National Engineers Week Foundation

Introduce A Girl To Engineering Day

Pledge Roster | INTRODUCE A GIRL TO ENGINEERING DAY FEBRUARY 24, 2011

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INTRODUCE A GIRL TO ENGINEERING DAY FEBRUARY 24, 2011
Women are severely underrepresented in the engineering profession. Research shows that girls and young women lose interest in subjects and the fields of study leading to engineering careers long before they enter college.

As part of our focus on girls, we will publicize the need for more women in engineering and will reach K-12 girls with positive messages about math and science education and engineering careers. Additionally we are striving to have engineering societies and other organizations incorporate their own focus on women engineers with a hope that these various entities can continue to collaborate in the future.

Currently only 20 percent of engineering undergraduates are women. Only ten percent of the engineering workforce are women. For years, false notions of girls’ innate inability in math, lack of science preparation in high school, and assumptions about the effects of historical and institutional discrimination, have been offered as causes for the startling disproportion. Recent surveys, however, refute most of those theories, including the ones that question girls’ academic readiness to study engineering when they leave high school. Girls and boys take requisite courses at approximately the same rate, with girls’ enrollment often exceeding that of boys. Instead, experts contend that the major culprit is one of perception among girls and the people who influence them, including teachers, parents, peers, and the media.

In short, girls have to perceive they can be engineers before they can be engineers. According to the National Engineers Week Foundation, nothing conveys that message as effectively as mentors and role models and no program more effectively brings girls and role models together than Introduce a Girl to Engineering Day, now in its 8th year.

Agilent Technologies, Inc. and the S.D. Bechtel, Jr. Foundation are lead sponsors for Introduce a Girl to Engineering Day, with additional funding from the Motorola Foundation.

For volunteer information about Introduce A Girl to Engineering, visit Introduce A Girl: Resources for Volunteers