Oral Session 7.2.A
Gender and diversity issues & Including entrepreneurship in engineering programmes
June 7, 11:25 - 12:45
Oral Session 7.2.A
Gender and diversity issues & Including entrepreneurship in engineering programmes
June 7, 11:25 - 12:45
June 7, 11:25 - 12:45
| Hour | Contribution | |
|---|---|---|
| 11:25 | Engineering Education: How to Attract Youth? Lenka Lhotska  | |
| 11:45 | Building of a Telecommunications Engineering Economics Curriculum: A case study from Greece Dimitris Varoutas, Manolis Athanasiou, Stathes Hadjiefthymiades  | |
| 12:05 | Comparing student outcomes for women and men in Electrical Engineering to Civil, Chemical, Industrial, and Mechanical Engineering in the USA Susan M. Lord, Matthew W. Ohland, Richard A. Layton  |
Engineering Education: How to Attract Youth?
Lenka Lhotska- Keywords
- STEM, gender, engineering, education methodology
- Abstract
- The main aim of the paper is to discuss, which measures we can take to attract young people (high/secondary school students) to study technology and engineering. We feel that it is necessary to bridge the gap between young people (aged 15-20) and their approach to science education and career. We propose an innovative methodology focused on the aim to attract young people to career in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics), with a specific attention on gender balance. Nowadays, young people are exposed to tsunami of information and urges from society and media, and often science seems to be too far from their reality. The main aim of the proposed work is to bridge this gap by stimulating youth curiosity and fresh ideas, showing them that science, and STEM career in particular, are more close to their life and habits than they can imagine. The power might be in strengthening the dialogue between science and youth by demonstrating that a career in science can boost economy and create a responsible generation of researchers. Moreover, engineering and technology areas create and will continue in creating new jobs unlike other areas. We plan to encourage and motivate young people and namely girls to approach STEM in a smart, easy and proactive way. In last decades the effort to increase the number of women applying for studies at technical universities, and consequently for a job in the field of technology, can be seen in European countries. However, the advance in the decreasing of gender disbalance is very weak and the amount of female students in technical fields is still quite small. Reasons for this are for sure historical patterns and society prejudices that maintain and encourage gender discrimination. We analyzed the situation in the Czech Republic and found out that there are differences in ratio of females in individual engineering disciplines. According to various studies, Czech society is conservative considering the dividing the male and female roles in the society. Also, employment of a woman in any field of engineering is considered nontraditional. This clearly points out to social stereotypes in this country, considering only the close connection of men and technology to be natural. We can observe these stereotypes already at the primary school. There is still prevailing belief that boys are more gifted for mathematics, and physics, and girls for humanities (languages, literature, art). However, it was shown in several studies performed with pre-school children that the natural talent for any of these disciplines is almost equally distributed in the population independently on sex. But in general as a consequence of the bias, we can observe disbalance in numbers of male and female students at specialized secondary schools, e.g. nursing, economy versus electrical or mechanical technology. And this disbalance continues at universities. The total number of university students at all 73 universities and colleges (both public and private) in the Czech Republic has been slightly increasing during the last decade. Since 2010 the total number is almost constant 392 thousand of students, out of which 219 thousand are females. In Bachelor and Master study the gender structure is almost the same: 46 49 per cent males and 51 54 per cent females. Certain shift is observable in PhD study, there are only 42 44 per cent females. Completely different situation is observed at engineering faculties at all educational levels. Technical sciences are studied more by men: overall percentage of women is about 11 per cent (from the whole number of females studying at universities) and slowly decreasing, while this percentage in male population is around 40 per cent (from total number of male students). However, if we analyze the numbers in interdisciplinary areas, such as biomedical engineering, biomedical informatics, eHealth and telemedicine, we see certain shift. There are usually up to 30 per cent of female students. The discussions with students confirm our assumptions, why they decided to apply for these particular interdisciplinary programs.
Building of a Telecommunications Engineering Economics Curriculum: A case study from Greece
Dimitris Varoutas, Manolis Athanasiou, Stathes Hadjiefthymiades- Keywords
- curriculum design, telecommunications engineering education, techno-economics, interdisciplinary education, simulations
- Abstract
- Telecommunications engineering has witnessed tremendous advances in recent years primarily due to progress in network science and engineering and developments in related areas and applications. Telecommunications nowadays serves broader industries than traditional telecom operators since convergence in fixed, wireless and mobile has occurred while media, entertainment, health, financial and defense industries are also participating in telecom ecosystem. The technical advances in the rather multidisciplinary field of telecom which blends ingredients from electrical engineering, computer engineering, computer science and information technology, others have been accompanied by business and economic advances in the associated industries, namely large investments, regulation reforms and new management challenges. These new developments in telecommunications engineering necessitate new specialized under- and post-graduate curricula and lead to new accreditation criteria for telecom engineering criteria by IEEE and ABET, the largest change since the introduction of Computer Engineering 35 years ago. In response to scientific, research and development challenges for telecoms, the business and economic aspects of telecommunications engineering have attracted the scientific interest of academia and industry as another ingredient of telecom, aiming to respond to the economic aspects of telecommunications networks developments. Therefore, the emerging telecom environment assembles people working in science, engineering, economics, business and social sciences, considering telecom developments and challenges. These needs have been accompanied by the development of specialized undergraduate courses world-widely. In this article, the development of a curriculum in telecommunications engineering economics as a joint effort of Informatics and Telecommunications and Economics faculties of the University of Athens is discussed and the 15-years experiences are presented.
Comparing student outcomes for women and men in Electrical Engineering to Civil, Chemical, Industrial, and Mechanical Engineering in the USA
Susan M. Lord, Matthew W. Ohland, Richard A. Layton- Keywords
- Diversity, Retention, MIDFIELD, Student outcomes, Stickiness
- Abstract
- Throughout Europe and the USA, Electrical Engineering (EE) suffers from an underrepresentation of women even when compared with most other engineering disciplines. This study uses a large multi-institution longitudinal dataset, the Multiple-Institution Database for Investigating Engineering Longitudinal Development (MIDFIELD) to examine engineering student outcomes in the USA. This work considers undergraduate student outcomes for women and men in EE and compares them to those in the other four largest engineering disciplines in the USA: Chemical (ChE), Civil (CVE), Mechanical (MCE), and Industrial (ISE) Engineering. This research focuses on over 94,000 men and 24,000 women who ever enrolled in one of these five disciplines. This includes first-time-in-college as well as transfer students. Analysis shows that EE has fewer women than men at enrollment and graduation and the percentage of women is comparable to MCE but lower than the other engineering disciplines. Students graduate in EE in six years at lower rates than ISE, CVE, and MCE and comparable rates to ChE. Women in EE graduate at slightly higher rates than men. Stickiness is the number of students who graduate in a major divided by the number who ever declared that major. EE has the lowest stickiness of the disciplines studied. In comparing the net population change of students from start to graduation, EE loses about 22% of the women and men. Only ChE has higher percentage losses. MCE has comparable losses, CVE loses about 10% of its student population and ISE gains students from start to graduation. This work contributes to the literature by examining engineering students disaggregated by gender, discipline, and entry point. This study can inform studies in other countries.