Outreach Aims to Attract More Young Women in Nebraska to Engineering Careers

Jan. 23, 2020, 6:45 a.m. ·

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Sally Wei with the University of Nebraska College of Engineering. (Photo by Jack Williams, NET News)

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Less than 20% of professional engineers are women, a number that hasn’t really improved much over the last several decades. The historically male-dominated profession has trouble attracting and recruiting females, but that could be changing. Introduce a Girl To Engineering Day is set for Saturday at the Nebraska Innovation Campus in Lincoln. NET’s Jack Williams spoke with Sally Wei with College of Engineering at the University of Nebraska about what needs to be done to attract more young women to the engineering profession.


Jack Williams: Statistics show the vast majority of engineers are men. Why is this such a male-dominated profession?

Sally Wei-College of Engineering: Traditionally it’s been a lot of males from days gone by, where it was very much agriculturally driven. I think it’s perception. Since it has traditionally been very male-dominated, I think a lot of females don’t think that they can become engineers because there are so many men in the field. Also, because I think there's a lot of gender-bias towards that. I think that’s a big factor, just the perception that only men can be engineers, but in fact, there are many women in engineering and it’s very important for us to have women in engineering.

Williams: I wanted to ask you a little bit more about the gender bias. Is there gender-bias in elementary and middle school, do teachers just assume that girls aren’t going to be interested in engineering and thus almost steer them away from pursuing that later?

Wei: Oh, absolutely. It’s been happening for centuries now. Gender-bias is a huge factor in terms of what we think. Traditionally, men are doctors and women are nurses. I think that’s changing. It has to do that it’s been traditionally male-dominated, that girls are supposed to be doing something else. Research is showing that happens a lot in schools just by our own perceptions that we’ll let the boys take care of that and the girls can do something else. That has to change and it has been changing. Girls are traditionally more on the quiet side. We also have statistics that show girls are outshining boys in science and math, some of the recent tests have shown that, but they tend to sit back and allow the boys to dominate, and I think that’s part of the problem. I think it’s also a confidence issue. I think girls have a tendency to think maybe they’re not as good in math or science. Again, the research shows that kids in general decide whether they’re good at science and math as early as 2nd or 3rd grade and that’s why it’s really important to promote this to some of the younger girls and continue that through the middle school years.

Williams: Are we gaining traction or losing some momentum when it comes to getting women interested in these kinds of careers?

Wei: We’re gaining traction very slowly. I have a computer science degree from the 80’s and back then there was a lot of women going into the field. Somewhere in the 90’s, I’m not quite sure what happened, maybe some of the dot.com things, but we lost a lot of women, which is why we’re doing a lot of the girls in coding and some of the national coding initiatives that are going on. So it’s slowly gaining traction, certainly not as quickly we would like it to be.

Williams: I know at the University of Nebraska College of Engineering, you have what you call engineering ambassadors who go into schools and try to get young women interested in engineering. Tell us more about that and is it working?

Wei: We get excellent feedback. It’s a wonderful program. We have about 25 undergraduate engineering students from Omaha and Lincoln, we’re one group, we’re one college of engineering, that go into the schools. Since the program began in 2015, we’ve impacted over 35,000 students in the state. We do go statewide, but having said that, during breaks, we can go farther from Lincoln, but we travel just on a normal weekday to Omaha and surrounding areas within an hour of us.

Williams: Saturday is Introduce a Girl to Engineering Day at the Nebraska Innovation Campus in Lincoln. What’s going to happen there?

Wei: It’s going to be conference-style, so we’ll have a number of breakout sessions. There will be five breakout sessions for ages 7-12 and then we have some specific breakout sessions we would like more older girls to attend for ages 13 and up. We would like some older girls to know that this is for them as well even though it’s being promoted by the Children’s Museum. New this year will be a special lunch session. Role models are very important, so we’ll have two different panels. One panel will be undergraduate and graduate engineering students and one panel will be professional women engineers. There’s a subsidized lunch included with that.

Williams: So it’s free to register and there’s still time to get on board with this?

Wei: The event is free. The Children’s Museum does charge a $3 processing fee per registration, so you can register 20 girls with that $3 and the subsidized lunch is $5.