Why do women leave engineering? (MIT Article)

[kristinweiss]

Another thing that I have noticed is that after high school, the number of females that stay involved, either by mentoring or by volunteering, significantly decreases. It is especially apparent at competitions, particularly within the alumni group that comes back to volunteer at events, where I often find myself being the only girl or one of only two or three girls with a group of over a dozen guys, but that could just be a local thing. It's not something that has ever particularly bothered me, but I've always found it funny how hard of a push there is to get more girls involved in FIRST, but as soon as they graduate they leave.

[NShep98]

This is an interesting perspective, how to keep girls involved as opposed to how to simply get them there. I feel like this is the reason for the disconnect between wanting to encourage girls to pursue STEM careers, the part that has been promoted in popular culture, and making sure the stereotypes that kept them away in the first place aren't perpetuated, the part that has not.

In certain cases, girls are up in arms expecting to be put down, only contributing to the problem. In others, boys do push girls down and assign them menial tasks. Often times it can be both. In any case, it will usually involve a change in approach on both ends.

As far as FRC goes, mentors should work with both girls and boys to make sure the girls are treated fairly and equally, and that they have the confidence to handle themselves. My team is fortunate in that, even though she is our only female mentor, our lead mentor is a woman, and she does exceptionally well in encouraging the girls along, while at the same time giving reminders to boys to make sure they get their fair chance (we're also trying to even out our gender ratio a bit). From my experience, this seems like the best solution, because as far as I can tell, the boys and girls get along fine.

[Sperkowsky]

Originally Posted by NorthernTaco

Another thing that I have noticed is that after high school, the number of females that stay involved, either by mentoring or by volunteering, significantly decreases. It is especially apparent at competitions, particularly within the alumni group that comes back to volunteer at events, where I often find myself being the only girl or one of only two or three girls with a group of over a dozen guys, but that could just be a local thing. It's not something that has ever particularly bothered me, but I've always found it funny how hard of a push there is to get more girls involved in FIRST, but as soon as they graduate they leave.

My question is, is the number decreasing in relation to the number of males?

The number of everyone decreases once students graduate. Only a small percentage of alumni actually come back to volunteer. It could have been perhaps that there were 3000 boys and 100 girls and now there is 1 girl and 30 boys.