INNOVATION May-June 2014

not “build cool stuff ” as was promised in engineering school, and that opportunities for advancement required working very long hours or inflexible schedules. More than 63% of female engineering students in Canada anticipate facing gender-based discrimination in the workplace. Engineers Australia observed the phenomenon of low female participation in engineering practice and instituted a comprehensive study of Australian women in engineering to determine why retention was so poor. Their findings were startling: The age profiles of working engineers were markedly different for men than for women. The age profile for women in engineering peaked in the 20 – 29 age bracket while that for men peaked in the 30 – 39 age bracket. Analysis of the age profile of female engineers no longer working in the profession indicated the leak in the pipeline: Women over the age of 30 were leaving the profession. Finding examples of successful progression towards gender balance in engineering is difficult as female engineers are still a minority in all countries, at less than 20%. Canada is achiev- ing the global average percentage of women in engineering, compared to 10.6% in 1999 in the US and 12% in the UK. Retention of women in Canadian engineering is 50% of female graduates; women represent 12.2% of the population of practising engineers in Canada. In order to meet Canada’s need for engineers in the future, the profession must stem the tide or block the leak in the pipeline of men and women who leave the profession after five to seven years by addressing

Current State of Canadian Engineering On April 13, 2013, the Globe & Mail published an article, “Canada Has a Serious Shortage of Engineers,” which com- mented on the Engineers Canada report that forecasted signifi- cant growth in sectors that require the services of professional engineers, and noted that as many as 95,000 Canadian engineers will be retiring by 2020. Engineering institutions produce 12,000 graduates annually, a number insufficient to fill the upcoming void because, of those graduates, only 70% will enter practice. Encouraging new engineers to work in the field is a significant part of the challenge. Less than 70% of engineering students nearing graduation expect to pursue careers in engineering. Women are more likely than men to choose graduate studies and of the small group who indicated they chose to leave engineering, 78% of the women and 22% of the men intended to stay in a science field (including medicine). Most indicated they chose to leave engineering because of perceptions of the workplace. Women do not leave careers in science and engineering because they lack aptitude or ability, proven by comparisons of male and female grade point averages in an American study of university engineering and science degrees, but rather for the same reasons their male counterparts leave: Their expectations about the work were not met and their developed perceptions of the workplace culture were negative. As Fouad and Singh reported in Stemming the Tide: Why Women Leave Engineering , many female engineers who left the profession were very disappointed that they did

CHART 1 – UNDERGRADUATE ENROLMENT BY GENDER (Full-time Equivalent)

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