BOULDER, Colo. — Getting more women interested in STEM careers has been a goal for high schools and colleges. Now, the University of Colorado Boulder can claim some bragging rights.
CU Boulder leads the nation with one of the highest percentages of female freshmen in engineering, according to the American Society for Engineering Education.
The College of Engineering and Applied Sciences' (CEAS) 2023 fall first-year class is 41% female. That's up 27% since 2003, according to CU Boulder.
For the past 20 years, CU Boulder said it's been their goal to get more women into the industry. Megan Conard is one of their recent mechanical engineering graduates.
"For the last three years of my time there, I was giving tours to people who were interested in engineering," she said. "I saw a increase in women who were coming on tours, who were coming to the engineering specific tour, and that was really great to see."
"My senior design professors in my last year were two incredibly powerful, strong women," Conard said. "That just strong, powerful energy really pushes you to want to be in engineering and continue to solve problems."
Conard said outside of campus, she did not find a lot of women in mechanical engineering. She said her first internship was at a refinery.
"There wasn’t a bathroom for women," she said. "I was actually the first woman who had shown up to this project, and so they had to split the trailer they were using as a restroom in half and create a bathroom for me."
Pioneering her way through internships, Conard helped pave the way for those coming after her, giving prospective students tours and letting high school students shadow her in class.
"I think some unique things that CU does is create communities," Conard said. "What’s really important is the support you see beyond the outreach ... supporting females in engineering as they’re in their coursework, past that first year and with mentorship."
Dean of CEAS Keith Molenaar graduated from the College in 1987 and has been on faculty since 1999. He said historically, women have been underrepresented in engineering. Two decades ago, they decided to do something about it.
"Our advisory board and some of our faculty really pushed us as a college to see what we could achieve, and amazingly, we’ve become really top in the country at attracting and retaining and graduating women in engineering," Molenaar said.
Community building and mentorship have been part of their long-term strategy of attracting more female students, he said.
"It really does start with K-12," Molenaar said. "We have worked with the Society of Women Engineers, the National Center for Women and Technology, TeachEngineering, some groups we’ve been working with for more than 20 years, to get women interested in engineering, and usher them into the university here."
Both Molenaar and Conard said diversity in engineering is imperative to making sure the things they're designing are compatible for everyone.
"Engineers are shaping the world, through buildings, through infrastructure, through computer science, all the different things that engineers do," Molenaar said. "It is so important that we have women engineers to design that future because we want to have a future that is inclusive for all."
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