Women sought as engineers

Sharon Davis usually doesn't feel like an oddity in her University of Utah classes.

Yet Davis was the only student in her mechanical engineering class who had used the product on the lab dissection table — a sewing machine.

Davis found herself in the situation of many female students at the U. who are often the sole woman in an engineering class. At the U., only about 12 percent of undergraduate engineering students are women.

"I think there are a lot of people that encourage it, but there still is a stigma against it," said Davis, who is now earning a master's degree in mechanical engineering after receiving a bachelor's in bioengineering. "Some girls think it's not acceptable to be smart or guys aren't going to want to date somebody smart."

University leaders in Utah are trying to change that stigma, recruiting more women into high-demand fields like engineering and science where women have historically been underrepresented.

With a $1.2 million state engineering initiative in its final year, university leaders are hoping the state investment makes a dent in the gender gap. If it doesn't, the state's crop of future engineers will be missing a unique female perspective, said JoAnn Lighty, a chemical engineering professor at the U.

At the U., only 208 of the 2,000 undergraduate pre-majors and official engineering majors are women. That 12 percent figure is down from the 2001-2002 school year, when women made up 15 percent of the engineering student body.

The numbers are similar at Utah State University, the state's second largest research institution. Female students only make up 10 percent of the engineering department, about half of the national average of 20 percent.

"Engineers are the people who design the human-made world. Whether that's your cell phone or your heart defibrillator, there's an engineer in the loop," said Christine Hailey, associate dean of the college of engineering at USU. "If you recruit only one kind of person, you have less creative design solutions than if you recruit a spectrum of people."

But engineering remains a hard sale for women who don't think the field jibes with a balanced family life, Hailey said. Perhaps even more of an obstacle, women simply don't know what engineers do.

"We don't do a very good job of promoting the profession," Hailey said. "We don't have the equivalent of 'E.R.' or 'CSI' on TV. Maybe with the exception of 'Apollo 13,' we're not people who like to be in the media, male or female."

That underexposure is stumbling block for many women who want a career involving math and science. Particularly in mechanical engineering, women tend to think of building things as men's work, Lighty said.