Cal State Long Beach’s Engineering Department will host Women Engineers @ the Beach this Friday. It is a free, exclusively female outreach program that will welcome between 300 and 350 female students from 11 schools.
The program was originally launched in 2001 by Lily Gossage. Gossage, an engineering department faculty member, began the program due to the void of females in the engineering field.
Currently, the field of engineering is male-dominated, with females earning only 14,579 bachelor’s degrees in the field, as opposed to the 65,164 earned by males in the 2004-2005 academic year, according to the National Center for Educational Statistics. At Cal State Long Beach, the number of women enrolled in the College of Engineering is 14.3 percent, despite a female student body of 60.4 percent, according to Cal State Long Beach’s department of institutional research.
According to Gossage, one of the reasons most females don’t think about becoming engineers is because of early social practices that dictate gender roles. “Girls haven’t been encouraged early on and that’s unfair … It’s an injustice.”
According to Gossage, gender bias starts in the home, where girls are taught to play with dolls and boys are taught to play with trucks, leading boys toward the more inquisitive, take-apart mentality required for engineering.
Gossage pointed to early education intervention as a key factor for increasing the amount of female engineers. She said school officials such as counselors and teachers should encourage young girls to look at the non-traditional field of engineering as a career option.
Gossage said Friday’s event will introduce the world of engineering at Cal State Long Beach to girls who have expressed an interest. According to the Women in Engineering @ the Beach website, 95 percent of the girls attending the event are in honors programs such as GATE or AVID.
On the agenda for Friday’s event are two engineering awareness workshops, hands-on activities that include ice-cream making and catapulting, a free T-shirt and a keynote speech from Antoinette Massey of Raytheon Space and Airborne Systems.
Raytheon’s American Indian Network and Space Airborne Systems is sponsoring the event. Gossage has received a lot of support from the engineering industry. However, she said she would also like to see financial support from the university, which has yet to contribute to the funding of the event.
The event itself is organized by a band of volunteers whom Gossage described as a group of people executing a very difficult task with “military precision.”
This will be the tenth event for Women Engineers @ the Beach. From 2001 to 2005, the event took place twice a year with a conference in the fall and another in the spring. However, due to a lack of resources, the conference had recently been cut back to a once-yearly event. Spring 2008 will mark a return to the fall/spring sessions.
The outreach program, according to Gossage, has grown exponentially. Each year, the program gets more applicants than it can host and some schools have to be turned away and rolled over to the next conference. Schools participating in the program include elementary, middle schools and high schools.
According to Gossage, because engineering is such a heavily math-laden, field girls need to start early on to stay on track.
Gossage said the field of engineering may come to include more women in the future. She pointed to the evolution in the medical and legal fields as a model for what women can accomplish, noting that those fields also once held a low number of women.
“Women are just as capable. They just haven’t been made aware, and that’s just sad,” said Gossage.
