Iowa State’s percentages of male and female undergraduate students are almost directly opposite to the percentages of male and female undergraduate students nationwide.

Nationally, women represent about 56 percent of all the undergraduate students, according to the 1995 Digest of Annual Statistics report. At Iowa State, however, men represent about 57 percent of the undergraduate student body.

The slogan, “Iowa State University of Science and Technology,” may hold the answer for the discrepancy, said Vern Hawkins, assistant director of admissions and acting special assistant to the vice president of student affairs.

He said the Colleges of Engineering, Agriculture and Veterinary Medicine have traditionally had a male-skewed student population.

The computer science major is also disproportionately male. As of the fall of 1995, male undergraduate students outnumbered female students in that major by almost 4 to 1.

“Engineering has been a traditionally male-dominated field. Overall, you could conclude that part of the preponderance of men over women has been the traditionally male-dominated fields [at Iowa State],” Hawkins said.

Ted Okiishi, associate dean of the College of Engineering, said the engineering department recognizes the lack of women. “We admit it, and we’re trying to do something about it.” he said.

Hawkins said the trend of having certain academic fields being dominated by men is changing.

“For years Veterinary Medicine has been a male-dominated field. For the last three years, women have outnumbered men in the freshman class,” he said.

The College of Family and Consumer Sciences (formerly the College of Home Economics) has traditionally been a female-dominated field. Hawkins said this too is changing, and last year the top graduate of Family and Consumer Sciences was a male.

But the percentage of women in traditionally male-dominated fields is changing very slowly. In the fall of 1995, only about 16 percent of enrolled engineering students were women.

“We would like to see it be 50/50. We’re not representative of the state of Iowa demographics,” Okiishi said.

Okiishi, like Hawkins, said the gender trend is gradually changing, but not very quickly. “It’s been a slow, slow increase,” he said.

Chemical engineering is atypical of the College of Engineering in general, in that about 30 percent of its students are women.

Kari Roehr, a senior chemical engineering and food science major, said she chose chemical engineering because of its academic appeal.

“I like chemistry a lot and I like math. My parents are both educators, so I’ve had the importance of education emphasized my whole life. I didn’t really know what [the chemical engineering major] was going into it.”

Roehr said she thinks more women decide to major in chemical engineering because it better fits what women like to do.

“It deals a lot with natural sciences. I think that has more interest for women than mechanics,” she said.

Terry King, chair of the department of chemical engineering, said there are probably a lot of reasons why more women choose to major in chemical engineering than other areas of engineering.

“If you ask our female students why they chose chemical engineering, the reasons are almost identical to what men say. They like math, chemistry, and physics, and the job opportunities are good right now. They knew it was hard, and they wanted to be challenged,” King said.

Roehr said the areas of specialization that chemical engineering had to offer were of interest to her. “There’s more choices, like food engineering and bio-engineering.”

Marketability was another reason Roehr said she chose to double major in chemical engineering and food science.

“It will provide an incredibly sound base for my career. So far, it’s been a great combination,” she said.

She said she wants a career in either product development or process engineering with a foods company, such as Kraft or Pillsbury.

Okiishi said one of the main reasons for the relatively small number of women in engineering at Iowa State is a lack of understanding as to what engineering is about.

“We need to do a better job communicating with grades kindergarten through 12, community colleges and the work force,” Okiishi said.

He said that he thinks students know more about what some fields of engineering involve academically than others.

“It’s harder for women to understand what mechanical engineering is all about. They take physics, but don’t connect it with mechanical engineering,” Okiishi said. He said it is easier to see the association between chemistry and chemical engineering than it is to see the connection between physics and mechanical engineering.

King said some of the reasons women decide to major in chemical engineering more than other areas of engineering is becuse other areas coincide with traditional female activities.

“Some female students say they like the idea of making things in sort of a cooking fashion, like when you mix chemicals,” he said.

The unstructured nature of chemical engineering is the main reason women choose chemical engineering, King said.

“I think it has to do with the abstractness and uncertainties you are faced with all the time,” King said.

During a recent reunion at Iowa State, King spoke with the second female graduate of the chemical engineering department, who graduated in 1945.

“She had no idea why she chose chemical engineering,” he said.

King said he has seen the gender trend change. Women began entering the chemical engineering major in larger numbers in the late ’70s and early ’80s.

He said about 25 percent of the majors were women 10 years ago, and in the last couple of years the trend has leveled with about 30 to 33 percent of the majors being female.

That percentage of women, however, is still much lower that Iowa State’s overall representation of women.

Hawkins said Iowa State is not “just riding the tide” in regard to the distribution of female students.

Iowa State’s Women in Engineering program is geared toward recruiting women into non-traditional fields, such as the sciences and technical areas. The program tries to attract women toward those fields through academic scholarship and support systems, Hawkins said.

He said Iowa State enrollment figures between 1975 and 1995 reflect the growing number of women in non-traditional fields.

The College of Agriculture has “more than doubled” the number of women it did in 1975, or about 16 percent, Hawkins said. Women are now just over 16 percent of the students in the College of Engineering — significantly more than their six percent representation in 1975.

“The numbers are still disparate, but there’s been significant progress,” Hawkins said.

On the graduate level, the discrepancy between male and female students is larger than at the undergraduate level. As of the fall of 1995, about 60 percent of enrolled graduate students were male.

Again, Iowa State is at odds with the national average, where women are slightly more strongly represented at the graduate level. About 57 percent of graduate students nationwide are female, according to the Digest of Annual Statistics.

The chemical engineering department at Iowa State is also exceptional at the graduate level, about 50 percent of its students are women.

Hawkins said the reason for the changing gender trend in the academic fields began in the business would.

“About twenty years ago, businesses began attracting women because it was the things to do, to have a woman token representative.

“What began to happen was that the women who did get into these fields, like technology, approached existing and new problems with a whole different mind set. Women began to solve problems that men wouldn’t even touch. Businesses that had women in the work force began to advance,” he said.

Hawkins said once women began entering the business field in greater numbers, their presence became a necessity.

“Now it’s not a tokenism idea at all; they need those different perspectives to keep up. Women are coming in and saying, ‘We can do it a better way.’

“I would also expand that scenario to include minorities in the work force,” he said. “They need it to survive.”