Women are outnumbered in the fields of science and engineering, but the Program for Women in Science and Engineering at Iowa State encourages them to enter these areas.

Karen Zunkel, director of PWSE, said the majority of undergraduate students in science and engineering are male.

“If you take all of the science and engineering fields and combine them, we’re at about 30 percent women, so 70 percent of the undergraduates are male in those areas,” Zunkel said.

Zunkel pointed out that some science fields at Iowa State are dominated by women, but other areas are even more strongly male-dominated than average.

“In the biological sciences at Iowa State University, there are more undergraduate women than there are men enrolled,” Zunkel said. “Some majors – you go to computer science or mechanical engineering or electrical engineering – and it’s less than 10 percent enrolled that are women.”

Zunkel said PWSE offers programs to help encourage women to think about entering these fields and help those enrolled succeed.

“We’ll have speakers or seminars or field trips – or different programs like that – that give students the chance to interact with professional women that are in science and engineering fields to see what it’s like in the workplace,” she said.

Zunkel said they also discuss issues that address “what it’s like being a female in a male-dominated world.”

PWSE also spends time with outreach programs for K-12 women to get them thinking about a career in science and engineering.

“We have undergraduate students that we pay to go out into classrooms across the state of Iowa to do science activities with kids so that they can see female undergraduate students that are in these fields,” Zunkel said.

Women in science and engineering can chose to live with other women in these fields by joining a learning community.

Jessica Tobelmann, sophomore in chemical engineering, is a peer mentor for the O’Bryan learning community in Friley Hall. She said each peer mentor is responsible for about 20 women that live on their floor.

“I have individual and group meetings with them, and then we plan activities and tours and panels and just fun social activities for them,” Tobelmann said.

Tobelmann said most women will take the same beginning classes, so peer mentors are available to help with study groups and test reviews.

“Most women take the same general education classes, and we took those last year, so we can help them with those,” Tobelmann said. “I can give them any study sheets I made and old tests to study off of.”

Tobelmann said peer mentors help with issues outside of schoolwork.

“We help them through all kinds of issues like homesickness – just any personal or social issue. We also help them find ways to get involved on campus,” Tobelmann said.

Allison Bryant, sophomore in industrial engineering, said the PWSE is nice because it allows her to network with others in the same field.

“It’s just nice to have a place that you can go if you need help and to be able to talk to people,” Bryant said.