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On Enrolling More Female Students in Science and Engineering

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Abstract

Many people hold this truth to be self-evident that universities should enroll more female students in science and engineering; the main question then being how. Typical arguments include possible benefits to women, possible benefits to the economy, and the unfairness of the current female under-representation. However, when clearly stated and scrutinized these arguments in fact lead to the conclusion that there should be more women in scientific disciplines in higher education in the sense that we should expect more women (which various kinds of discrimination may prevent), not that we should actively enroll more women. Outreach programs towards high school students may therefore be logically incompatible with the arguments supposed to justify them. They should purport to allow women to graduate in a field congruent with her abilities and desires, rather than try to draw as many of them to scientific disciplines as possible: one cannot try to ‘recruit’ as many female students as possible while claiming to help them choose more freely.

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Notes

  1. By ‘the subject’ I mean whether universities should strive to enroll more female students in scientific fields, not why few women actually enroll in science and engineering. In other words, the present article is about questions of policy and prescription, not an empirical description.

  2. Many authors talk of a “leaky pipeline”—i.e. the fact that the older the girl the less interested she is in science and engineering—and want to get rid of this ‘leak’ (see for instance [18]). Yet they tend to forget that this is a simile, not an argument. One can also say that a difference between girls in elementary school and in high school is that the latter have breasts. Can one infer that this difference is due to social pressure? Should one try to put an end to this phenomenon?

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  1. Institute of Materials Research and Engineering, Singapore, 117602, Singapore

    Mathieu Bouville

  2. Institute of High Performance Computing, Singapore, 117528, Singapore

    Mathieu Bouville

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Correspondence to Mathieu Bouville.

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Bouville, M. On Enrolling More Female Students in Science and Engineering. Sci Eng Ethics 14, 279–290 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-007-9038-1

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