"Upstart 2' has stood there since 1970. It is rumored that the sculptor, Clement Meadmore, purposely gave it a phallic resemblance to point out that engineering was dominated by males. Things have changed today, but a disparity still exists. While chemical engineering, civil and environmental engineering and operations research and financial engineering have gender ratios that are not noticeably unbalanced, mechanical and aerospace engineering, electrical engineering, and computer science are still very disproportionate. At the extreme, the MAE department has 31 seniors, four of them girls. Our parties have a lot of testosterone.
Before writing this column, I spoke to a few women in engineering and physics about their experiences in their respective majors (by all means, not a scientific survey). Those in the more gender-balanced departments had few complaints about sexism; all three chemical engineers I spoke with thought Princeton was doing a good job involving women in engineering.
Those in the more male-dominated disciplines, however, felt more discriminated against and felt they were taken less seriously as students than males in their field. A common complaint was that they had to prove their intelligence. They said people assumed they were dumb until proven intelligent, while most people naturally assumed the males were already intelligent unless proven dumb. While biases certainly exist, they could also be due to the common supposition that there is gender-based affirmative action in the sciences. These biases are a bit ironic, since engineers and scientists are often stereotyped as less masculine than the general population.
Numbers are improving for females in engineering. This year, 46.6 percent of the freshmen who declared interest in B.S.E. was female, up from 37 percent two years ago. The number of female faculty doubled from 7.7 percent in 1997 to 15.4 percent in 2007. But despite these rising numbers, sexist attitudes still exist. There were plenty of angry stories from the girls I talked with and their peers: harassment during problem sets, disbelief from other members that they were capable of engineering, even a professor's skepticism about whether a girl was fit for applying to engineering grad school.
Such attitudes can have a detrimental effect on performance, as shown by many psychology studies. In one study, Asian-American female undergrads at Harvard were first given a questionnaire that reminded them either of their heritage or their gender and then given a math test. Those primed for Asian-American did better than average, and those primed for female did worse.
Even as we're moving toward a more gender-balanced environment, students and even faculty members remain a little sexist. Is there a solution to this problem within the power of the University? A much higher number of freshmen switch from B.S.E. to A.B. than vice-versa, and we'd better not give 46.6 percent of the freshman B.S.E. class an extra reason to leave. We students and faculty should start off with the assumption that all the individuals who made it into this University are intelligent and capable of their majors, and hold off from passing judgment until they consistently demonstrate otherwise. With a more supportive environment women might do even better academically, encouraging them as rising engineers. As the engineering school and the Princeton Society of Women Engineers host more events and talks aimed at females, they provide them with all the more reason to stay.
Surely this is not a phenomenon limited to the realms of engineering, math and science; women struggle in other professional fields dominated by men as well. Some of those that make it to the top have to be aggressive and in turn get called "bitchy." Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) may be closely associated with this word after a competitive campaign in the primaries this year. Our society has a long way to go to rid itself of discrimination.
Here at Princeton, we are a little ahead of that. While society traditionally gives Legos and rockets to our boys and dance shoes and dolls to our girls, Princeton is enrolling females in sciences and engineering at double the national average.
The title of this column (for the mathematically disinclined) reads "if the number of girls over time is increasing, then are girls happy?" An increase seems correlated, but we still can't say whether it is directly influencing their satisfaction in the E-Quad. Ultimately, what can directly influence their satisfaction is accepting our personal responsibility to respect these female engineers and scientists for their choice of study.
Ben Chen is a mechanical and aerospace engineering major from Los Altos, Calif. He can be reached at bc@princeton.edu.
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