Abstract:

Since ancient times, whenever you think about engineering, you think of an area that requires a lot of physical and mental strength, and is commonly assumed and led by persons of the male gender, however within these areas there is a minority of people gender female, which plays its work satisfactorily. In the racing world order systems engineering and related careers, they receive a share of women reaches an average of 10%.

This article aims to identify why this happens, doing their focus of study in Cali, why women take this profession as male characteristics when, in history, women have accepted as a life project, have performed satisfactorily and they have received higher wages than those received in other professions, that have saturated labor market, which elements have influenced to decide on their training as engineers Systems and what have been the challenges and strategies to overcome these difficulties throughout the process deformation.

The paper is organized as follows, in section two works related to the subject are presented; section three related scenario motivation to address this issue. In section four case study, the choice of strategy for data collection, the population with which they worked and the methodology used to collect the presents information; the fifth section describes the analysis of data related to the process of choosing the career of Systems Engineering and related careers. The sixth section presents the analysis of the process of training as Systems Engineers and related difficulties, the strategies used to overcome them. Later in the last section, some conclusions related to the reflections present and future work related to the issue of training for women in Systems Engineering are proposed.

When designing the case study, it is proposed to have a diagnosis related to two distinct aspects:
• Identify influential factors in women when selecting their career, specifically at the Universities of Colombian South-western.
• Identify findings related to the formation of female students of Systems Engineering programs.

This case study is classified as exploratory and descriptive. Exploratory because it seeks to find out what is happening with women taking the decision to undertake their training as engineer’s systems or related careers. And descriptive because thoroughly details a detected phenomenon or situation.

The application of focus groups with the groups of student women for university is proposed, given that populations of women in Systems Engineering programs are small and this method is relevant and adjusted to the objective of the case study. A focus group is an organized discussion around a topic or phenomenon. Focus groups provide great benefits to research and society.

This instrument was applied to students (women) of different semesters and different ages (data taken at the time of the focus group). Qualitative data, their feelings, their way of analyzing the situation facing their training process, are collected, this allows quantitative analyzes to determine trends in the responses of women with the focus group that was held in the two universities.

Keywords:

Gender, gender in engineering, gender differences.