Abstract:

The number of female students enrolled in engineering degrees represents only 15% over the total number of students. This percentage has remained unchanged during the last 10 years. In fact, in some specialities the percentage of girls is even worse than at the beginning of the century, when there was already a very important gender gap. There is a global concern about this issue as reflected in the Sustainable Development Goal 4 “Quality Education” defined by the United Nations. Many girls do not even consider studying an engineering degree as a plausible option and everybody must work for every child to have access to all the possible alternatives. In this way, the gender gap problem on the Electrical and Electronics Engineering degrees is addressed in this work. First, the statistics publicly available of the number of girls studying engineering degrees in Spain are shown and compared with those of other western countries. Second, the situation found in the Industrial Engineering School of Toledo of the University of Castilla – La Mancha is analysed, where both the Electrical Engineering degree and the degree in Industrial Electronics and Automation have been studied from 1983. The evolution over the last years is presented according to the following data: the number of new enrolments in each degree vs. the percentage of female students, the number of graduate students vs. the percentage of female students, and the academic results in each group of students. Third, the possible reasons of having such low percentage of female students in the industrial engineering are analysed by referring to sociological studies recently published. Fourth, actions to be developed in the schools, high schools and universities are proposed in order to change the decreasing tendency in the number of female engineering students. Finally, the initiatives already developed are described.

Keywords:

Engineering, equality, gender gap, girls in tech.