Women in Engineering and Architecture: Evolution in the Number of Students Enrolled and Actions to Promote Vocations in the University of Alicante

Abstract

Despite efforts to achieve gender equity in all aspects of society as one of the Sustainable Development Goals, there is still a gender gap in the number of professionals graduating from Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) careers: graduated women do not exceed 30%. In particular, the percentage of women earning degrees in engineering has remained stable at 20% for over 20 years in the United States and other countries, thus being a global situation. The percentage of undergraduate women in different engineering programs varies from a high of about 50% in fields such as environmental engineering and biomedical engineering, to a low of about 13% for computer engineering. With this approach, many Spanish universities began to develop activities to encourage vocations towards these technical degrees around the 2018-19 academic year, among them the University of Alicante. These activities are intended for high school students and consist of meetings to see, touch and experiment engineering and conferences with leading female engineers. The purpose of this study was to find out whether there is a change in trend in recent years in the enrolment of women in engineering and architecture programs in the University of Alicante, especially since actions to promote vocations began. Data from 5035 students enrolled in different engineering and architecture programs from 2018-19 to 2023-24 academic years were collected from the information system of the institution and compared to data from a previous study carried out with 25061 students from 1972-73 to 2017-18 (being 22% of them women, as expected). Data were processed differentiating by degree program, gender and academic year. As a result, the percentage of women in engineering and architecture has increased to 30% taking into account the total number of students during the last 6 years. The percentage found in the last year, when the first participants in activities of vocation promotion haven been able to reach university, was 32%. This value is slightly higher than the previous ones, although not very different, so the activities must continue to check their effectiveness. Nevertheless, the trend is changing somewhat over the years and the percentage of women enrolled is gradually emerging from stagnation. Differentiating by study programs, some of them showed equality, such as Architectural Technology (46% in the last year), Fundamentals of Architecture (60%), Biomedical Engineering (52%) and Chemical Engineering (43%), all of them showing similar values compared to previous years. Other programs continued with low women percentages, such as Computer Engineering (16%), Robotic Engineering (16%) and Sound and Image in Telecommunication Engineering (21%). On the other hand, Multimedia Engineering (28%) significantly increased the percentage last year and Civil Engineering (31%) showed a good trend. Activities to encourage women vocations towards these technical degrees must continue since the woman percentage is still low compared to other degrees. In the era when more engineers are needed, women must be an important part. Society, companies and institutions have to encourage them in a culture of equity and inclusion.