IEEE Women in Engineering Magazine - December 2023 - 47

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Retaining Women
in Academics
Education Efforts
d
Diversity is essential for problem solving
in engineering as it yields better solutions
and new ideas. However, including
women in this field has encountered
several challenges. Early childhood is a
critical window when girls form ideas
about what they can do. For this reason,
it is necessary to educate parents on the
potential opportunities for women in
engineering. Similarly, teachers must
nurture an interest in girls during primary
school. For example, girls in science
classrooms often ask few questions
and do not participate in classroom
discussions. Teachers need to create a
learning environment where girls feel a
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MWIE.2023.3311310
Date of current version: 30 October 2023
sense of belonging. Only 14% of professors
at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology (MIT) Electrical Engineering
and Computer Science Department
are female. The MIT Women's Technology
Program is a summer internship that
introduces high school female students
to team-based projects.
Even after completing an undergraduate
degree, to begin an academic
career, you must go through many
stages, such as receiving a Ph.D. or
postdoctorate degree, followed by a tenure-track
permanent position. Recently,
several articles have been written
by women in academia in Europe and
other countries about the cutting-edge
developments in the field. However,
there is still a significant gender bias
toward men when offering permanent
jobs to engineering academics. We find
that most female engineering doctorates
are on nontenure-track contracts.
This has resulted in many people pursuing
alternative career pathways.
Academic Work Culture
Women engineering students are often
assigned menial tasks in university group
projects in subjects such as robotics.
Similarly, women found internships in
engineering to be a very creepy experience.
Even after graduation, engineering
status is often not recognized by them.
For example, they are more likely to be
employed in roles that require social skills
and lower salaries compared to their male
counterparts. As a response to such a
DECEMBER 2023
work culture, education should anticipate
such gender bias in the workplace.
Despite several efforts to motivate
them, few women choose engineering
as a career. Simplistic assumptions such
as increasing the number of women in
an organization often fail. For example,
a " mind scripting " activity at an Austrian
university showed that several hidden gender
codes exist, resulting in exclusions.
They discovered that one of the main
barriers to including women is taken-forgranted
beliefs about organizational practices.
This results in constant repetition of
unquestioned norms and values.
Women take time off work to care for
their children. Activities that increase the
impact of their research are particularly
demanding and require constant communication
with the public. For example, they
need to maintain blogs on Twitter or university
websites. This is based on the Foucauldian
approach to neoliberalism, where
power can be achieved through social
interactions instead of the government.
Academic Trends
At James Cook University (JCU) in Australia,
we find that most of the academics
in engineering (including information
technology) have a doctorate degree. The
number of female academics in the age
group of 45-65, when considering the
entire university, is like men. In contrast,
within engineering, only 20% of academics
are women. If we consider the country of
origin for the entire university, we find that
most of the women are from Australia and
most male of the academics are of international
origin. Here again, engineering
shows the reverse trend where most of the
females are of international origin. Finally,
the number of female faculty has increased
slightly over the past five years in this field.
This is despite a slight decline in the total
number of women at JCU.
To identify the key challenges facing
women today, we conducted a short fivequestion
survey. On the bright side, most
of the women in our survey plan to continue
working in this field. What is concerning
is that one fourth of the women
in our survey feel that the workplace
is not welcoming to them. This is further
reinforced by the fact that 30% of women
IEEE WOMEN IN ENGINEERING MAGAZINE
47
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IEEE Women in Engineering Magazine - December 2023

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Women in Engineering Magazine - December 2023
