It’s not surprising that fourth-year materials engineering
student Sophia Wong says she feels like she knows every girl
studying in the school of engineering with her ““
there’s not very many of them.
“I know all the girls. It’s such a small world, you
realize, within engineering,” Wong said.
Wong is one of about 500 women in the Henry Samueli School of
Engineering and Applied Science, equaling about 20 percent of the
school’s student population.
UCLA’s numbers reflect the average number studying the
field at colleges across the country. The numbers have also
remained stagnant in the last five years and even seem to be
experiencing a slight downturn in the most
recent years at UCLA. Only 16 percent of first-years and 17
percent of transfers in the incoming class of engineers at UCLA are
women.
When Wong began walking the halls of South Campus four years
ago, these numbers became real to her.
When asked if she was surprised at the amount of girls in her
classes, she said: “I had no idea that it was going to be
this few. I knew that there would be the stereotypical classes
filled with guys. But, I didn’t know how real that was, until
I actually came here.”
Though the current numbers remain low compared to the number of
women enrolled in all the other UCLA schools, women in the field
have come a long way.
After instruction in engineering began at UCLA in 1941, it took
seven years before the field saw its first woman graduate. In 1948,
Barbara Wynn became the first woman to graduate from the College of
Engineering at UCLA. And in 1972, a study done by an associate dean
of the school concluded that not enough female professional role
models existed with women making up less than 1 percent of the
practicing work force, according the engineering school’s Web
site.
Stephen Jacobsen, associate dean of the school, said when he was
a student here in 1963, he doesn’t believe there were
women’s rest rooms in the school. Though this may be an
exaggeration, Jacobsen makes his point.
Studies abound on why women traditionally shy away from the
field, organizations spring up frequently with the goal of
recruiting the underrepresented, efforts are underway to change the
face of K-12 education, while Wong simply hopes she’s setting
a good example to the diminishing number of aspiring female
engineers.
Tucked away in the basement of Boelter Hall, Wong spends a
Friday afternoon where she has spent many of her summer days
““ an electrical engineering lab hidden inside hallways whose
paint has grown old and where nearby construction provides an
obtrusive view of hard hats and dumpsters. Most students
wouldn’t end up here unless they had a made an erroneous turn
on their valued campus maps on the first days of school.
But, Wong says she feels comfortable in her surroundings. There
are rows of computers along the walls that enclose tables of wires,
metals and microchips. Above, missing ceiling tiles reveal more
wires and censors. And at each of the desks including hers, is an
engineer hard at work. The only difference between Wong and her
coworkers is that she’s the only female that day.
Wong is one of few girls working on the Ragobot game project
that uses nickel titanium alloys (material that when destroyed, can
restore its original shape) to build the terrain that the robot
destroys. The game could revolutionize the toy industry and the
material could prove to be a substitute for hydraulic systems in
the airplane industry, Wong says. There are two female full-time
employees in the lab, with a third one on the way along with eight
male students from both UCLA and Yale University.
Several factors result in fewer women choosing the field,
ranging from high school education to cultural conditioning,
experts say.
Jane Margolis, a researcher in the department of education and
co-founder of a computer science training program for teachers in
the Los Angeles Unified School District, says the problem of
diversity at the university is an inherited problem from the K-12
levels of education.
The percentage of females taking the Advanced Placement Computer
Science exam nationally is 17, and this number translates to low
numbers at college, Margolis said.
The low numbers in high school often result from the culture of
society in which engineering and computer science is typically
associated with males.
“It is a field that has been culturally marked as a
male,” Margolis said. “Girls are surfing the Web and
using (computers) as much as men, but are not pulled in as
much,” Margolis said.
Many believe that the field is simply misconceived.
The field of engineering includes numerous disciplines ranging
from the conventional mechanical and electrical engineering to
lesser obvious studies like agricultural and environmental
engineering. Ironically, it is the lesser popular disciplines that
attract the highest proportion of female students.
In a 2002-2003 survey conducted by the American Society for
Engineering Education, the organization found that while about 15
percent of women received bachelors’ degrees in electrical
engineering, a significantly higher 42 percent women received the
same degree in environmental engineering.
Engineering and related fields such as computer science are
critical to subjects like biology and environmental health,
Margolis said, but added that often, these interdisciplinary
subjects go unnoticed.
Wong agreed that she never realized how diverse a field
engineering could be.
