the female engineer

I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned this yet, but I study a combined mechanical engineering and commerce. As expected, there are not many female engineers, and much less so in Mechanical.

I chose to study an engineering degree back in 2006 after finishing high school. I was good at maths, directionless with a degree choice and dating someone who did the course a few years above me and very good at it. That is how I got sold into it.

Now I’m not saying it’s a bad choice – it was actually a smart one. There’s an abundance in jobs compared to most industries at the moment due to the GFC, there tends to be a preference in females because of discrimination and I’m not too bad at it.

Today one of my oldest friends told me she was gay too. Which I thought was amusing because she, like me, also studies mechanical engineering. However amusingly enough, she also studies gender in an arts degree, like my girlfriend did. This seems to coincide with the theory of “she must be a lesbian if she does engineering” funnily enough. I’ve noticed something though about the girls who do study my degree. They tend to be very boyish (ie; the theory we just worked with), or Christian. I am not sure about what the latter suggests but both at my university and hers, this seems to be a trend. There is a bulk in this area. It is understandable, but still disappointing that more girls, or exceptional students in general do not study the course. It is demanding, fulfilling and very rewarding. My theory has always been the inadequacy of the New South Wales’ University Admission Index in indicating the difficulty of a course. As a rank system, it only shows demand of students wanting to study a degree rather than future prospects. As expected, medicine and law rock off the scale encouraging many future students and parents to choose those courses for this prestige and ultimately eating out many competent students. This leaves engineering far behind.

That being said though, I am accounting for the biomedical engineering students (amounting to a fair proportion of females compared to other engineering streams). Mechanical can be much more difficult to prove a statistic as there are only about 40 people left in my year studying the degree.