEM programs are more focused on non-university education stages. The university can collaborate with educational centers through contact with their teachers and opening the institution to visits and short stays (summer courses, for example) of secondary school students
@joaquin-gairin Yes, you are right - it is all about getting in contact with pupils/girls at a very early stage of their eduaction. The EU-project ELIC gives some interesting ideas. Teachers are used to increase the engineering literacy among pupils. Already taught STEM subjects are combined with practical daily life engineering examples. Therefore pupils should already receive a concrete impression on what an engineering study/job is all about. More information on the project can be found here: http://www.elic-mooc.com/