Women in Engineering

At this week’s event, the ‘Woman in Engineering’ awards for the UNSW I managed to annoy more than one academic.

The stated goal of the event is to help get their female numbers up above 20%, where they have been stuck for some time, and preferably to 50%.

I suggested that they could achieve this goal overnight by cutting their student intake by 60% but also by keeping all their females.

Apparently that is absurd even though less than 50% of their graduates go on to practice engineering. Maybe, I suggested, that their real problem, like much of our tertiary sector, is that they train way too many graduates for the given job market.