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Making Engineering Science Gender Neutral

December 12, 2005

To recruit more girls and women into the so-called "engineering pipeline" educators are presenting engineering careers in more appealing ways, for example, as fun, socially useful, and multidisciplinary. Engineering instructors and faculty are redesigning engineering education using different classroom techniques leaning toward a focus on group work and interdisciplinarity, which have the added advantage of being purportedly more "women friendly" than traditional methods.  The remaining task is to address the content of engineering courses, which has changed only superficially, says Alice Pawley, graduate student and project assistant at WCER's Center on Integrating Research, Teaching, and Learning. Pawley hopes to contribute to the task of redesigning engineering and engineering science to be more gender-neutral  and to encourage reconsidering the content of engineering classrooms. Read Alice Pawley's paper.