This is an essay I wrote for the course “Science and Masculinity in History, a global perspective” in autumn 2018, originally published in Entropie ETH in May 2020. The statistics were updated in February 2021 from Gender/Equality Monitoring.
Women are a rare sight in engineering courses. This is especially true at ETH Zurich. It promotes a cutting-edge study of “Maschinenbau” with antiquated images of men and machines. And it does too little to attract female talent.
Scenario at a party on December 8th, 2018. Conversation between a man of my age and me:
Man: “So what do you study?”
Me: “I study mechanical engineering”
Man: “Really?!” (looking astonished)
Me: “Yes!! What about you?”
Man: “Me too actually”
At a first glance, you would imagine that his question seems justified since there are not many women studying mechanical engineering at ETH (12% enrolled in the Master’s Program in 2019.) In fact, all people I met for the first time were astonished when I told them what I studied. Until that day, I believed they imagined that I had to work in a boiler suit or repair an engine or a machine (a traditional image of a man in the mechanical craft and technology field which is until today outnumbered by men).
ENGINEERING AT ETH: A DIFFICULT TERRAIN FOR WOMEN
But the astonishment from one of my fellow students made me realize that he just could not believe that I could study something technical due to the lone fact that I am a woman (who looked feminine, because else it would be ‘understandable’ for him I guess). Of all people, a man who studies the exact same subject and in the exact same university as me should know what we do in a mechanical engineering program. He should know that women with enough motivation and interest in the subject are as suited as men to become engineering students at ETH.
With this little introduction I would like to open the discussion about the real problem here: Why is mechanical engineering outnumbered by men? Since when is it perceived as a problem and does it seem to change? What does ETH or our Department for Mechanical and Process Engineering D-MAVT do about it?
In order to understand the history of mechanical engineering at ETH, let’s review briefly why women weren’t encouraged to do science prior to the industrial revolution. During the Enlightenment, a period which lasted from mid 17th until the end of 18th century, philosophers and scientists believed that passions – emotions like lust, greed, jealousy and anger – were interfering with the reasonable functioning of the mind. In order to be a good scientist back then, one had to restraint all kind of passions: scholars had to train their minds by performing diet, regimen and abstinence. [1] It was also believed that passions were one of the main characteristics of the female gender and that women did not have enough self-control to discard these passions completely: therefore women were thought to be unsuited to do science.
As engineering became a popular field of applied science with the industrial revolution in the 19th century, ETH opened its doors in 1855 and women were explicitly entitled to study there. However, they were not encouraged by society to go to university since well-respected women at the time were meant to stay at home being wives and mothers in the first place. As a matter of fact, there were no upper secondary schools for girls in Switzerland. This meant that only women from abroad could benefit from the female admission to ETH. The first female student at ETH was Nadezda Smeckaja from Russia, who enrolled for a mechanical engineering degree in 1871. [2]
During the 20th century, the number of women enrolled in a mechanical engineering program was almost zero. To give you a rough idea, the first year where more than four women enrolled in mechanical engineering was 1974 (compared to 791 men that year). [3]
ENGINEERING IS MORE THAN ‘MASCHINENBAU’
Compared to the overall number of women at ETH (32.3% of BSc and MSc students in 2019) or other fields of study like materials science or pharmaceutical science, the number of women in mechanical engineering has not increased drastically since the 1970s (see Figures 1 and 2). The current percentage of women enrolled is about 10%. So why is mechanical engineering still so unattractive for women?
Firstly, when people imagine what mechanical engineering is, they depict a turbine, a car, a pump or an aircraft: basically, anything that has to do with a machine. This is especially true in German-speaking countries where this study program is called ‘Maschinenbau’ which literally means ‘building of machines’. The study program along with its name originate in the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century when cutting-edge machines like the steam engine were invented. The socially constructed stereotype of women not being able to handle machines has led to the conclusion that women could not study mechanical engineering. The problem is that mechanical engineering studies nowadays have little to do with machines while the stereotype still persists. The study program has become a very broad field including – to name just some – biomedical technology, mechatronics and robotics, micro- and nano- technology, design and mechanics of materials and the more traditional energy processes or production techniques.