Wong became interested in the field after a chemistry teacher in
Piedmont Hills High School in Northern California recognized her
talents. Before that time, Wong did not even know exactly what an
engineer did.
“I thought they were the people who rode trains. I
didn’t exactly know what it meant at the time because I was
16,” she said.
After receiving a $25,000 scholarship to study engineering in
high school and doing research with a professor from Stanford
University, Wong understood that engineering entailed a little more
than train rides.
“The thing to tell (prospective women engineers) would be
that you can do anything with it ““ whether it is materials or
electronics or the environment,” Wong said.
“There’s a class that studies dirt; if you are a civil
engineer and that’s fun to you. There are no limits at all
what you can do with an engineering degree.”
Jacobsen pointed out that engineering can be found in almost
every surrounding.
When considering the creation of many objects, “God
didn’t deliver it, an engineer did,” he said.
A May 2003 study in the University of Michigan sheds light on
why so many women are still inherently limited in the choices they
make.
The study reveals that choosing a math-based career is dependent
on “how much (students) believe in the ultimate utility of
mathematics, and how much they value working with and for
people,” said Jacquleynne Eccles ““ a UM professor and
research scientist that helped conduct the study ““ in a press
release.
While male students ranked the utility of math higher than
females, girls also valued working with people more than guys.
“Given this data, it’s not surprising that there are
many more men than women in math-based majors and careers,”
Eccles also said in the release. “Boys’ beliefs and
values are pulling them toward those areas while girls’ are
pushing them in other directions.”
Experts also say biological or genetic explanations for the
different career choices men and women make are outdated and
non-conclusive.
Carlos Grijalva, a pyschobiology professor, explains that trends
of male and female career choices are always changing over time and
that very little information exists that would be able to
substantiate any one theory.
It has less to do with biology and more to do with upbringing,
Grijalva speculated.
Jonathan Friedman and David Lee, graduate students in electrical
engineering, believe the public image that is associated with
engineers has done the field a disservice.
Engineers come in more shapes than “nerdy guys who like
computers a lot,” Lee said.
Whatever the reason, Wong said she’s become accustomed to
the fact that one in five engineering students is female. But that
doesn’t mean that she and several professionals don’t
hope the situation will change.
The institute that Margolis co-founded, along with the dean of
engineering Vijay Dhir, aims at repairing the problem at its
onset.
Professors from UCLA and UC Irvine provided high school teachers
in the Los Angeles area with the technical skills and engaging
teaching approaches to attract underrepresented students to the
field.
Though the first steps have been taken to establish computer
science courses in these high schools, it is still too early to
tell whether the training will be successful, Margolis said.
Outreach efforts are being planned in the school of engineering,
said associate dean Jacobsen, after showing a orientation video
that aims at depicting the diversity within the school.
Jacobsen also said that budget cuts are a factor when it comes
to recruiting underrepresented students into the school.
Though the call for change is widespread, Jacobsen says change
is always gradual, recalling his days as a student in the 1960s,
compared with today.
“It takes time,” he said. “In 1969, I
don’t remember seeing many (women) at all, but we are
gradually seeing more and more.”
In an effort to speed up the process, some women engineers are
taking matters into their own hands. Wong belongs to the national
organization, the Society of Women Engineers that aims to recruit
and retain female students.
Group members go to high schools and share their experiences as
well as work to provide students with internship and job
opportunities.
“By simply showing the women (in high schools) that it can
be done … we are not really not giving them anything other than
giving them what our experience has been like.”
But, some male students wonder how a female engineer’s
perspective is unique and are somewhat wary of a distinction being
made between the sexes.
Working professionally with both male and female engineers,
Friedman has not noticed a difference in the two, he said.
Friedman has worked with Wong on the Ragobot project and is
respected by Wong for the work he does. She enjoys working with
most of the guys in the school, she said as they are “nice
and helpful.”
Though the weeder engineering courses of her first year caused
an ulcer, Wong has finally learned to balance work with fun with
the myriad of hobbies she has.
Wong is writing her second mystery novel, loves to belly dance
and keeps in touch with her non-engineering friends once in a
while. Though she will receive a degree in materials engineering,
her options are by no means limited ““ she wants to get a
realtor’s license, go to law school, or maybe go to business
school.
“It’s not so much what you learn in engineering, but
the fact that you can go through it and survive. …. What you go
through in the process of engineering says so much more than the
degree,” she said.