Programs and services designed to attract women to engineering are helping to increase the number of women engineers at Iowa State.

“We have programs that are really working,” said Monica Bruning, program coordinator of engineering outreach and recruitment. “We’re reaching the audience that we want.”

There are a few ISU programs that are meant to increase the percentage of women in science and engineering by recruiting them from an early age.

“We do have outreach programs that go before high school, actually into middle school and even grade school,” said Diane Rover, associate dean of the College of Engineering. “Certainly, we try to target both minorities and women in these programs, but some of these are just general programs.”

Some programs targeted toward women include internships for high school seniors, a LEGO League, a Society of Women Engineers sleepover for women accepted into the College of Engineering, an engineering conference for middle school and high school girls visiting Iowa State, Iowa Girl Scout activities, female and minority group campus visits, and the Women in Science and Engineering learning community.

“We try to attract women students, make sure they get the correct image of engineering,” Rover said.

The programs are partially responsible for the increase in Iowa women coming to Iowa State for engineering recently, Bruning said.

However, during the past year, the overall number of women in engineering has decreased.

“Last year, there were 165 women in the freshmen class of the College of Engineering, and this year there are 152,” said Lora Leigh Chrystal, program coordinator for Women in Science and Engineering. “That’s just an example of how the numbers have dropped.”

The percentage of women students in the College of Engineering varies from program to program, Rover said. The most popular undergraduate programs are chemical engineering and industrial engineering.

“It can vary anywhere from around 10 percent to 30 percent,” she said. “Chemical engineering has been, on average, more attractive to women students.”

Undergraduate diversity is important at Iowa State because one of the things employers look for when hiring graduates is diversity, Rover said.

“One of the reasons companies want diverse resources is they want diversity of thought. In order to solve complex problems, you want people to think differently,” she said. “You want them to bring different perspectives to problems.”

To achieve diversity in the workforce, Iowa State is training a diverse set of engineers, Rover said. Part of that diversity comes from gender, which is why the university wants more women engineers than it currently has.

When the number of women increases to around 30 percent in a program, the impact of female presence is more obvious within the larger group, Rover said.

“One of the reasons that we do get a little excited when we see 30 percent numbers for women students is because that’s when women students can change the way engineering is learned and taught, and changing the environment for all engineering students, and that would be changing it for the positive,” she said.