In 2023, 30% of all undergraduate engineering students were female at the University of Colorado Boulder, compared to 18% in 2003. Of the freshmen that came into engineering during the fall of 2023, 41% were female, up from 14% two decades ago.
CU Boulder’s College of Engineering and Applied Sciences announced these increases as its engaged in efforts during the past decades to improve gender diversity.
Jasleen Batra, a student in electrical and computer engineering at CU Boulder, said she has noticed an increasing number of female engineering students.
“My major is really, really tiny already, so we don’t have a lot of women engineers. But every single time I look at the years before me, I always see more and more women in the room, and it just makes me really, really happy to see them all come together,” Batra said.
The increase resulted in CU Boulder achieving a top spot in 2022 for the highest percentage of female freshmen in engineering from the American Society for Engineering Education.
“We’re just thrilled at the growth we’ve seen in the number of women engineers,” Keith Molenaar, dean of the College of Engineering, said. “I know it’s a recent story, but we’ve really been working on it for more than 20 years and been dedicated to recruiting, retaining and graduating a diverse set of engineers.”
Ada Forsner said she loves being an aerospace engineering student at CU Boulder. But, being a female in engineering has been challenging, and she has felt a need to succeed to be noticed.
“I don’t see myself as a female. I see myself as another student, and I want to be seen for my achievements and things that I do, not for what’s different about me,” Forsner said
The Society of Women Engineers estimates that, in 2023, the percentage of women professionals in architecture and engineering is 16.7% compared to 9% in the 1990s.
Batra said it’s important to have diversity in engineering programs so people can have their experiences validated by people who understand.
“As a woman of color, I have been discriminated against a lot, and in engineering it’s kind-of hard to go through this major without experiencing it,” Batra said. “And just knowing that there’s other folks who I can talk to … is a really big thing.
“That means there are more people who recognize that this is a real thing, and there are more people who can get something done by trying to address the problem rather than having one voice.”
Molenaar said one challenge with recruiting diverse students for engineering is competition with other universities like the School of Mines and Colorado State University.
“But more so, it’s the societal norms we’ve had over the past century where it’s been not as welcoming to women-identifying students because it has, honestly, been a male-dominated industry for so many years,” he said. “And so this is why we’ve taken not just a one year approach to this but we’ve been dedicated more than 20 years and we’re going to be continuing to dedicate efforts toward this into the future because it is what we need to do in the engineering profession to better serve our society”
Molenaar said recruitment begins by working with K-12 students and letting them know engineering is more than just being good at math and science. Students are shown they can make a difference through creating clean water systems, being part of biomedical engineering solutions or creating buildings that are more energy sustainable, for example.
This year’s graduating class will surpass 50,000 graduates from the College of Engineering. Molenaar said he’d love to see some female graduates partner with CU Boulder to continue reaching and inspiring the next generation.
“Engineers truly serve society and create technical solutions to some of our biggest challenges,” he said. “So it’s important that we have a diverse set of engineers to come up with solutions that serve our diverse society.”