The second reason why mechanical engineering is not perceived as very attractive for women is the common gender bias in engineering workplaces and its resulting atmosphere in post-doc positions at university or in some companies. Most engineering projects require dynamic group work: some colleagues seat together and develop a new idea or improve an existing one. Most of the time, women are welcome to be part of the team. Their ideas will often be heard but oftentimes (subconsciously) not given the same attention as the ones of their male counterparts. Women have to make an extra effort to prove that they are as qualified as men. This can clearly be seen in the glass ceiling index (GCI) illustrating the chances of women being promoted in academia as a full or associate professor, relative to their number. A GCI of 1 means that women’s chances are equal to men’s, and a GCI over 1 means that women are underrepresented. The higher the value is above one, the ‘thicker’ is the glass ceiling (see Figure 3). In 2019, the GCI for D-MAVT was 3.62: this number is worse than the GCI in 2012 (3.29), while the overall GCI at ETH is decreasing slowly over the past few years reaching a GCI of 1.77 in 2019. [4]
WHERE ARE THE FEMALE ROLE MODELS?
Another reason why young women are not attracted to mechanical engineering in particular is because they simply do not know that there are (at least some!) women active in this field. The lack of female ‘role models’ like well-known professors and the lack of publicity from technical universities specifically targeting young women is an obvious phenomenon. The latter can clearly be seen on the ETH website informing about all study programs: The promotional video for mechanical engineering (see below) from our department D-MAVT depicts a group of (male) students working on a race car eight seconds into the clip and more than 20 men interviewed in total compared to only three women.
THE MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY (MIT) MAKES AN EFFORT
MIT has found out that publicity played a huge role in motivating women to study mechanical engineering. It is basically a chicken-and-egg cycle: the more women are represented on campus, the more women are going to apply for the program. This worked perfectly for MIT after they specifically focused their campaign onto attracting more female students: in 2017, 49.5% of the students enrolled in mechanical engineering in the bachelor’s program were women (compared to 11.1% at ETH). Additionally, it is also important for women to have female role models in mechanical engineering so that they can relate to someone and see that there is a chance for women to have a successful career. A role model would be a well-known professor for example. But even in the number of professors, women are largely outnumbered by men at D-MAVT: in 2019, they accounted for 10.3% of the professors, see Figure 4. We can see that there is still a long way to go for women to attain the same number of professorships than men in our department. When more mechanical engineering female professors will be well-known, there might be a bigger chance for women to enroll in a mechanical engineering degree.
*Note: AssP: assistant professors; FP: full and associate professors (permanent contracts)
‘YOU STUDY MECHANICAL ENGINEERING?’ – ‘ME TOO!’
To conclude, the fact that men outnumbered women in mechanical engineering when the field was ‘created’ in the 19th century has mainly something to do with the fact that women did not have an easy access to upper education in science at that time. It wasn’t until the 1920s that women started to increasingly enroll at ETH, but the engineering field and especially the mechanical engineering program remained almost absent from women until the 70s. The popularity of this subject is still low among women as of today, but I believe that the trend shows an increase in the enrolment numbers, making me confident that there will be more female mechanical engineers in the future.
Hopefully, a conversation between a male and a female student will soon sound like this:
Man: “So what do you study?”
Woman: “I study mechanical engineering”
Man: “Me too! In what semester are you?”
Woman: “In the third. How about you?”
Man: “I’m in the first semester, I have just begun to study here. Do you mind looking at my mechanics homework and help me with this exercise I don’t understand?”
Woman: “Sure, I would love to help!”
Editorially supervised by Bernhard C. Schär & Monique Ligtenberg
Bibliography
[1] Golinski, Jan (2002): “The care of the self and the masculine birth of science”, in: History of Science, vol. 40, pages 125-145.
[2] ETH Zurich, From the first female student to today’s female researchers. https://www.ethz.ch/services/en/employment-and-work/working-environment/equal-opportunities/strategie-und-zahlen/frauen-an-der-eth/geschichte-der-frauen-an-der-eth/von-der-ersten-studentin-bis-zu-den-heutigen-forscherinnen0.html
[3] Leeman, Lars and Speich, Daniel, Weibliche Studierende an der ETH Zürich 1917-2002, http://www.ethistory.ethz.ch/statistik/04Weibliche_Studierende.pdf (07.01.19)
[4] Schubert, Renate and Storjohann Romila, Gender Monitoring 2017/2018. Report on the Gender Balance between Women and Men in Studies and Research at ETH Zürich, https://www.ethz.ch/content/dam/ethz/associates/services/Anstellung-Arbeiten/chancengleichheit/Strategie_und_Zahlen/monitoring-und-studien/1718/PUB_181015_Gender_Monitoring_total2017_ENG.pdf (07.01.19)
List of figures and illustrations
Gallery: ETH Library 1 and 2
Image 1: Wikimedia Commons, Image Credit: NACA
Figure 1: ETH History – Statistiken
Figure 2-4: ETH Equal! – Equality Monitoring 2019/20