Name five female engineers. If you're having a hard time coming up with names, don't blame yourself — blame the numbers.
According to MSU data from the spring, 54 percent of MSU students are female. Despite this, only 18 percent of engineering students are women. It's no secret that certain occupations and majors are heavily geared toward certain sexes.
It's hard to forget the scene from "Meet the Parents" in which Robert De Niro's character gives Ben Stiller's character a hard time about being a nurse. De Niro's character is not alone in his notion. Society has traditionally allocated certain roles for certain sexes.
Last week though, 29 high school students participated in MSU's Women in Engineering program last week. For four years, the program has aimed at encouraging women to pursue engineering.
Although the first women's rights convention was held in Seneca Falls, N.Y. more than 150 years ago, the problem of sequestering certain subjects to different genders still exists. Social inequalities begin as soon as parents dress their daughters in pink and sons in blue.
While gender inequalities may not be escapable in the near future, educational inequalities could be coming to an end. With the help of programs like MSU's Women in Engineering, we can begin to break down gender-based fields of study.
If you've been keeping up with educational news lately, you've probably noticed that girls are consistently performing better than boys in elementary and secondary school and that women outnumber men on college campuses. But with statistics like this, would making more programs aimed at incorporating women into male-dominated majors begin to decrease the numbers of men in those specific fields?
MSU's program for high school students encourages women to continue participating in fields in which they show interest, rather than discouraging men from the same fields. With this approach, no one is told not to pursue a specific area of study, but instead fields like engineering could eventually have a more equal gender distribution.
Although the Women in Engineering program is beneficial and encouraging for young girls eager to study engineering, it would be nice to see similar programs geared toward encouraging interested boys to pursue historically female-saturated occupations like nursing and education.
MSU's program is a step in the right direction to promote a more well-balanced educational system.
